Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 6.10-rc2, released on June 2. Linus said: "Nothing feels particularly odd, but rc2 is usually fairly small and people are only starting to find regressions. So please go test some more."
Stable updates: 6.9.3 and 6.8.12 were released on May 30. The 6.8.x line ends with 6.8.12.
CFP: the 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit
The 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit will happen on September 17 in Vienna, Austria; it is an invitation-only event for a small group to discuss important kernel-development problems. The call for proposals for this gathering has now been posted. One of the best ways to be invited to the event is to propose a topic that needs discussion in that forum. The deadline for proposals is June 18.Quotes of the week
Yes, I said "trolling" many years ago in jest as there was no way for the kernel community to actually create CVEs like that, it was a joke.— Greg Kroah-HartmanBut what I'm saying now is that I am NOT trolling anyone. The number of CVEs created for the kernel is exactly what cve.org wants us to do here as now we ARE allowed to be a CNA. And by being a CNA, we must follow the rules of cve.org which is what we are doing. I have had many meetings with the cve.org employees and board about this, and everyone seems to be in agreement that what we are doing now is correct and should be done this way.
Again, I'm not trolling anyone, and again, the kernel development model has not changed, all that has changed is that finally we are marking all potential vulnerability fixes as CVEs.
If people come and say we need X and the maintainer says no, they don't just give up and stop doing X, the go and do X anyhow out of tree. This has become especially true now that the center of business activity in server-Linux is driven by the hyperscale crowd that don't care much about upstream. Linux maintainer's don't actually have the power to force the industry to do things, though people do keep trying.. Maintainers can only lead, and productive leading is not done with a NO.— Jason Gunthorpe
Seriously. I think it should be a fundamental filter for any C language committee member: "Do you think type-based aliasing makes sense?". If you get anything but an immediate "No!", you pull the lever that opens the trap-door to the crocodile-infested waters below.— Linus TorvaldsOr sharks. Sharks are good too.
Distributions
Fedora Linux 40 election results
The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 40 election cycle. Four seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Stephen Gallagher, Neal Gompa, Michel Lind, and Fabio Valentini. The Fedora Council had two seats open, and the winners are Aleksandra Fedorova and Adam Samalik. One seat was open on the Fedora Mindshare Committee, and the winner is Sumantro Mukherjee. Four seats were open for the first election to select members of the EPEL Steering Committee, which went to Troy Dawson, Kevin Fenzi, Carl George, and Jonathan Wright.
FreeBSD 14.1 released
Version 14.1 of FreeBSD has been released. This is the second release of the 14.x stable branch. Highlights of this release include upgrades to OpenZFS 2.2.4, Clang/LLVM 18.1.5, and OpenSSH 9.7p1. FreeBSD 14.1 also features cloud-init support, sound subsystem improvements, and more. See the what's new blog post from the FreeBSD Foundation, release notes, and errata for more information.
Kali Linux 2024.2 released
Version 2024.2 of the Kali Linux penetration testing distribution has been released. This release includes an update to GNOME 46, a high-resolution (HiDPI) mode for Xfce, as well as a number of new packages such as the AutoRecon network reconnaissance tool, pspy command-line utility for snooping on Linux processes, and SploitScan tool for fetching and displaying CVE information. Kali Linux is based on Debian testing, and 2024.2 incorporates Debian's work to transition to 64-bit time_t to avoid year 2038 problems. Users with existing Kali systems should be sure to follow the documentation when upgrading.
Distribution quote of the week
I prefer Debian to be Debian and to need some RTFM process to administer correctly. I'm an old school person and sysadmin. I prefer a more direct, "this machine has no brain, use yours" approach.
Development
Opt Green: KDE Eco's New Sustainable Software Project
KDE Eco, a KDE project focused on reducing software's environmental impact, has announced its Opt Green campaign to reduce e-waste:
Over the next two years, the "Opt Green" initiative will bring what KDE Eco has been doing for sustainable software directly to end users. A particular target group for the project is those whose consumer behavior is driven by principles related to the environment, and not just price or convenience: the "eco-consumers".
Through online and offline campaigns as well as installation workshops, we will demonstrate the power of Free Software to drive down resource and energy consumption, and keep devices in use for the lifespan of the hardware, not the software.
Our motto: The most environmentally-friendly device is the one you already own.
See the KDE Eco Get Involved page for more information on how to participate.
Incus 6.2 released
Version 6.2 of the Incus container-management system is out. "This release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and improvements." The features include a new incus top command, a new API for system load information, and more.
25 Years of Krita
The developers of the Krita painting application are celebrating 25 years of development with a detailed history of the project.
A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.
LyX 2.4.0 Released
Version 2.4.0 of the LyX document processor has been released. LyX is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See the full list of new features on the LyX wiki, and release notes for information on known issues and caveats for those upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.
The state of SourceHut
Drew DeVault has published an update about the state of the SourceHut software development platform and its plans for the coming months. This is the first update since the January post-mortem following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that resulted in a prolonged outage:
As you can imagine, it has been a stressful time for us. However, I wish to stress that everything we've been dealing with is planned for in our models, both technical and financial. There is no existential threat to SourceHut. Nevertheless, we are grateful for your patience and support.
[...] We have been focusing on two things this year: provisioning and managing our infrastructure and getting as much rest as possible. Our situation has calmed down, and while we still have a lot of loose ends to attend to I'm happy to say that we're resuming a sense of normalcy here and preparing to resume our work on the features you need.
Development quote of the week
If there's one single, overriding request that I could make to Go package authors, it's this: Don't name packages after common nouns. [...]
The fix is so easy, so simple, and costs nothing. Come up with an alternative name that's still descriptive, but no longer a simple noun. A strategy that usually works great is to add another word.
How about this? `rate` -> `ratelimit`.
Variable names in Go are camel case, so `ratelimit` will never clobber a variable name. Even if that wasn't the case, having variables called `rate`, `limit`, or `rateLimiter` is plausible and even likely, but `ratelimit`? Not a thing.
Miscellaneous
Mike Karels has passed away
We have just received the sad news that longtime core BSD developer Mike Karels has died; he will certainly be missed.New site feature: comment subthread hiding
In the recent discussion on commenting at LWN, several readers asked for the ability to hide subthreads of a long comment stream. That feature has just been added; it is also integrated with the three comment-display modes and with comment filtering, removing the need for JavaScript for filtering. Hiding is not persistent; no extra data is stored at either end.Give it a try; if you have comments on the new mechanism, this is the place to put them.
Page editor: Daroc Alden
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