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[$] SUSE asks openSUSE to consider name change
SUSE has, in a somewhat clumsy fashion, asked openSUSE to consider rebranding to clear up confusion over the relationship between SUSE the company and openSUSE as a community project. That, in turn, has opened conversations about revising openSUSE governance and more. So far, there is no concrete proposal to consider, no timeline, or even a process for the community and company to follow to make any decisions.
[$] Hierarchical storage management, fanotify, FUSE, and more
Amir Goldstein led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on his project to build a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system using fanotify. The idea is to monitor file access in order to determine when to retrieve content from non-local storage (e.g. the cloud). The session was a follow-up to last year's introduction to the project, which covered some of the problems he had encountered; this year, he was updating attendees on its status and progress, along with some other problem areas that he wanted to discuss.
[$] A hash table by any other name
On June 25, Matthew Wilcox posted
a second version of a patch set
introducing a new
data structure called rosebush, which
"is a resizing, scalable, cache-aware, RCU optimised hash
table.
" The kernel already has generic hash tables, though, including
rhashtable. Wilcox believes that the design of
rhashtable is not the best choice for performance, and has written rosebush as
an alternative for use in the
directory-entry cache (dcache) — the filesystem cache used to speed up
file-name lookup.
[$] Development statistics for the 6.10 kernel
The 6.10 kernel was released on July 14 after a nine-week development cycle. This time around, 13,312 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline repository — the lowest changeset count since 5.17 in early 2022. Longstanding tradition says that it is time for LWN to gather some statistics on where the new code for 6.10 came from and how it got to the mainline; read on for the details.
[$] A look at Linux Mint 22
Linux Mint has released a beta of its next long-term-support (LTS) release, Linux Mint 22 (code-named "Wilma"), based on Ubuntu 24.04. Aside from the standard software updates that come with any major upgrade, some of Wilma's largest selling points are what it doesn't have; namely snap packages or GNOME applications that have broken theming on non-GNOME desktops like Mint's Cinnamon desktop.
[$] Nix alternatives and spinoffs
Since the disagreements that led to Eelco Dolstra stepping down from the NixOS Foundation board, there have been a number of projects forked from or inspired by Nix that have stepped up to compete with it. Two months on, some of these projects are now well-established enough to look at what they have to offer and how they compare to each other. Overall, users have a number of good options to choose from, whether they're seeking a compatible replacement for Nix (the configuration language and package manager) or NixOS (the Linux distribution), or something that takes the same ideas in a different direction.
[$] Reports from OSPM 2024, part 1
The sixth edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (OSPM) Summit took place on May 30-31 2024, and was graciously hosted by the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) in Toulouse, France. This is the first of a series of articles describing the discussions held at OSPM 2024; topics covered include latency hints, energy-aware scheduling, ChromeOS, and user-space schedulers.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 11, 2024
Posted Jul 11, 2024 0:49 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 11, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: C++26; Sxmo; getrandom() in the vDSO; PSP security protocol; Virtual filesystems; nmbl.
- Briefs: OpenSSH vulnerability; Fedora Atomic boot problem; Text rendering; Firefox 128.0; GDB 15.1; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Improving pseudo filesystems
The eventfs filesystem provides an interface to the tracepoints that are available to be used by various Linux tracing tools (e.g. ftrace, perf, uprobes, etc.); it is meant to be a version of the tracefs filesystem that dynamically allocates its entries as needed. The goal is to reduce the memory required for multiple instances of tracefs, as Steven Rostedt described in a session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. He returned to the 2024 edition of the summit to talk further about how to make pseudo (or virtual) filesystems, such as tracefs/eventfs, more like regular Linux filesystems, where the directory entries (dentries) and inodes are only created (and cached) as needed.
[$] Sxmo: a text-centric mobile user interface
Sxmo, short for "Simple X Mobile", is described on its web site as "a
minimalist environment for Linux mobile devices
"; it offers a menu-driven
interface that is controlled with the phone's hardware buttons. Sxmo enables the user
to send SMS messages from a text editor and is entirely customizable with
shell scripts. This peculiar mobile user interface significantly differs
from the prevailing approach—but it works.
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.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (erlang-jose, mingw-python-certifi, and yt-dlp), Mageia (firefox, nss, libreoffice, sendmail, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox, ghostscript, git-lfs, kernel, kernel-rt, ruby, and skopeo), SUSE (Botan, cockpit, kernel, nodejs18, p7zip, python3, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-azure-6.5, linux-gcp-6.5, and linux-gke, linux-nvidia).
Stable kernels 6.6.40 and 6.1.99
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.6.40
and 6.1.99 stable kernels. Both contain a
fix for the USB subsystem; anyone who uses those kernel series and "the XHCI
USB host controller driver (i.e. USB 3) must upgrade
".
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cups, krb5, pgadmin4, python3.6, and yarnpkg), Mageia (freeradius, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, and dwarves, kernel-linus, and squid), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and less), SUSE (avahi, c-ares, cairo, cups, fdo-client, gdk-pixbuf, git, libarchive, openvswitch3, podman, polkit, python-black, python-Jinja2, python-urllib3, skopeo, squashfs, tiff, traceroute, and wget), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm).
The 6.10 kernel has been released
Linus has released the 6.10 kernel.
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.
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.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2), Fedora (mingw-python3 and python-urllib3), Oracle (dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, openssh, pki-core, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), SUSE (apache2, firefox, libvpx, oniguruma, python-zipp, python310, thunderbird, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (apache2, apport, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-intel, linux-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-raspi, linux, linux-gcp, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-raspi, linux-gke, and python-django).
Stable kernels 6.9.9, 6.6.39, and 6.1.98
The 6.9.9, 6.6.39, and 6.1.98 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Debian (exim4 and firefox-esr), Fedora (dotnet8.0, firefox, onnx, qt6-qtbase, squid, and wordpress), Mageia (golang, netatalk, php, and poppler), Red Hat (ghostscript, httpd, openssh, python3, and ruby), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel and openssh), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-ibm-5.15, and python3.5, python3.6, python3.7, python3.8, python3.9, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12).
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.