~lwn | Bookmarks (398)

Many of us enjoy uninterrupted access to mobile networks. However, in remote areas or during emergencies, that connectivity may not always be available. For such scenarios, Meshtastic offers a decentralized wireless mesh network with open-source firmware that runs on affordable, low-power devices. At FOSDEM 2025, the Meshtastic project was represented by one of its core developers, Thomas Göttgens, who gave a talk, "Meshtastic -...

The Fedora Project has announced two milestones in its journey to supporting the RISC-V architecture: a dedicated RISC-V Koji build system instance is live in the Fedora data center, and Fedora 41-based images are now available for RISC-V. It is also possible to run Fedora RISC-V images using QEMU for those without supported hardware.

Debian Developer Thomas Lange has written a blog post in the attempt to help users find the right Debian image for their systems. It's difficult to find the right Debian image. We have thousands of ISO files and cloud images and we support multiple CPU architectures and several download methods. The directory structure of our main image server is like a maze, and our...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gcc-toolset-14-gcc, nodejs:18, and nodejs:22), Fedora (bootc), Gentoo (OpenSSH), Oracle (doxygen, libxml2, mingw-glib2, and NetworkManager), Red Hat (bind, bind9.16, bind9.18, kernel, kernel-rt, mysql, and mysql:8.0), Slackware (openssh), SUSE (buildah, emacs, glibc, google-osconfig-agent, grub2, java-11-openj9, kernel, netty, netty-tcnative, openssh, openvswitch, podman, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (atril, libsndfile, libtasn1-6, openssh, python-virtualenv, and symfony).

Pi-hole v6 has been released. The latest version of the popular ad-blocking software sports a redesigned user interface, has support for subscribing to allowlists, and brings a new REST API and embedded web server. Its Docker/OCI image is now based on Alpine Linux rather than Debian to reduce image size. See the announcement for guidance on upgrading existing Pi-hole installations.

The Reproducible-openSUSE project has announced that it has created a usable version of openSUSE with 100% reproducible packages. [Bernhard] Wiedemann took on this 4-month-long project to create a fork of openSUSE that has 100% bit-reproducible packages. So far ring0 (aka bootstrap) and ring1 with 3,300 software packages have all successfully been patched and tested. This build is not yet recommended for production use, though.

Kernel developers have been working to convert various internal interfaces to use folios; while this process has been progressing, there is still the occasional regression introduced by the change. In December 2024, it was discovered that installing a Flatpak application could trigger a filesystem bug in the kernel that would cause the software to read incorrect data from the disk. The problem was quickly fixed...

The 6.12.15 stable kernel update has been fast-tracked to release. It seems that its predecessor contains a regression in the XFS filesystem that can lead to kernel crashes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gnutls28, openssh, and pam-pkcs11), Mageia (microcode and python-cryptography), Oracle (nodejs:18, nodejs:20, and rsync), Red Hat (gcc, nodejs:20, and nodejs:22), SUSE (emacs, kernel, openvswitch, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (Docker).

It is a standard practice to use milestones to reflect on the achievements of a project, such as the anniversary of its first release or first commit. Usually, these are observed at five and ten‑year increments; the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release, or 25 years since from the first public announcement, etc. Lennart Poettering, however, took a different approach at FOSDEM 2025 with a...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three more stable kernels: 6.13.3, 6.12.14, and 6.6.78. There was a bit of confusion that resulted in the patch for CVE 2025-21687 getting applied twice — but that doesn't result in any problems for users of the kernel, just a bit of extra noise in the CVE database, so Kroah-Hartman has decided to leave the releases as-is instead of rushing...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, gcc, libxml2, nodejs:18, and nodejs:20), Debian (freerdp2, golang-glog, trafficserver, and tryton-client), Fedora (chromium, krb5, libheif, microcode_ctl, nginx, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, and webkitgtk), Mageia (ffmpeg, golang, postgresql13 and postgresql15, and python-zipp), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, gcc, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, libxml2, and nodejs:20), Red Hat (gcc, idm:DL1, and ipa), SUSE (buildah, chromium, glibc, kernel, kernel-firmware-all-20250206, libecpg6, postgresql15, python, python3,...

The 6.14-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing; the announcement, for unknown reasons, went only to the linux-btrfs list. So the first few weeks of the 6.14 release development were smaller-than-usual, but rc3 is actually right in line with normal releases at this point. Probably just timing of pull requests, and we'll see how next week goes. But nothing looks worrisome. Along with the...

There are many challenges involved with running a web site like LWN. Some of them, such as finding the courage to write for people who know more about the subject matter than we do, simply come with the territory we have chosen. But others show up as an unwelcome surprise; the ongoing task of fending off bots determined to scrape the entire Internet to...

Memcached is a memory-based data-caching daemon that has a long history. More than twenty years after its first public release, Memcached strives to remain relevant in a vastly changed computing landscape, balancing new features with a commitment to the original principles that separate it from newer alternatives like Redis and Hazelcast.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (doxygen, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, and libxml2), Debian (chromium, postgresql-13, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (krb5, openssl, and python3.13), Mageia (ark, ofono, and perl-Net-OAuth, perl-Crypt-URandom, perl-Module-Build), Oracle (firefox, gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, openssl, tbb, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libxml2), SUSE (chromium, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, kernel, kernel-firmware-ath10k-20250206, kernel-firmware-bnx2-20250206, kernel-firmware-brcm-20250206, kernel-firmware-chelsio-20250206, kernel-firmware-dpaa2-20250206, kernel-firmware-mwifiex-20250206, kernel-firmware-platform-20250206, kernel-firmware-realtek-20250206, kernel-firmware-serial-20250206, kernel-firmware-ueagle-20250206, libtasn1, python312, qemu, SUSE Manager Client Tools,...

The Asahi Linux project, which is working to support Linux on Apple silicon, has announced the resignation of Hector "marcan" Martin as its lead, and his replacement by a seven-person committee. "Today's news is bittersweet. We are grateful to marcan for kicking off this project and tirelessly working on it these past years. Our community will miss him. Still, with your support, the project...

The openSUSE project has announced that future installations of the Tumbleweed rolling distribution will use SELinux for mandatory access control rather than AppArmor. Existing installations will not be migrated, and AppArmor will continue to be maintained for Tumbleweed. The openSUSE Leap 15 distribution is not changing.

Huge pages can increase the performance of many programs, but they can also have unfortunate performance impacts of their own. Over the last few years, multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) have increasingly been seen as a happy medium that bring the benefits of huge pages at a lower cost. The system cannot benefit from mTHPs, though, if it does not create them; two developers...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (doxygen and openssl), Debian (dcmtk and webkit2gtk), Fedora (chromium, clevis-pin-tpm2, envision, fido-device-onboard, gotify-desktop, keylime-agent-rust, keyring-ima-signer, libkrun, python3.10, python3.11, python3.14, rust-afterburn, rust-cargo-vendor-filterer, rust-coreos-installer, rust-eif_build, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-nu, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, rust-pore, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-keyring-linter, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-policy-config, rust-sequoia-sqv, rust-sevctl, rust-snphost, rust-tealdeer, rustup, and s390utils), Mageia (ffmpeg, php-tcpdf, python-tornado, and subversion), Red Hat (openssl and python-jinja2), SUSE (crun, glibc, kernel, libngtcp2-16, libtasn1, netty,...

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: BPF load-time checking; IRQ suspension; Rust for Linux; Rewriting coreutils; Selfish contributors; emlearn. Briefs: RfL policy; OpenWrt 24.10.0; Arti 1.4.0; LibreOffice 25.2; OpenInfra; Plasma 6.3; Attacks on Codeberg; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Codeberg development forge has recently been subject to sustained attacks resulting in, among other things, abusive email being sent to the site's users. The organization has now put up a description and a defiant response: Extreme right forces actively target members of our communities and discriminate based on ethnicity and gender, political background, sexual orientation, disabilities, nationality and faith. However diversity is an...

While large language models and the expensive hardware they require are all the rage now, other areas of artificial intelligence work within much more constrained hardware environments. At FOSDEM 2025, Jon Nordby presented his open-source machine-learning inference engine for microcontrollers, named emlearn. The project also boasts bindings for MicroPython, thus making machine-learning applications even more accessible.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (bind9, cacti, pam-pkcs11, and ruby2.7), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, crun, and java-21-openjdk), Mageia (calibre, nginx, python-ansible-core, python-jinja2, python-pip, python-setuptools, python-twisted, and python-waitress), Red Hat (doxygen, firefox, gcc, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, tbb, and thunderbird), SUSE (go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, openssl-3, ovmf, python3-numpy, python311, python36, qemu, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (bluez and openssl).