Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.4-rc1, released on May 7.

The one feature that didn't make it was the x86 shadow stack code. That side was probably a bit unlucky, in that it came in as I was looking at x86 issues anyway, and so I looked at it quite a bit, and had enough reservations that I asked for a couple of fairly big re-organizations.

This is just one more setback in the long-running shadow-stack story; see this article for some background.

In the end, 13,044 non-merge changesets were pulled during this merge window.

Stable updates: none have been released in the last week. The 6.3.2, 6.2.15, 6.1.28, and 5.15.111 stable updates are in the review process; they are due at any time.

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Quote of the week

I'm already used to small differences, but *if* you send me pull requests, this does mean that it might be just slightly easier on me if you follow my lead on picking a diff algorithm, and do

     git config diff.algorithm histogram

in your kernel tree.

— Linus Torvalds

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Yocto Project 4.2 released

Version 4.2 of the Yocto Project distribution builder has been released. It features improved Rust support, a number of BitBake enhancements, lots of updated software, and numerous security fixes.

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Distributions quotes of the week

The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.

The X11 protocol remains fully supported using the XWayland back end. As a result, applications that require X11 can run in the Wayland session.

Red Hat is working on resolving the remaining problems and gaps in the Wayland session.

— Red Hat

If you look at openSUSE's own statistics, there is absolutely no evidence that more users can lead to more contributors.

Our highest contribution numbers [were] when we had the least users. All of our periods of user growth have seen either a decline or stagnation in our contributor numbers.

Looking outside of our little bubble, this is not an isolated phenomenon.

Fundamentally, Projects that work hard to appeal to contributors, gain contributors.

— Richard Brown

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Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" (SemiAnalysis)

The SemiAnalysis site has what is said to be a leaked Google document on the state of open-source AI development. Open source, it concludes, is winning.

At the beginning of March the open source community got their hands on their first really capable foundation model, as Meta’s LLaMA was leaked to the public. It had no instruction or conversation tuning, and no RLHF. Nonetheless, the community immediately understood the significance of what they had been given.

A tremendous outpouring of innovation followed, with just days between major developments (see The Timeline for the full breakdown). Here we are, barely a month later, and there are variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF, etc. etc. many of which build on each other.

(Thanks to Dave Täht).

Comments (69 posted)

Firefox 113.0 released

Version 113.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include improved picture-in-picture support, blocking of third-party cookies in private windows, some accessibility improvements, and more. "A 13-year-old feature request was fulfilled and Firefox now supports files being drag-and-dropped directly from Microsoft Outlook".

Comments (11 posted)

New C features in GCC 13 (Red Hat Developer)

The Red Hat Developer site has an overview of some of the new C-language features supported by the GCC 13 release.

The nullptr constant first appeared in C++11, described in proposal N2431 from 2007. Its purpose was to alleviate the problems with the definition of NULL, which can be defined in a variety of ways: (void *)0 (a pointer constant), 0 (an integer), and so on. This posed problems for overload resolution, generic programming, etc. While C doesn’t have function overloading, the protean definition of NULL still causes headaches.

Comments (43 posted)

Julia 1.9 released

Version 1.9 of the Julia language has been released. Notable changes include improved caching of native code, faster load times via a "package extensions" mechanism, better memory-usage introspection, and more.

Comments (1 posted)

Thunderbird 2022 financial report

The Thunderbird email-client project has put out a report describing its financial situation in 2022.

The breakout growth we enjoyed last year means hiring even more talented people to vastly improve the Thunderbird desktop experience. This past year we expended significant effort to dramatically improve Thunderbird’s UX and bring it in-line with modern expectations and standards. In 2022 we also laid the groundwork for large architectural changes for Thunderbird on the desktop. These changes address many years of technical debt that has limited our ability to add new features at a brisk pace. This work will largely pay off in our 2024 release, however it does power some of the improvements in the 115 “Supernova” release this summer.

Comments (2 posted)