Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.13-rc1, released on December 1. Linus said: "And for once - possibly the first time ever - it looks like the release cycle doesn't clash horribly up with the holiday season, and we'll have time both to stabilize this release, _and_ the work for 6.14 won't be starting until well into January."

Stable updates: 6.12.1, 6.11.10, 6.6.63, and 6.1.119 were released on November 22.

The large 6.12.2, 6.11.11, and 4.19.325 updates are in the review process; they are due on December 5. Note that the 4.19.x series ends with 4.19.325: "It's been 6 years, everyone should have moved off of it by now."

Comments (1 posted)

A kernel code of conduct enforcement action

The Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) has decided to "restrict Kent Overstreet's participation in the kernel development process during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle" based on a recommendation from the Code of Conduct committee. In particular, the scope of the restriction will be to "decline all pull requests from Kent Overstreet" during the development cycle. Overstreet is the creator and maintainer of the bcachefs filesystem.

This action stems from a message Overstreet posted back in early September that was abusive toward another kernel developer; there is a fair amount of back-and-forth about the incident and the committee's attempts to extract a public apology from Overstreet in that thread. Overstreet has published a lengthy blog post describing his side of the story.

Comments (172 posted)

Walleij: New ARM32 Security Features in v6.10

Linus Walleij writes about a pair of security features for 32-bit Arm systems; these landed in 6.10, but, he says, have now stabilized to the point that distributors may want to enable them.

PAN is an abbreviation for the somewhat grammatically incorrect Privileged Access Never. [...]

For modern ARM32 systems with large memories configured to use LPAE nothing like PAN was available: this version of the MMU simply did not implement a PAN option.

As of the patch originally developed by Catalin Marinas, we deploy a scheme that will use the fact that LPAE has two separate translation table base registers (TTBR:s): one for userspace (TTBR0) and one for kernelspace (TTBR1).

Comments (none posted)

Quote of the week

I think this is the tipping point, expect to see way more rust drivers going forward now that these bindings are present. Next merge window hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) rust drivers.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman on the addition of the Rust bindings for misc devices.

Comments (none posted)

Elementary OS 8 released

Version 8 of the Ubuntu-based elementary OS has been released. This release includes a rewritten Dock, new window-management features, improvements in the installation and initial setup procedures for visually impaired users, as well as a new Secure Session mode:

In the Secure Session, apps will be more restricted and will require your consent for access to system features. When an app wants to listen in the background for your keystrokes, take a screenshot, record the screen, or even pick up the color from a single pixel, you will be asked first to make sure that it's okay. The Secure Session also comes with other modern features like support for Mixed DPI modes—A hotly requested feature for folks using a HiDPI notebook or tablet with a LoDPI external display—and improved support for multi-touch gestures on touch screens and tablets.

Comments (8 posted)

Fedora moves towards Forgejo (Fedora Magazine)

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller reports that the project's search to replace Pagure as its git forge is almost complete, with the Fedora Council strongly in favor of Forgejo:

The Council, currently, has a clear preference for Forgejo. This is a big decision and we don't want it to feel rushed. Therefore, we're opening this up one last time to everyone's comments. After two weeks, we'll take our formal vote — and then get on with the work!

LWN looked at Forgejo in February.

Comments (7 posted)

NixOS 24.11 released

The most recent version of NixOS, 24.11, was released on November 30. It contains GNOME 47, Plasma 6.2, LLVM 19, and lots more:

The 24.11 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2669 contributors, who authored 49079 commits since the previous release. Our thanks go the contributors who also take care of the continued stability and security of our stable release.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution while also being the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 8141 new packages and 20975 updated packages in Nixpkgs. We also removed 3970 packages in an effort to keep the package set maintainable and secure.

Comments (none posted)

Distributions quote of the week

My advice to anyone still running Debian on a 32-bit x86 machine would be to look into acquiring a second-hand 64-bit laptop, many of which are already sufficiently old that they're most likely to be disposed of as e-waste if unsold (so replacing an existing 32-bit machine would not be a net increase in the amount of e-waste needing disposal).

— Simon McVittie

Comments (none posted)

Firefox version 133.0 is now available

Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 133.0. Notable in this release is the addition of a new anti-tracking feature, Bounce Tracking Protection, which detects trackers based on redirect behavior and automatically purges their cookies and site data to thwart tracking. The release also includes various security fixes and more.

Comments (8 posted)

Hurl 6.0.0 released

Version 6.0.0 of the Hurl command-line tool has been released. Hurl is a curl-powered utility that runs HTTP requests and tests defined in a plain-text Hurl file. Notable features in this release include the ability to generate dynamic values with functions, shorter syntax, and an option to export Hurl files to a list of curl commands. See the release notes for a full list of changes and downloads.

Comments (1 posted)

PHP 8.4.1 released

Version 8.4.1 of the PHP language has been released. See this page for details on the new features in this release. "PHP 8.4 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as property hooks, asymmetric visibility, an updated DOM API, performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup."

Comments (2 posted)

Rust 1.83.0 released

Version 1.83.0 of the Rust language has been released.

This release includes several large extensions to what code running in const contexts can do. This refers to all code that the compiler has to evaluate at compile-time: the initial value of const and static items, array lengths, enum discriminant values, const generic arguments, and functions callable from such contexts (const fn).

There are also quite a few new stabilized APIs.

Comments (17 posted)

Development quote of the week

The biggest problem in benchmarking filesystem I/O is that Linux tries really hard to avoid doing it, aggressively using any spare memory as a filesystem cache. This is why serving static Web traffic out of the filesystem often remains a good idea in 2024; your server will take care of caching the most heavily fetched data in RAM without you having to do cache management, which everyone knows is hard.

I have read of various cache-busting strategies and have never really been convinced that they'll outsmart this aspect of Linux, which was written by people who are way smarter and know way more than I think I do. So Bonnie has always used a brute-force approach: Work on a test file which is much bigger than main memory, so Linux has to do at least some real I/O. Ideally you'd like it to be several times the memory size.

But this has a nasty downside. The computer I'm typing on has 32GB of memory, so I ran Bonnie with a 64G filesize (128G would have been better) and it took 35 minutes to finish. I really don't see any way around this annoyance but I guess it's not a fatal problem.

Oh, and those numbers: Some of them look remarkably big to me. But I'm an old guy with memories of how we had to move the bits back forth individually back in the day, with electrically-grounded tweezers.

— Tim Bray

Comments (7 posted)

Giving thanks for the LWN community

Earlier today, one of our subscribers, anselm, posted the one millionth item in our database during a discussion in the comments about the GPL. One million articles and comments is a big milestone — one representing twenty two years of work by both the editors of LWN and the community. I think reaching this milestone on Thanksgiving is a lovely coincidental reminder of how far LWN has come, and how that wouldn't have been possible without your support. So thank you for reading.

Comments (40 posted)

The OpenWrt One router is now shipping

The OpenWrt One router, which was reviewed here recently, is now generally available.

This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.

Comments (20 posted)