Bookmarks (234)

The final session in the memory-management track at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) was run remotely by James Gowans and David Woodhouse. It was titled "user-space control of memory mappings", with a subtitle of "letting guest memory and state survive kexec". Some options were discussed, but the real work is clearly yet to be done.

As the memory-management track at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) neared its conclusion, Mike Kravetz ran a session remotely to talk about page sharing with hugetlbfs, which is a special filesystem that provides access to huge pages. (See this article series for lots of information about hugetlbfs). Hugetlbfs can help to reduce page-table overhead when pages are shared between...

The numerous correctness problems with the kernel's get_user_pages() functionality have been a fixture at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM) for some years. The 2022 event did not break that tradition. The first-day discussion on page pinning was covered here. On the final day, in the memory-management track, David Hildenbrand led a session on the current status of get_user_pages() and its...

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (ark, openldap, and thunderbird), Fedora (freetype and vim), Oracle (.NET 5.0, .NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, container-tools:3.0, glibc, kernel, rsync, and subversion:1.10), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (dcraw, firefox, glib2, ImageMagick, kernel-firmware, libxml2, libyajl, php7, ucode-intel, and unrar), and Ubuntu (openldap).

Version 1.61.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time around include more flexibility in main-program exit codes, a number of new features for const functions, a number of newly stabilized APIs, and more.

Control groups are a useful system-management feature, but they can also consume a lot of resources, especially if they hang around on the system after they have been deleted. Roman Gushchin described the problems that can result at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM); he returned during the 2022 LSFMM to revisit the issue, especially as it relates to the...

During the final day of the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), attention in the memory-management track turned once again to the challenges posed by the upcoming Compute Express Link (CXL) technology. Two sessions looked at different problems posed by CXL memory, which can come and go over the operation of the system. CXL offers a lot of flexibility, but changes...

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has posted an extensive review of the Rust language derived from the experience of writing "over 100k lines" of code. Rust is a difficult language for authoring code because it makes these "cheats" hard – as long as you have the discipline of not using "unsafe" constructions to make cheats easy. However, really hard does not mean impossible – there were...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (microcode_ctl, rubygem-nokogiri, and vim), Mageia (htmldoc, python-django, and python-oslo-utils), Red Hat (container-tools:2.0, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and pcs), SUSE (ardana-barbican, grafana, openstack-barbican, openstack-cinder, openstack-heat-gbp, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-ironic, openstack-keystone, openstack-neutron-gbp, python-lxml, release-notes-suse-openstack-cloud, autotrace, curl, firefox, libslirp, php7, poppler, slurm_20_11, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (bind9, gnome-control-center, and libxrandr).

LWN does its best to provide comprehensive coverage of the free-software development community, but there is far more going on than our small staff can handle. When expressed that way, this problem suggests an obvious solution: make the staff bigger. Thus, LWN is looking to hire a writer/editor.

In a combined filesystem and storage session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Chuck Lever wanted to discuss the need for a permanent, globally unique ID for network filesystems. He was joined by Hannes Reinecke who has worked on the problem for NVMe storage devices; Lever said something along those lines is needed for NFSv4. He was hoping to...

OpenSUSE Leap Micro is a new distribution, described as "an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system built for containerized and virtualized workloads". The initial release (5.2) is now available. More information can be found in the 5.2 release notes.

A longstanding problem with Btrfs subvolumes and duplicate inode numbers was the topic of a late-breaking filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). The problem had cropped up in the bcachefs session but Josef Bacik deferred that discussion to this just-created session, which he led. The problem is not limited to Btrfs, though, since filesystem snapshots for other...

The 5.17.9, 5.15.41, 5.10.117, 5.4.195, 4.19.244, 4.14.280, and 4.9.315 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (elog, needrestart, openssl, and waitress), Fedora (curl, libxml2, slurm, and vim), Scientific Linux (zlib), SUSE (e2fsprogs, nodejs10, php72, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apport, clamav, needrestart, and pcre3).

Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline...

The Linux kernel allows processes to share pages in memory, but the page tables used to control that sharing are not, themselves, shared; as a result, processes sharing memory maintain duplicate copies of the page-table data. Normally this duplication imposes little overhead, but there are situations where it can hurt. At the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Khaled Aziz (remotely)...

Version 1.2 of the Inkscape drawing tool has been released. New features include multi-page support, editable markers, the ability to flow text around shapes, and more; see the release notes for details.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cifs-utils, ffmpeg, libxml2, and vim), Fedora (rsyslog), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, e2fsprogs, gzip, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformats-binary, jackson-annotations, jackson-bom, jackson-core, kernel, nodejs8, openldap2, pidgin, podofo, slurm, and tiff), and Ubuntu (clamav, containerd, libxml2, and openldap).

It is perhaps unusual to have a kernel tracing developer leading a filesystem session, Steven Rostedt said, at the beginning of such a session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). But he was doing so to try to find a good way to dynamically allocate kernel data structures for some of the pseudo-filesystems, such as sysfs, debugfs, and tracefs,...

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced that it succeeded with its motion in US Federal Court to send the case back to California, where it was originally filed. The suit was filed in October 2021 by SFC, as an owner of Vizio televisions, to get the company to comply with the GPL on some of the code in the TVs. Back in November, Vizio...

A new helper library for network filesystems, called netfslib, was the subject of a filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). David Howells developed netfslib, which was merged for 5.13 a year ago, and led the session. Some filesystems, like AFS and Ceph, are already using some of the services that netfslib provides, while others are starting to look...

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (gzip, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and zlib), Debian (adminer, htmldoc, imagemagick, libgoogle-gson-java, lrzip, openjdk-8, openssl, and ruby-nokogiri), Fedora (ecdsautils, et, libxml2, podman, and supertux), Mageia (cairo, clamav, curl, fish, freetype2, golang-github-prometheus-client, python-django-registration, python-nbxmpp, python-waitress, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (curl, kernel, pidgin, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (tiff).