Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.5-rc2, released on July 16. Linus said:"No surprises here: this thing looks very normal."

Stable updates: the large 6.4.4 and 6.1.39 updates were released on July 19.

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Quote of the week

The problem of security is not now, nor has it ever been, isolation. It is sharing. If it is appropriate for "users" to determine sharing, we have mode bits. If it is appropriate for "administrators" to determine sharing, we have mandatory access controls and namespaces. If sharing is completely inappropriate, we have virtualization.

— Casey Schaufler

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AlmaLinux to diverge (slightly) from RHEL

AlmaLinux has announced that the distribution will no longer be a strict clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but will maintain ABI compatibility.

For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of “bug-for-bug compatibility” with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream.

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Distributions quote of the week

Web server statistics aggregator Statcounter announced last week that as of June 2023, Linux accounts for 3 per cent of desktop operating system use. However, this is still surpassed by ChromeOS, which means that desktop Linux has less than half of the desktop Linux market. If you feel that this is a bit weird, we agree with you.

— Liam Proven in The Register

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Cython 3.0 released

Version 3.0 of Cython (described as "a programming language that makes writing C extensions for the Python language as easy as Python itself") has been released. Changes include support for Python through 3.11 (but 2.6 support was dropped), the implementation of a number of PEPs, initial support for the CPython limited API, better exception handling, and more.

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Rust 1.71.0 released

Version 1.71.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time include the C-unwind ABI, an upgrade to musl 1.2, and more.

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