Brief items
Security
Security quotes of the week
Just putting "privacy" in the name of a feature doesn't make it less creepy. Considering today's branding trends it might even go the other way. "Your privacy is important to us" is the new "your call is important to us." If you dig into the literature behind PPA [Privacy-preserving attribution], you will find some mathematical claims about how it prevents tracking of individuals. This is interesting math if you like that kind of thing. But in practice the real-world privacy risks are generally based on group discrimination, so it's not really accurate to call a system "privacy-preserving" just because it limits individual tracking. Even if the math is neato.— Don Marti
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The 6.10 kernel is out; it was released on July 14. Linus said:
So the final week was perhaps not quite as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don't love - but it also wasn't noisy enough to warrant an extra rc.
Changes in 6.10 include the removal of support for some ancient Alpha CPUs, shadow-stack support for the x32 sub-architecture, Rust-language support on RISC-V systems, support for some Windows NT synchronization primitives (though it is marked "broken" in 6.10), the mseal() system call, fsverity support in the FUSE filesystem subsystem, ioctl() support in the Landlock security module, the memory-allocation profiling subsystem, and more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.10 page for more details.
Stable updates: 6.9.9, 6.6.39, and 6.1.98 were released on July 11. 6.6.40 and 6.1.99 followed on July 15 with a single fix for a USB regression.
The 6.9.10, 6.6.41, 6.1.100, 5.15.163, 5.10.222, 5.4.280, and 4.19.318 updates are in the review process; they are due on July 18.
An empirical study of Rust for Linux
The research value of this USENIX paper by Hongyu Li et al. is not entirely clear, but it does show that the Rust-for-Linux project is gaining wider attention.
Despite more novice developers being attracted by Rust to the kernel community, we have found their commits are mainly for constructing Rust-relevant toolchains as well as Rust crates alone; they do not, however, take part in kernel code development. By contrast, 5 out of 6 investigated drivers (as seen in Table 5) are mainly contributed by authors from the Linux community. This implies a disconnection be- tween the young and the seasoned developers, and that the bar of kernel programming is not lowered by Rust language.
As a bonus, it includes a ChatGPT analysis of LWN and Hacker News comments.
Silva: How to use the new counted_by attribute in C (and Linux)
Gustavo A. R. Silva describes the path to safer flexible arrays in the kernel, thanks to the counted_by attribute supported by Clang 18 and GCC 15.
There are a number of requirements to properly use the counted_by attribute. One crucial requirement is that the counter must be initialized before the first reference to the flexible-array member. Another requirement is that the array must always contain at least as many elements as indicated by the counter.
See also: this article from 2023.
Distributions
Redox to implement POSIX signals in user space
Redox has received a grant to work on implementing POSIX-compatible signals. The draft design calls for them to be implemented nearly completely in user space.
So far, the signals project has been going according to plan, and hopefully, POSIX support for signals will be mostly complete by the end of summer, with in-kernel improvements to process management. After that, work on the userspace process manager will begin, possibly including new kernel performance and/or functionality improvements to facilitate this.
Distribution quote of the week
If we have to tell our users and sysadmins to do "X" on Debian server systems (using ifupdown or potentially sd-networkd), while doing "Y" on Debian desktop systems (using NetworkManager), while doing "Z" on Debian cloud systems (using Netplan), while doing something totally different on RaspberryPi (or alike) boards that run a Debian server setup, but using WiFi as their primary network interface, that's just a really bad user experience.
Using Debian should NOT feel like using different distros. And we really need a common way to do network configuration. With Netplan we can tell people to just use use the "dhcp4: true" setting (for example), which will work on all Debian systems and is automatically translated to the corresponding backend for server/desktop/cloud/embedded usecases.
All while giving sysadmins the [flexibility] to fully utilize the underlying network daemon directly, if they feel like writing native configuration for it (or don't like Netplan).
Development
Blender 4.2 LTS released
Version 4.2 LTS of the Blender open-source 3D creation suite has been released. Major improvements include a rewrite of the EEVEE render engine, faster rendering, and much more. See the showcase reel for examples of work created by the Blender community with this release. See the text release notes for even more about 4.2 LTS, which will be maintained until July 2026.
digiKam 8.4.0 released
Version 8.4.0 of the digiKam photo editing and management application has been released. This release includes an update of the LibRaw RAW decoder which brings support for many new cameras, a new version of the LensFun toolkit, a feature for automatic translation of image tags, GMIC-Qt 3.4.0, and many bug fixes. See the announcement for full details.
GNOME Foundation Announces Transition of Executive Director
The GNOME Foundation has announced that executive director Holly Million is stepping down at the end of July, and will be replaced by Richard Littauer as interim executive director:
On behalf of the whole GNOME community, the Board of Directors would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves.
The Foundation's Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, brings years of open source leadership as part of his work as an organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, as a sustainability coordinator at the Open Source Initiative, and as a community development manager at Open Source Collective, and through open source contributions to many projects, such as Node.js and IPFS. The Board appointed Richard in June and is confident in his ability to guide the Foundation during this transitional period.
Million says she is leaving to pursue a PhD in psychology. The board plans to announce its search plan for a permanent executive directory after GUADEC, which takes place July 19 through 24.
Development quote of the week
Valkey represents – whatever the project's ultimate fate might be – the first real, major pushback from a market standpoint against the prevailing relicensing trend.
To be clear, no one should get carried away and expect Valkeys to begin popping up everywhere. It's important to note that there are many variables that impact the friction involved in forking a project and the viability of sustaining it long term. Some projects are easier to fork than others, unquestionably, and Redis – if only because it was a project with many external contributors – was lower friction than some.
Not every project that is re-licensed can or will be forked. But investors, boards and leadership that are pushing for re-licensing as a core strategy will, moving forward, have to seriously consider the possibility of a fork as a potentially more meaningful cost. Where would be re-licensors previously expected no major project consequences from their actions, the prospect of a Valkey-like response is a new consideration.
Page editor: Daroc Alden
Next page:
Announcements>>