~lwn | Bookmarks (365)

The Sequoia OpenPGP library has been in development for some time. LWN covered the library in 2020. Now the project's command-line interface has been released. The sq tool offers a promising alternative to the venerable GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) tool — albeit one with a different interface, set of terminology, and approach to the web of trust. Several distributions are making increasing use of...

The Tor Project has published a review of major milestones from 2024, including merging with the Tails project, work to enable human-friendly .onion addresses, and the launch of WebTunnel: By mimicking common internet protocols, WebTunnel improves the resilience of the Tor network in regions with heavy censorship. And since its launch earlier this year, we've made sure to prioritize small download sizes for more...

The pkgsrc developers have announced the 2024Q4 branch of the pkgsrc cross-platform packaging system. It is the default package manager for NetBSD, SmartOS, and is available for Linux as well. This marks the 85th quarterly release of pkgsrc: Since the pkgsrc-2024Q3 release, 110 packages were added, 1580 packages were updated (with 2399 updates, including language-specific updates: 24 Go, 3 OCaml, 66 Perl, 5 PHP,...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (firefox, mupdf, and php-tcpdf), SUSE (etcd, file-roller, gtk3, kernel, python-django-ckeditor, rubygem-json-jwt, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, HTMLDOC, linux-aws, linux-raspi, linux-gke, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, and tinyproxy).

Kernel networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski reviews progress in the networking subsystem in 2024. Work on relieving the rtnl_lock pressure has continued throughout the year. The rtnl_lock is often mentioned as one of the biggest global locks in the kernel, as it protects all of the network configuration and state. The efforts can be divided into two broad categories – converting read operations to rely...

Gentoo Linux has published a project retrospective that looks at the major improvements and news from 2024, the Gentoo Foundation's finances, and contributions to Gentoo by the numbers. The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a 2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown strongly...

In the past, LWN had a tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year in early January. We thought we might try reviving that tradition in 2025 to see if our readers find it useful. While we have covered these events as they happened, it's interesting to see how much has taken place in just 12 months.

Version 134.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include support for touchpad hold gestures on Linux, a refreshed layout for the New Tab page for users in the US and Canada, and improved support for debugging web extensions.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python-requests), Oracle (python-requests), SUSE (python-Jinja2 and rizin), and Ubuntu (ceph, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iotg, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi-5.4, and salt).

During EmacsConf 2024, which was held online in early December 2024, Ramin Honary gave a talk about Project Gypsum, which is his effort to rewrite Emacs in Scheme. Unlike most other Emacs clones, which simply replicate the key bindings, Gypsum is also implementing Emacs Lisp (or Elisp). Honary is initially targeting Guile, which is an implementation of Scheme, but wants to make the code portable to...

From the Ubuntu Discourse instance comes the sad news that longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor Steve Langasek has passed away. Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ofono and webkitgtk), Mageia (ruby and virtualbox & kmod-virtualbox), Red Hat (oci-seccomp-bpf-hook and runc), SUSE (corepack22, dpdk, libpoppler-cpp1, pcp, python-Jinja2, and sysstat), and Ubuntu (tinyproxy).

Linus has released 6.13-rc6 for testing. So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice as many commits as the holiday week, but that's still not all that many. I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are back from the holidays and are starting to...

The Pony programming language is dedicated to exploring how to make high-performance actor-based systems. Started in 2014, the language's most notable feature is probably reference capabilities, a system of pointer annotations that gives the developer fine manual control over how data is shared between actors, while simultaneously ensuring that Pony programs don't have data races. The language is not likely to overtake other more...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (linux-6.1), Fedora (iwd and libell), Red Hat (python-requests), and SUSE (velero).

We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun. That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how the year will actually go. We have to try; it's traditional, after all. Read on for our view of what's coming and how...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.8, 6.6.69, and 6.1.123 stable kernels. They contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as usual.

While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front end for the Algol 68 language. This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced,...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-django and python-tornado), Fedora (libxml2), and Red Hat (python-virtualenv and python36:3.6).

Version 22.1 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution is out. We've been hard at work since Android 15's release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15's code-base...

Kees Cook describes his work resulting in a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the same first 12 characters as the initial commit in the kernel's repository. This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead...