Linux Weekly News

The first two articles in this series introduced four ways to order memory accesses: load-acquire and store-release operations in the first installment, read and write memory barriers in the second. The series continues with an exploration of full memory barriers, why they are more expensive, and […]

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (389-ds-base, dogtag-pki, dpdk, freeipa, isync, openvswitch, pki-core, and screen), Mageia (bind, chromium-browser-stable, gnome-autoar, jasper, openldap, openssl and compat-openssl10, screen, webkit2, and xpdf), Oracle (grub2), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm, […]

Over the last couple of years, a lot of development effort has gone into two kernel subsystems: BPF and io_uring. The BPF virtual machine allows programs from user space to be safely run within the context of the kernel, while io_uring addresses the longstanding problem of running system calls […]

Linus Torvalds has sent out a note telling people not to install the recent 5.12-rc1 development kernel; this is especially true for anybody running with swap files. "But I want everybody to be aware of because _if_ it bites you, it bites you hard, and you can end up with a filesystem that is […]

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 5.11.3, 5.10.20, 5.4.102, 4.19.178, 4.14.223, 4.9.259, and 4.4.259 stable kernels. These are generally enormous updates, with important changes throughout the kernel tree; users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (389-ds-base, dogtag-pki, freeipa, isync, pki-core, and screen), Mageia (firefox, kernel, kernel-linus, libtiff, nonfree-firmware, and thunderbird), Red Hat (bind and java-1.8.0-ibm), Scientific Linux (grub2), and SUSE (kernel-firmware, openldap2, […]

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 4, 2021 is available.

The Python lambda keyword, which can be used to create small, anonymous functions, comes from the world of functional programming, but is perhaps not the most beloved of Python features. In part, that may be because it is somewhat clunky to use, especially in comparison to the shorthand notation […]

OpenSSH 8.5 has been released. It includes fixes for a couple of potential security problems (one of which only applies to Solaris hosts); it also enables UpdateHostKeys by default, allowing hosts with insecure keys to upgrade them without creating scary warnings for users. There are a lot of […]

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (bind), Debian (adminer, grub2, spip, and wpa), Mageia (openjpeg2, wpa_supplicant, and xterm), openSUSE (avahi, bind, firefox, ImageMagick, java-1_8_0-openjdk, nodejs10, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (container-tools:1.0, container-tools:2.0, grub2, and […]

For more than a decade, PulseAudio has been serving the Linux desktop as its predominant audio mixing and routing daemon — and its audio API. Unfortunately, PulseAudio's internal architecture does not fit the growing sandboxed-applications use case, even though there have been attempts to […]

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (bind, intel-ucode, ipmitool, isync, openssl, python, python-cryptography, python-httplib2, salt, tar, and thrift), Fedora (ansible, salt, webkit2gtk3, and wpa_supplicant), Oracle (bind), Red Hat (bind, kernel, and kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux […]

The 5.12 merge window closed with the release of 5.12-rc1 on February 28; this released followed the normal schedule despite the fact that Linus Torvalds had been without power for the first six days after 5.11 came out. At that point, 10,886 non-merge changesets had found their way into the […]

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, ImageMagick, libexif, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (docker.io, python-aiohttp, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, kernel, and rygel), Mageia (nodejs, pix, and subversion), openSUSE (glibc, gnuplot, nodejs12, nodejs14, pcp, […]

William Woodruff has posted a rant of sorts on the adoption of Rust by the Python Cryptography project, which was covered here in February. What’s the point of this spiel? It’s precisely what happened to pyca/cryptography: nobody asked them whether it was a good idea to try to run […]