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On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a non-experimental part of Python. The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised...

Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu distribution is out. This release continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs. The list of changes and enhancements is long; click below...

Linux, famously, appears in a wide range of systems. While servers and large data centers get a lot of the attention, and this year will always be the year of the Linux desktop, there is also a great deal of Linux to be found in realtime and embedded applications. Two talks held in the realtime and embedded tracks of the 2024 Open Source Summit...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl, filezilla, flatpak, kubernetes, libfilezilla, thunderbird, and xen), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, kernel, libreswan, shim, and tigervnc), Red Hat (buildah, gnutls, libreswan, tigervnc, and unbound), SUSE (cockpit-wicked, nrpe, and python-idna), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, freerdp2, linux-azure-6.5, and thunderbird).

BleepingComputer reported on April 20 that some malware was being distributed via GitHub. Uploading files as part of a comment gives them a URL that appears to be associated with a repository, even if the comment is never posted. A GitHub flaw, or possibly a design decision, is being abused by threat actors to distribute malware using URLs associated with Microsoft repositories, making the...

On April 23, Mozilla announced that Firefox's crash reporter has been rewritten in Rust, allowing the project to address a backlog of issues. Even though it is important to properly handle main process crashes, the crash reporter hasn't received significant development in a while (aside from development to ensure that crash reports and telemetry continue to reliably be delivered)! It has long been stuck...

Version 9.0 of the QEMU emulator has been released. "This release contains 2700+ commits from 220 authors." The list of improvements is long; see the announcement and the changelog for details.

For several years, contributors to the Rust project have been working to improve support for asynchronous code. The benefits of these efforts are not confined to asynchronous code, however. Members of the Rust community have been working toward adding explicit existential types to Rust since 2017. Existential types are not a common feature of programming languages (something the RFC acknowledges), so the motivation for...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (abseil-cpp, chromium, filezilla, libfilezilla, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Oracle (firefox, gnutls, golang, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libreswan, mod_http2, owO: thunderbird, and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, gnutls, grub2, kernel, kernel-rt, less, linux-firmware, opencryptoki, pcs, postgresql-jdbc, and thunderbird), Slackware (ruby), SUSE (kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, and opensc), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux-azure, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, and ruby-sanitize).

The long-running effort to complete the work on stacking (or composing) the Linux security modules (LSMs) recently encountered a barrier—in the form of a "suggestion" to discontinue it from Linus Torvalds. His complaint revolved around the indirect function calls that are used to implement LSMs, but he also did not think much of the effort to switch away from those calls. While it does...

The Fedora 40 distribution has been released. See the "what's new" pages for Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE to learn more about the desktop spins, along with this LWN article, for more information.

The Rust programming language, it is hoped, will bring a new level of safety to the Linux kernel. At the moment, though, there are still a number of impediments to getting useful Rust code into the kernel. In the Embedded Open Source Summit track of the Open Source Summit North America, Fabien Parent provided an overview of his work aimed at improving the infrastructure...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (glibc and samba), Fedora (chromium, cjson, mingw-python-idna, and pgadmin4), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, and perl-Clipboard), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-11-openjdk, kpatch-patch, and shim), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration, glibc, jasper, polkit, and qemu), and Ubuntu (google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, pillow, and squid).

The Open Home Foundation has announced its existence as a home and support resource for free home-automation projects. We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one. Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming,...

The Debian project leader election results are in and Andreas Tille has been elected. In a fairly competitive vote, Tille beat Sruthi Chandran to fill the position for the coming year. We looked at the election and the candidates a few weeks back.

One of the mainstays of the the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit is the "fireside chat" (sans fire) between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel to discuss open source and Linux kernel topics of the day. On April 17, at Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Seattle, Washington, they held with tradition and discussed a range of topics including proper whitespace parsing, security, and...

Peter Hutterer announces udev-hid-bpf, a tool to facilitate the loading of BPF programs that make human-input devices work correctly. eBPF was originally written for network packet filters but as of kernel v6.3 and thanks to Benjamin, we have BPF in the HID subsystem. HID actually lends itself really well to BPF because, well, we have a byte array and to fix our devices we...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox and java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (chromium, flatpak, guix, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, thunderbird, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, firefox, glibc, nghttp2, nodejs18, python-aiohttp, python-django3, python-pip, and uxplay), Mageia (putty & filezilla), Red Hat (Firefox, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, nodejs:18, shim, and thunderbird), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration2, nodejs14, perl-CryptX, putty, shim, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15,...

Linus has released 6.9-rc5 for testing. But if you ignore those oddities, it all looks pretty normal and things appear fairly calm. Which is just as well, since the first part of the week I was on a quick trip to Seattle, and the second part of the week I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is...

Gregory Price recently posted a patch set that adds support for weighted memory interleaving — allowing a process's memory to be distributed between non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes in a more controlled way. According to his performance measurements, the patch set could provide a significant improvement for computers with network-attached memory. The patch set also introduces new system calls and paves the way for...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnutls, java-17-openjdk, mod_http2, and squid), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (editorconfig, perl-Clipboard, php, rust, and wordpress), Mageia (less, libreswan, puppet, and x11-server, x11-server-xwayland, and tigervnc), Slackware (aaa_glibc), and SUSE (firefox, graphviz, kernel, nodejs12, pgadmin4, tomcat, and wireshark).

Gentoo Council member Michał Górny posted an RFC to the gentoo-dev mailing list in late February about banning "'AI'-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions" to the Gentoo Linux project. Górny wrote that the spread of the "AI bubble" indicated a need for Gentoo to formally take a stand on AI tools. After a lengthy discussion, the Gentoo Council voted unanimously this week to adopt his proposal and ban...

Kernel developers, like conscientious developers for many projects, will often include checks in the code for conditions that are never expected to occur, but which would indicate a serious problem should that expectation turn out to be incorrect. For years, developers have been encouraged (to put it politely) to avoid using assertions that crash the machine for such conditions unless there is truly no...