Brief items

Emacs 29.3 released

Version 29.3 of the Emacs editor has been released:

Emacs 29.3 is an emergency bugfix release; it includes no new features except a small number of changes intended to resolve security vulnerabilities uncovered in Emacs 29.2.

Those vulnerabilities mostly have to do with executing untrusted Lisp code; see the NEWS file for a bit more information.

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Security quotes of the week

[...] we now have Schrodinger's privacy policy. Mentioning names both is and isn't allowed. It's a quantum superposition of content moderation that only collapses when observed by [Elon] Musk himself.

— Mike Masnick

There are very obvious privacy concerns haunting Americans, related to those tech giants, and yet the closest Congress can come to doing something about it is to attempt the forced sale of the sole Chinese tech giant with a US footprint to a US company, to ensure that its rampant privacy violations are conducted by our fellow Americans, and to force Chinese spies to buy their surveillance data on millions of Americans in the lawless, reckless swamp of US data-brokerages:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1238435508/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-china

— Cory Doctorow

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.9-rc1, released on March 24. Linus said:

The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested use-case, but not realistic in many cases).

Stable updates: 6.8.2, 6.7.11, 6.6.23, 6.1.83, 5.15.153, 5.10.214, 5.4.273, and 4.19.311 were released on March 26.

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The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Danilo Krummrich has announced the existence of the "Nova" project within Red Hat.

We just started to work on Nova, a Rust-based GSP-only driver for Nvidia GPUs. Nova, in the long term, is intended to serve as the successor of Nouveau for GSP-firmware-based GPUs.

With Nova we see the chance to significantly decrease the complexity of the driver compared to Nouveau for mainly two reasons. First, Nouveau's historic architecture, especially around nvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible and requires major rework to solve certain problems (such as locking hierarchy in VMM / MMU code for VM_BIND currently being solved with a workaround) and second, with a GSP-only driver there is no need to maintain compatibility with pre-GSP code.

Besides that, we also want to take the chance to contribute to the Rust efforts in the kernel and benefit from from more memory safety offered by the Rust programming language.

Given that the effort has just begun, it will be a while before this driver shows up in a distribution release.

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Quote of the week

Take Rust - one big point of Rust is the whole "safe" thing, but it's very much not a straightjacket like Pascal was. There's a "safe" part to Rust, but equally importantly, there's also the "unsafe" part to Rust.

The safe part is the one that most programmers are supposed to use. It's the one that allows you to not have to worry too much about things. It's the part that makes it much harder to screw up.

But the *unsafe* part is what makes Rust powerful. It's the part that works behind the curtain. It's the part that may be needed to make the safe parts *work*.

— Linus Torvalds

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Perl 5.39.9 released

Verson 5.39.9 of the Perl language has been released. Changes this time include a new "medium-precedence" logical exclusive-or operator, a number of updated modules, and more; see this page for details.

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Redis is no longer free software

The Redis in-memory database system has had its license changed to either the Redis Source Available License or the Server Side Public License (covered here in 2018); neither license qualifies as free software.

Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. For example, cloud service providers will be able to deliver Redis 7.4 only after agreeing to licensing terms with Redis, the maintainers of the Redis code.

Distributors like Fedora are already looking at removing Redis as a consequence. (Thanks to Emmanuel Seyman).

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Rust 1.77.0 released

Version 1.77.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include support for NUL-terminated C-string literals, the ability for async functions to call themselves recursively, the stabilization of the offset_of!() macro, and more.

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Development quote of the week

If there's one thing that the current [millennium] has, it's too many reimplementations of everything. On the other hand, that means finding a substitute was never easier.

— Jan Engelhardt

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The PostgreSQL community mourns Simon Riggs

The PostgreSQL community is dealing with the loss of Simon Riggs, who passed away on March 26:

Simon was responsible for many of the enterprise features we find in PostgreSQL today, including point in time recovery, hot standby, and synchronous replication. He was the founder of 2ndQuadrant which employed many of the PostgreSQL developers, later becoming part of EDB where he worked as a Postgres Fellow until his retirement. He was responsible for the UK PostgreSQL conferences for many years until he passed that responsibility to PostgreSQL Europe last year.

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