Welcome to LWN.net
LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information, and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities.
[$] One more pidfdfs surprise
The "pidfdfs" virtual filesystem was added to the 6.9 kernel release as a way to export better information about running processes to user space. It replaced a previous implementation in a way that was, on its surface, fully compatible while adding a number of new capabilities. This transition, which was intended to be entirely invisible to existing applications, already ran into trouble in March, when a misunderstanding with SELinux caused systems with pidfdfs to fail to boot properly. That problem was quickly fixed, but it turns out that there was one more surprise in store, showing just how hard ABI compatibility can be at times.
[$] Standardizing the BPF ISA
While BPF may be most famous for its use in the Linux kernel, there is actually a growing effort to standardize BPF for use on other systems. These include eBPF for Windows, but also uBPF, rBPF, hBPF, bpftime, and others. Some hardware manufacturers are even considering integrating BPF directly into networking hardware. Dave Thaler led two sessions about all of the problems that cross-platform use inevitably brings and the current status of the standardization work at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit.
[$] New APIs for filesystems
A discussion of extensions to the statx() system call comes up frequently at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit; this year's edition was no exception. Kent Overstreet led the first filesystem-only session at the summit on querying information about filesystems that have subvolumes and snapshots. While it was billed as a discussion on statx() additions, it ranged more widely over new APIs needed for modern filesystems.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 30, 2024
Posted May 30, 2024 2:28 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 30, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: DNF5 for Fedora 41; Fedora macOS binaries; 6.10 Merge window; Lots of LSFMM+BPF coverage.
- Briefs: DNSSEC; Linux 6.10-rc1; BitKeeper licensing; FreeBSD Community Survey; KDE Gear 24.05.0; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Fedora approves shipping pre-built macOS binaries
The Asahi Linux project works to support Linux on Apple Silicon hardware. The project's flagship distribution is the Fedora Asahi Remix, which has its own installer (rather than Anaconda) to accommodate the unique requirements of installing on Apple's hardware. Previously the installer was built by the Asahi project, but it has asked for (and received) an exception from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) to include two binaries from upstream open-source projects so that the installer can be built on Fedora infrastructure.
A plea for more thoughtful comments
When redesigning the LWN site in 2002, we thought long and hard about whether the ability to post comments should be part of it; LWN had not offered that feature for the first four years of its existence. There were already plenty of examples of how comments can go bad by then, but we decided to trust our readers to keep things under control. Much of the time, that trust has proved justified, but there have been times where things have not gone so well. This time is quickly becoming one of those others.
[$] Supporting BPF in GCC
The GCC project has been working to support compiling to BPF for some time. José Marchesi and David Faust spoke in an extended session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about how that work has been going, and what is left for GCC to be on-par with LLVM with regard to BPF support. They also related tentative plans for how GCC BPF support would be maintained in the future.
[$] Filesystems and iomap
The iomap block-mapping abstraction is being used by more filesystems, in part because of its support for large folios. But there are some challenges in adopting iomap, which was the topic of a discussion led by Ritesh Harjani in a combined storage and filesystem session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. One of the main trouble spots is how to handle metadata, which is not an area that iomap has been aimed at.
[$] Measuring memory fragmentation
In the final session in the memory-management track of the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, the exhausted group of developers looked one more time at the use of huge pages and the associated problem of memory fragmentation. At its worst, this problem can make huge pages harder (and more expensive) to allocate. Luis Chamberlain, who ran the session, felt that people were worried about this problem, but that there was little data on how severe it truly is.
[$] The state of the memory-management community in 2024
A longstanding tradition in the memory-management track of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit is a session with maintainer Andrew Morton to discuss the overall state of the community and the development process. The 2024 gathering upheld that tradition toward the end of the final day of the event. It seems that Morton and the assembled developers were all happy with how memory-management work is going, but there is always room for improvement.
Opt Green: KDE Eco's New Sustainable Software Project
KDE Eco, a KDE project focused on reducing software's environmental impact, has announced its Opt Green campaign to reduce e-waste:
Over the next two years, the "Opt Green" initiative will bring what KDE Eco has been doing for sustainable software directly to end users. A particular target group for the project is those whose consumer behavior is driven by principles related to the environment, and not just price or convenience: the "eco-consumers".
Through online and offline campaigns as well as installation workshops, we will demonstrate the power of Free Software to drive down resource and energy consumption, and keep devices in use for the lifespan of the hardware, not the software.
Our motto: The most environmentally-friendly device is the one you already own.
See the KDE Eco Get Involved page for more information on how to participate.
CFP: the 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit
The 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit will happen on September 17 in Vienna, Austria; it is an invitation-only event for a small group to discuss important kernel-development problems. The call for proposals for this gathering has now been posted. One of the best ways to be invited to the event is to propose a topic that needs discussion in that forum. The deadline for proposals is June 18.
25 Years of Krita
The developers of the Krita painting application are celebrating 25 years of development with a detailed history of the project.
A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, 389-ds:1.4, ansible-core bug fix, enhancement, and, bind and dhcp, container-tools:rhel8, edk2, exempi, fence-agents, freeglut, frr, gdk-pixbuf2, ghostscript, git-lfs, glibc, gmp, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, grub2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, harfbuzz, httpd:2.4, Image builder components bug fix, enhancement and, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, less, LibRaw, libsndfile, libssh, libtiff, libX11, libXpm, linux-firmware, motif, mutt, nghttp2, openssh, pam, pcp, pcs, perl-Convert-ASN1, perl-CPAN, perl:5.32, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, pmix, poppler, python-dns, python-jinja2, python-pillow, python27:2.7, python3, python3.11, python3.11-cryptography, python3.11-urllib3, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, qt5-qtbase, resource-agents, squashfs-tools, sssd, systemd, tigervnc, traceroute, vorbis-tools, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), Debian (gst-plugins-base1.0), Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, roundcubemail, and wireshark), Oracle (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, bind and dhcp, gdk-pixbuf2, git-lfs, glibc, grafana, krb5, pcp, python-dns, python3, sssd, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (edk2, less, nghttp2, and ruby:3.0), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-base, Java, kernel, and python-requests), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, node-browserify-sign, postgresql-14, postgresql-15, postgresql-16, and python-pymysql).
Stable kernels 6.9.3 and 6.8.12
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.9.3 and 6.8.12 stable kernels. As usual, they contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree. Note that 6.8.12 is the end of the line for the 6.8.x stable kernel series.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-pymysql), Fedora (chromium, mingw-python-requests, and thunderbird), Mageia (perl-Email-MIME and qtnetworkauth5 & qtnetworkauth6), Red Hat (gdisk and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9 modules), SUSE (freerdp, gdk-pixbuf, gifsicle, glib2, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, libfastjson, libredwg, nodejs16, python, python3, python36, rpm, warewulf4, and xdg-desktop-portal), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, python-werkzeug, and tpm2-tss).
Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report. The report provides a summary of 1,446 responses to an anonymous online survey of FreeBSD users. It provides insights into user profiles, typical usage, how the FreeBSD project is viewed, as well as recommendations for expanding the FreeBSD community and contributor base:
Currently fewer than half of users consider FreeBSD their daily driver; Individuals are less likely than Corporate Users to consider FreeBSD primary. The barrier seems to be less about software and more about hardware support, particularly around Wi-Fi drivers (which are at the top of the wish list for the Foundation to focus on in the coming year). A relatively high number of those who don't consider FreeBSD their main OS say they would consider doing so with hardware support for desktops and laptops that was equivalent to Linux.
The raw data for the survey is available as well.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc and tomcat), Fedora (chromium, fcitx5-qt, python-pyqt6, qadwaitadecorations, qgnomeplatform, qt6, qt6-qt3d, qt6-qt5compat, qt6-qtbase, qt6-qtcharts, qt6-qtcoap, qt6-qtconnectivity, qt6-qtdatavis3d, qt6-qtdeclarative, qt6-qtgraphs, qt6-qtgrpc, qt6-qthttpserver, qt6-qtimageformats, qt6-qtlanguageserver, qt6-qtlocation, qt6-qtlottie, qt6-qtmqtt, qt6-qtmultimedia, qt6-qtnetworkauth, qt6-qtopcua, qt6-qtpositioning, qt6-qtquick3d, qt6-qtquick3dphysics, qt6-qtquicktimeline, qt6-qtremoteobjects, qt6-qtscxml, qt6-qtsensors, qt6-qtserialbus, qt6-qtserialport, qt6-qtshadertools, qt6-qtspeech, qt6-qtsvg, qt6-qttools, qt6-qttranslations, qt6-qtvirtualkeyboard, qt6-qtwayland, qt6-qtwebchannel, qt6-qtwebengine, qt6-qtwebsockets, qt6-qtwebview, and zeal), Red Hat (glibc, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, linux-firmware, mod_http2, pcp, pcs, protobuf, python3, rpm-ostree, and rust), SUSE (git, glibc-livepatches, kernel, libxml2, openssl-1_1, SUSE Manager Client Tools, SUSE Manager Client Tools, salt, and xdg-desktop-portal), and Ubuntu (amavisd-new, firefox, flask-security, frr, git, intel-microcode, jinja2, libreoffice, linux-intel-iotg, unbound, and webkit2gtk).
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (less), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (apache2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, libqt5-qtnetworkauth, and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (netatalk and python-cryptography).
Huston: Calling Time on DNSSEC?
Geoff Huston suggests that it is time to give up on DNSSEC and look for a better way to secure the Internet namespace.
What appears to be very clear (to me at any rate!) is that DNSSEC as we know it today is just not going anywhere. It's too complex, too fragile and just too slow to use for the majority of services and their users. Some value its benefits highly enough that they are prepared to live with its shortcomings, but that's not the case for the overall majority of name holders and for the majority of users, and no amount of passionate exhortations about DNSSEC will change this.