Brief items

Security quote of the week

These and countless other ethical lapses should prompt us to consider whether we want to give technology companies further abilities to learn our personal details and influence our day-to-day decisions. Tech companies can already access our daily whereabouts and search queries. Digital devices monitor more and more aspects of our lives: We have cameras in our homes and heartbeat sensors on our wrists sending what they detect to Silicon Valley.

Now, tech giants are developing ever more powerful AI systems that don't merely monitor you; they actually interact with you—and with others on your behalf. If searching on Google in the 2010s was like being watched on a security camera, then using AI in the late 2020s will be like having a butler. You will willingly include them in every conversation you have, everything you write, every item you shop for, every want, every fear, everything. It will never forget. And, despite your reliance on it, it will be surreptitiously working to further the interests of one of these for-profit corporations.

— Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.4-rc6, released on June 11. Linus said:

I don't think we've had anything hugely interesting happen the last week, and the whole 6.4 release really does feel like it's going fairly smoothly. Knock wood, famous last words, you know the drill.

Stable updates: 6.3.7, 6.1.33, 5.15.116, 5.10.183, 5.4.246, 4.19.285, and 4.14.317 were released on June 9, followed by 6.3.8, 6.1.34, 5.15.117, 5.10.184, 5.4.247, 4.19.286, and 4.14.318 on June 14.

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McKenney: Parallel Programming: June 2023 Update

Paul McKenney has announced a new version of his book Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?.

This release contains a new section on thermal throttling (along with a new cartoon), improvements to the memory-ordering chapter (including intuitive subsets of the Linux-kernel memory model), fixes to the deferred-processing chapter, additional clocksource-deviation material to the "What Time Is It?" section, and numerous fixes inspired by questions and comments from readers.

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Debian 12 "bookworm" released

"After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development", Debian 12, codenamed "bookworm", has been released. The announcement has lots of details about package versions for desktop environments (6 are supported), kernel version (Linux 6.1 series), other package versions (compilers, graphics tools, office suites, languages, and more), architectures supported (8 for real hardware and 5 for cloud services), blends, and lots more.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.

"bookworm" has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.

See the Debian 12 release notes for additional information.

Comments (23 posted)

Fedora election results

The Fedora project has posted the results of its elections for members of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (Stephen Gallagher, Neal Gompa, Major Hayden, and Tom Stellard), Fedora Council (Sumantro Mukherjee), and Mindshare Committee (David Duncan).

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Haas: The PostgreSQL Documentation and the Limitations of Community

Robert Haas looks at the advantages and disadvantages of how documentation for PostgreSQL is written.

The strengths of this process are also its weaknesses. A developer is, by definition, someone who spends the majority of their time doing development, which is to say writing code. Updating the documentation becomes a task that must be completed so that the code one has written can get committed so that one can move on to the next project and write some more code. If a change to the documentation would be beneficial but is unrelated to any particular patch, it's not likely to get done.

The results are, in a certain sense, pretty comical.

Comments (11 posted)

Videos from the 2022 Tracing Summit

Videos from the 2022 Tracing Summit are now available on YouTube. They include talks about Visual eBPF, Perfetto, the state of Linux tracers, libpatch, hardware trace, and more.

Comments (1 posted)