~lwn | Bookmarks (365)

The origins of the TCP and UDP network protocols can be traced back a full 50 years. Even though networks and their use have changed radically since those protocols were designed, they can still be found behind most networking applications. Unsurprisingly, these protocols are not optimal for all situations, so there is ongoing interest in the development of alternatives. One such is the Homa transport...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-good1.0 and opensc), Fedora (iwd and libell), and SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, and poppler).

The 6.13-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus says: "It's been another week, but I'm happy to report that clearly most people actually seem to have been enjoying the holidays, because rc5 is tiny"

Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted three new stable kernel updates: 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122. As usual, he warns that all users of stable kernels must upgrade, although for many systems that seems unlikely to happen until January.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-postcss), Fedora (age, dr_libs, incus, libxml2, moodle, and python-sql), and SUSE (poppler and python-grpcio).

Continuing its tradition of yearly major releases on December 25, the Ruby programming-language project has released Ruby 3.4.0 (followed quickly by 3.4.1, which simply updates the version number). Ruby 3.4 includes lots of changes, including the addition of it as a less-confusing shorthand for _1 as a block parameter, switching to Prism as the default parser, adding the Happy Eyeballs version 2 algorithm to the...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (fastnetmon, webkit2gtk, and xen), Fedora (sympa), Oracle (postgresql), and Red Hat (pcp, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland).

It is often said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results. Be that as it may, LWN has repeatedly started a new year with a set of predictions, only to have to review how badly they went at the end. There was no break in that pattern this year, so there is no help for it; the...

The systemd v257 release brings a number of incremental enhancements to various components and utilities for working with Linux systems. This includes more support for varlink, automated downloading of disk images at boot time, and a number of improvements to the secure-boot process for unified kernel images (UKIs), which we have covered in a separate article.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, edk2:20240524, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libsndfile:1.0.31, mpg123:1.32.9, pam, php:8.1, php:8.2, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.9:3.9.21, skopeo, and unbound:1.16.2), Debian (intel-microcode), Fedora (python3-docs and python3.12), Mageia (emacs), Red Hat (podman), and SUSE (gdb, govulncheck-vulndb, libparaview5_12, mozjs115, mozjs78, and vhostmd).

The systemd project has been working for some time on promoting unified kernel images (UKIs), a format that bundles a kernel, initial disk image, kernel command line, and other associated data into a single file. The advantage of the format is the ability to authenticate the entire collection with secure boot, which makes it easier for end users to know that their operating system...

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 41 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, David Cantrell, Tomáš Hrčka, and Fabio Alessandro Locati. One seat was open on the Mindshare Committee and that went to Luis Bazan as the only eligible candidate nominated in this period.

In the past, suspensions of Python core developers have effectively been permanent because the recipients of the punishment chose not to return. Things have played out quite differently after Tim Peters was suspended for three months back in August; Peters has been posting to the Python discussion forum since his suspension ended in early November and, generally, getting back to work as usual. That...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-base1.0, libxstream-java, php-laravel-framework, python-urllib3, and sqlparse), Fedora (chromium, libcomps, libdnf, mingw-directxmath, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-orc, ofono, prometheus-podman-exporter, python3-docs, python3.13, and webkitgtk), Mageia (mozjs78, thunderbird, and tomcat, tomcat packages), SUSE (aalto-xml, flatten-maven-plugin, jctools, moditect, netty, netty-tcnative, chromedriver, govulncheck-vulndb, grpc, kernel, python-aiohttp, python-python-sql, and vim), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15 and linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4,...

Linus has released 6.13-rc4 for testing. "So this definitely is looking a bit smaller than most rc4s, and I expect (and hope) that rc5 will be absolutely tiny because you should all already be relaxing over the xmas holidays. But hey, if somebody is out there keeping the lights on, please do keep testing."

Version 5.0.0 of the darktable photography workflow application has been released. Major changes in this release include user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX) improvements, speed improvements for bulk operations, and the addition of a inter-script-communication event to allow a running script to send messages to another running script. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022.

Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg announces that the curl project will be dropping hyper, its experimental HTTP backend written in Rust, due to lack of developer interest. While the experiment itself is deemed a failure, I think we learned from it and improved curl in the process. We had to rethink and reassess several implementation details when we aligned HTTP behavior with hyper. libcurl parses...

Version 2024.12 of the Debian-based Grml live Linux system for system administrators has been released. Grml 2024.12 uses packages from the upcoming Debian 13 ("trixie") release. It drops support for 32-bit x86 PCs and gains support for 64-bit ARM CPUs. See the release notes for a full list of changes and new features.

Back in 2022, Josh Triplett presented a plan to implement a "spawn new process" functionality in the io_uring subsystem. There was a fair amount of interest at the time, but developers got distracted, and the work did not progress. Now, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi has returned with a patch series updating and improving Triplett's work. While interest in this functionality remains, it may still take...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and gunicorn), Fedora (jupyterlab), Oracle (bluez, containernetworking-plugins, edk2:20220126gitbb1bba3d77, edk2:20240524, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libsndfile, libsndfile:1.0.31, mpg123, mpg123:1.32.9, pam, python3.11-urllib3, skopeo, tuned, and unbound:1.16.2), SUSE (avahi, docker, emacs, govulncheck-vulndb, haproxy, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, python-grpcio, python310-xhtml2pdf, sudo, and tailscale), and Ubuntu (dpdk, linux-hwe-5.15, and linux-iot).

The 6.12.6, 6.6.67, 6.1.121, 5.15.175, 5.10.232, and 5.4.288 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bluez, edk2:20220126gitbb1bba3d77, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, kernel-rt, mpg123, php:8.2, python3.11-urllib3, and tuned), Fedora (ColPack, glibc, golang-github-chainguard-dev-git-urls, golang-github-task, icecat, python-nbdime, python3.13, and python3.14), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, dwarves and kernel-linus), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-base and gstreamer1-plugins-good), SUSE (curl, emacs, git-bug, glib2, helm, kernel, and traefik2), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, gstreamer1.0, libvpx, linux-gcp, phpunit, and yara).