Brief items

Kernel release status

The 6.7 kernel is out, released on January 7. Linus said:

End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release.

Some of the headline features in this release are: the removal of support for the Itanium architecture, the first part of the futex2 API, futex support in io_uring, the BPF exceptions mechanism, the bcachefs filesystem, the TCP authentication option, the kernel samepage merging smart scan mode, and networking support for the Landlock security module. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the (in-progress) KernelNewbies 6.7 page for more information.

Stable updates: 6.6.10, 6.1.71, 5.15.146, and 5.10.206 were released on January 5, followed by 5.4.266, 4.19.304, and 4.14.335 on January 8 and 6.6.11, 6.1.72, and 4.14.336 on January 10.

Note that this is the end of the line for the 4.14 stable series:

This is the LAST 4.14.y kernel to be released. It is now officially end-of-life. Do NOT use this kernel version anymore, please move to a newer one, as shown on the kernel.org releases page.

All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade. But then, move to a newer release. If you are stuck at this version due to a vendor requiring it, go get support from that vendor for this obsolete kernel tree, as that is what you are paying them for :)

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Leemhuis: Regression tracking: state of the union early 2024

Thorsten Leemhuis writes about his plans for improving the kernel's regression handling in the coming year.

Top-priority will be "make regzbot more useful for kernel subsystem maintainers" from now on. My tracking efforts of course will continue, but everything except regressions in the current and the previous mainline cycle might not see much attention from my side. This refocusing also means that I won't work much on resolving some ambiguities around "how regressions are supposed to be handled" which lead to tension quite a few times. But all that should be for the best in the long term.

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Quote of the week

Both C and C++ has had a lot of development since 1999, and C++ has in fact, in my personal opinion, finally "grown up" to be a better C for the kind of embedded programming that an OS kernel epitomizes. I'm saying that as the author of a very large number of macro and inline assembly hacks in the kernel.

— H. Peter Anvin

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The OpenWrt One project

OpenWrt developer John Crispin says: "In 2024 the OpenWrt project turns 20 years! Let's celebrate this anniversary by launching our own first and fully upstream supported hardware design." The rest of the message describes the proposed OpenWrt-native network-routing system, based on Banana Pi boards; the project is being organized through the Software Freedom Conservancy. (Thanks to Dave Täht).

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Solus 4.5 released

Version 4.5 ("Resilience") of the Solus distribution has been released. "This release brings updated applications and kernels, refreshed software stacks, a new installer, and a new ISO edition featuring the XFCE desktop environment."

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Shaw: Python 3.13 gets a JIT

Anthony Shaw describes the new copy-and-patch JIT that has been proposed for Python 3.13.

Copy-and-patch was selected because the compilation from bytecodes to machine code is done as a set of “templates” that are then stitched together and patched at runtime with the correct values. This means that your average Python user isn’t running this complex JIT compiler architecture inside their Python runtime. Python writing it’s own IL and JIT would also be unreasonable since so many are available off-the-shelf like LLVMs and ryuJIT. But a full-JIT would require those being bundled with Python and all the added overheads. A copy-and-patch JIT only requires the LLVM JIT tools be installed on the machine where CPython is compiled from source, and for most people that means the machines of the CI that builds and packages CPython for python.org.

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Vcc: a Clang compiler for Vulkan

The Vcc compiler has been announced.

It’s exactly what the name implies: a clang-based compiler that outputs code that runs on Vulkan.

Vcc can be thought of as a GLSL and HLSL competitor, but the true intent of this project is to retire the concept of shading languages entirely. Unlike existing shading languages, Vcc makes a honest attempt to bring the entire C/C++ language family to Vulkan, which means implementing a number of previously unseen features in Vulkan shaders

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Development quote of the week

I also agree with you that the culture of Postgres development is hard to change. This is the only OSS project that I've ever worked on, and I still do it the same way I worked on code 30 years ago, except now I use git instead of cvs. I can't imagine how we could modernize some of our development practices without causing unacceptable collateral damage, but maybe there's a way, and for sure the way we do things around here is pretty far out of the 2023 mainstream. That's something we should be grappling with, somehow.

— Robert Haas

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Computer science pioneer Niklaus Wirth passes away (ITWire)

ITWire covers the passing of Niklaus Wirth.

Wirth is well-remembered for his pioneering work in programming languages and algorithms. For these achievements, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1984, inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 1994, and a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2004.

They include, among many, being chief designer for the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1968), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007).

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