Brief items

Kernel release status

The 6.5 kernel is out, released on August 27. Linus said:

I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that. But this release has been going smoothly, so that's probably just me being paranoid. The biggest patches this last week were literally just to our selftests.

Headline features in 6.5 include faster booting on large x86 systems, Arm Permission Indirection Extension support, Rust 1.68.2 support, unaccepted memory handling, "mount beneath" support for filesystems, the cachestat() system call, the ability to pass a pidfd via a SCM_CREDENTIALS control message, scope-based resource management for internal kernel code, the deprecation of the SLAB allocator, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the (in-progress) KernelNewbies 6.5 page for details.

Stable updates: 6.1.48, 5.15.128, and 5.10.192 were released on August 26. 6.1.49 followed one day later with a small set of x86 and F2FS fixes. Then, 6.4.13, 6.1.50, 5.15.129, 5.10.193, 5.4.255, 4.19.293, and 4.14.324 were all released on August 30.

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Quotes of the week

You HAVE to take all of the stable/LTS releases in order to have a secure and stable system. If you attempt to cherry-pick random patches you will NOT fix all of the known, and unknown, problems, but rather you will end up with a potentially more insecure system, and one that contains known bugs. Reliance on an "enterprise" distribution to provide this for your systems is up to you, discuss it with them as to how they achieve this result as this is what you are paying for. If you aren't paying for it, just use Debian, they know what they are doing and track the stable kernels and have a larger installed base than any other Linux distro. For embedded, use Yocto, they track the stable releases, or keep your own buildroot-based system up to date with the new releases.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

I am /very/ pleased to announce that online repair for XFS is completely finished. For those of you who have been following along all this time, this means that part 1 and part 2 are done! [...]

As I have now been testing online repair in its various stages [on my testing cloud] for two years and the fstests cloud has nearly cleared 300 million successful filesystem repairs, I am discontinuing all notices about "This is an extraordinary way to destroy your data". It works, and it's time to merge it to get broader testing.

— Darrick Wong

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Bugzilla Celebrates 25 Years With Special Announcements (Bugzilla blog)

August 26 was the 25th anniversary of the release of the Bugzilla bug tracker as open-source software under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). A blog post for the occasion has some announcements, including several upcoming releases, help wanted, and a new legal entity to house the project:

Which now brings us to today, when I’m happy to announce the formation of Zarro Boogs Corporation, which will now be overseeing the Bugzilla Project. This is a taxable non-profit non-charitable corporation - we have filed with the IRS our intent to operate under US Tax Code §501(c)(4) (still pending approval from the IRS) meaning the IRS would require us to spend money raised on project expenses and not make a profit, but money donated to us will not earn you a tax deduction because we aren’t a charity (software development is not considered a charitable cause in the US). Unlike Thunderbird, which is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, we are an independent entity not owned by or associated with the Mozilla Foundation, although they have licensed the use of the Bugzilla trademark to us.

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Rust 1.72.0 released

Version 1.72.0 of the Rust compiler has been released. Changes include improved diagnostics and the removal of a limit on const evaluation:

To prevent user-provided const evaluation from getting into a compile-time infinite loop or otherwise taking unbounded time at compile time, Rust previously limited the maximum number of statements run as part of any given constant evaluation. However, especially creative Rust code could hit these limits and produce a compiler error. Worse, whether code hit the limit could vary wildly based on libraries invoked by the user; if a library you invoked split a statement into two within one of its functions, your code could then fail to compile.

Now, you can do an unlimited amount of const evaluation at compile time.

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OpenTF Announces Fork of Terraform

The OpenTF Foundation has announced that it is moving forward with its eponymous fork of HashiCorp Terraform, which was recently changed to a non-FOSS license by the company. The organization has applied to become part of the Linux Foundation, "with the end goal of having OpenTF as part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation". There is a GitHub repository for its manifesto, but the code repository for OpenTF is private for now, with plans to open it up in the next week or two. Work has been going on for the last week and more developers are coming on board:

So far, four companies pledged the equivalent of 14 full-time engineers (FTEs) to the OpenTF initiative. We expect this number to at least double in the following few weeks. To give you some perspective, Terraform was effectively maintained by about 5 FTEs from HashiCorp in the last 2 years. If you don’t believe us, look at their repository.

Some of the people behind OpenTF are participating in a Hacker News thread, so more information can be found there as well.

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Rest in peace Satoru Ueda

The OpenChain site carries the sad news of the passing of Satoru Ueda. Your editor first met Ueda San at the 2007 Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, where a small group of dedicated developers and managers was working hard to bring open-source development practices to the country. Ueda San was always a strong advocate for this cause and deserves much credit for the success of Linux and open source in Japan. He was also always a warm and welcoming person; he will be much missed.

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