Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.6-rc6, released on October 15. "So the previous week has been pretty calm, and a lot of the discussion has been about future changes as so often happens late in the release cycle."

Stable updates: 6.1.58 was released with a set of NFS reverts on October 15. The 6.5.8, 6.1.59, and 5.15.136 updates are in the review process; they are due at any time.

Comments (none posted)

Civil Infrastructure Platform to maintain 6.1 for 10 years

The Civil Infrastructure Platform project has announced that it will be maintaining the 6.1 kernel for a minimum of ten years past its initial release (and, thus, through 2032).

CIP kernels are maintained like regular long-term-stable (LTS) kernels, and developers of the CIP kernel are also involved in LTS kernel review and testing. While regular LTS kernels are moving back to 2 years maintenance, CIP kernels are set up for 10 years. In order to enable this extended lifetime, CIP kernels are scoped-down in actively supported kernel features and target architecture. At the same time, CIP kernels accept non-invasive backports from newer mainline kernels that enable new hardware.

Comments (24 posted)

OpenWrt 23.05.0 released

Version 23.05.0 of the OpenWrt distribution has been released: "OpenWrt 23.05 supports over 1790 devices. Support for over 200 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 22.03". Along with new device support, this release features a switch to the mbedtls cryptographic library, the ability to include utilities written in Rust, an updated toolchain, and more.

Comments (3 posted)

Ubuntu 23.10 released

Version 23.10 of the Ubuntu distribution is out. Changes include support for hardware-backed full-disk encryption, tighter control over user namespaces, a new App Center application, and more.

Comments (4 posted)

OpenBSD 7.4 released

OpenBSD 7.4 is out. Changes include a new kqueue1() system call that allows close-on-exec behavior, support for better arm64 control-flow integrity, support for TCP segmentation offloading, and much more.

Full Story (comments: none)

The GNOME Foundation's new executive director

The GNOME Foundation has announced the hiring of Holly Million as its new executive director.

Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing. Her commitment to empowering individuals to make a positive impact aligns perfectly with the values and goals of the GNOME Foundation.

Comments (25 posted)

Development quote of the week

This particular problem is minor, but the overall experience of trying to get things committed is that you have to check 300 things for every patch and if you get every one of them right then nothing happens and if you get one of them wrong then you get a bunch of irritated emails criticizing your laziness, sloppiness, or whatever, and you have to drop everything to go fix it immediately. What a deal! I'm sure this isn't the only reason why we have such a huge backlog of patches needing committer attention, but it sure doesn't help.

— Robert Haas

Comments (1 posted)