Brief items

The "KeyTrap" DNS vulnerability

DNS resolvers (those that handle DNSSEC, at least) are almost uniformly vulnerable to an exploit that has been named "KeyTrap". In short, the right type of packet can send a DNS system into something close to an infinite loop, taking it out of service indefinitely.

With just a single DNS packet, hackers could paralyze all common DNS implementations and public DNS providers. Exploiting this attack would have serious consequences for any application that uses the internet, including the unavailability of technologies such as web browsers, email and instant messaging. This devastating effect prompted major DNS vendors to call KeyTrap "The worst attack on DNS ever discovered"

Some more information and pointers to updates can be found on the CVE-2023-50387 page; some distributors have been faster to get updates out than others.

(Thanks to Dave Täht).

Comments (10 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.8-rc5, released on February 18. Quoth Linus: "Absolutely nothing stands out here, although I do wish things should have calmed down a bit more at this point in the release process."

Stable updates: 6.7.5, 6.6.17, and 6.1.78 were released on February 16.

The 6.7.6, 6.6.18, and 6.1.79 updates are in the review process; they are due on February 22. The 5.15.149, 5.10.210, 5.4.269, and 4.19.307 updates can be expected one day later.

Comments (none posted)

Righi: Writing a scheduler for Linux in Rust that runs in user-space

Andrea Righi has started a blog series on writing a user-space CPU scheduler with the BPF-based extensible scheduler class:

.select_cpu() implements the logic to assign a target CPU to a task that wants to run, typically you have to decide if you want to keep the task on the same CPU or if it needs to be migrated to a different one (for example if the current CPU is busy); if we can find an idle CPU at this stage there's no reason to call the scheduler, the task can be immediately dispatched here.

Comments (none posted)

Quotes of the week

New elements in this transaction might expired before such transaction ends. Skip sync GC for such elements otherwise commit path might walk over an already released object. Once transaction is finished, async GC will collect such expired element.

The Linux kernel CVE team has assigned CVE-2023-52433 to this issue.

— The first kernel-issued CVE hits the list

All of the current stable developers are busy handling other kernel developer issues or reviewing properly tagged kernel patches. Please wait for the next available developer, or press 0 to return to the main menu.

You are caller number SEVENTY FIVE in the queue with an expected wait time of ELEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE MINUTES.

Please enjoy the smooth sounds of Enya while you wait.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

Comments (6 posted)

Exploring Agama's 2024 roadmap (openSUSE News)

The openSUSE News blog looks at the roadmap for Agama (a new installer from the YaST development team) with releases planned for April and July:

The milestone in April is set to revolutionize Agama’s architecture. It will be moving away from its reliance on Cockpit toward a more autonomous framework that is coupled with a refined user interface that aims to streamline storage configurations.

The aim of the second milestone is to improve Agama’s flexibility and capabilities for unattended installations, which seeks to position Agama as a formidable alternative to AutoYaST.

The Agama page explains why YaST is due for replacement.

Comments (2 posted)

Hare programming language 0.24.0 released

Drew DeVault announced the first numbered release of the Hare programming language on February 16.

Many Hare users want to ship their Hare projects to users, and as such, software written in Hare is making its way into Linux distributions and the like. However, due to Hare's unstable nature, we have not provided any versioned releases, forcing any distributions who want to package Hare to package Hare's master branch, which is less than ideal.

Comments (none posted)

RawTherapee 5.10 released

Version 5.10 of the RawTherapee raw photo editor is out. The list of changes is long, and includes improved support for many camera-specific formats. (LWN looked at RawTherapee in 2022).

Comments (none posted)