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[$] Handling the NFS change attribute

[Kernel] Posted Jun 4, 2024 15:39 UTC (Tue) by jake

The saga of the i_version field for inodes, which tracks the occurrence of changes to the data or metadata of a file, continued in a discussion at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. In a session led by Jeff Layton, who has been doing a lot the work on changing the semantics and functioning of i_version over the years, he updated attendees on the status of the effort since a session at last year's summit. His summary was that things are "pretty much where we started last year", but the discussion this time pointed to some possible ways forward.

Full Story (comments: 1)

[$] An instruction-level BPF memory model

[Kernel] Posted Jun 4, 2024 13:57 UTC (Tue) by daroc

There are few topics as arcane as memory models, so it was a pleasant surprise when the double-length session on the BPF memory model at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit turned out to be understandable. Paul McKenney led the session, although he was clear that the work he was presenting was also due to Puranjay Mohan, who unfortunately could not attend the summit. BPF does not actually have a formalized memory model yet; instead it has relied on a history of talks like this one and a general informal understanding. Unfortunately, ignoring memory models does not make them go away, and this has already caused at least one BPF-related bug on weakly-ordered architectures. Figuring out what a formal memory model for BPF should define was the focus of McKenney's talk.

Full Story (comments: none)

[$] Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

[Distributions] Posted Jun 3, 2024 16:16 UTC (Mon) by jzb

Debian had a major discussion about mounting /tmp as a RAM-based tmpfs in 2012 but inertia won out in the end. Debian systems have continued to store temporary files on disk by default. Until now. A mere 12 years later, the project will be switching to a RAM-based /tmp in the Debian 13 ("Trixie") release. Additionally, starting with Trixie, the default will be to periodically clean up temporary files automatically in /tmp and /var/tmp. Naturally, it involved a lengthy discussion first.

Full Story (comments: 115)

[$] One more pidfdfs surprise

[Kernel] Posted May 31, 2024 18:08 UTC (Fri) by corbet

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.

Full Story (comments: 14)

[$] Standardizing the BPF ISA

[Kernel] Posted May 30, 2024 20:19 UTC (Thu) by daroc

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.

Full Story (comments: 7)

[$] New APIs for filesystems

[Kernel] Posted May 30, 2024 13:16 UTC (Thu) by jake

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.

Full Story (comments: 33)

[$] 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.
Read more

[$] Fedora approves shipping pre-built macOS binaries

[Distributions] Posted May 29, 2024 18:15 UTC (Wed) by jzb

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.

Full Story (comments: 12)

A plea for more thoughtful comments

[Front] Posted May 29, 2024 16:28 UTC (Wed) by corbet

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.

Full Story (comments: 118)

[$] Supporting BPF in GCC

[Kernel] Posted May 28, 2024 19:45 UTC (Tue) by daroc

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.

Full Story (comments: 1)

Mike Karels has passed away

[Briefs] Posted Jun 4, 2024 20:00 UTC (Tue) by corbet

We have just received the sad news that longtime core BSD developer Mike Karels has died; he will certainly be missed.

Comments (none posted)

Incus 6.2 released

[Development] Posted Jun 4, 2024 19:31 UTC (Tue) by corbet

Version 6.2 of the Incus container-management system is out. "This release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and improvements." The features include a new incus top command, a new API for system load information, and more.

Full Story (comments: none)

New site feature: comment subthread hiding

[Announcements] Posted Jun 4, 2024 18:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet

In the recent discussion on commenting at LWN, several readers asked for the ability to hide subthreads of a long comment stream. That feature has just been added; it is also integrated with the three comment-display modes and with comment filtering, removing the need for JavaScript for filtering. Hiding is not persistent; no extra data is stored at either end.

Give it a try; if you have comments on the new mechanism, this is the place to put them.

Comments (19 posted)

Security updates for Tuesday

[Security] Posted Jun 4, 2024 13:35 UTC (Tue) by corbet

Security updates have been issued by Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, git, libreoffice, microcode, python-requests, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, glibc, go-toolset:ol8, idm:DL1 and idm:client, less, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, ruby:3.0, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (nodejs, nodejs:18, python-idna, and ruby:3.1), and SUSE (389-ds, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, gnutls, gstreamer-plugins-base, libhtp, mariadb104, poppler, python-python-jose, squid, and unbound).

Full Story (comments: none)

LyX 2.4.0 Released

[Development] Posted Jun 3, 2024 20:51 UTC (Mon) by jzb

Version 2.4.0 of the LyX document processor has been released. LyX is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See the full list of new features on the LyX wiki, and release notes for information on known issues and caveats for those upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.

Full Story (comments: 1)

Security updates for Monday

[Security] Posted Jun 3, 2024 14:49 UTC (Mon) by jake

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9 and ruby:3.0), Debian (chromium, gst-plugins-base1.0, and kernel), Fedora (chromium, glances, glycin-loaders, gnome-tour, helix, helvum, kitty, libarchive, libipuz, librsvg2, loupe, maturin, ntpd-rs, plasma-workspace, and a huge list of Rust-based packages due to a "mini-mass-rebuild" that updated the toolchain to Rust 1.78 and picked up fixes for various pieces), Mageia (gifsicle, netatalk, openssl, python-jinja2, and unbound), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (bind, glibc, gstreamer-plugins-base, squid, and tiff), and Ubuntu (glibc).

Full Story (comments: none)

Kernel prepatch 6.10-rc2

[Kernel] Posted Jun 2, 2024 23:24 UTC (Sun) by corbet

The second 6.10 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Nothing feels particularly odd, but rc2 is usually fairly small and people are only starting to find regressions. So please go test some more."

Comments (none posted)

Fedora Linux 40 election results

[Distributions] Posted Jun 2, 2024 18:44 UTC (Sun) by jzb

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 40 election cycle. Four seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Stephen Gallagher, Neal Gompa, Michel Lind, and Fabio Valentini. The Fedora Council had two seats open, and the winners are Aleksandra Fedorova and Adam Samalik. One seat was open on the Fedora Mindshare Committee, and the winner is Sumantro Mukherjee. Four seats were open for the first election to select members of the EPEL Steering Committee, which went to Troy Dawson, Kevin Fenzi, Carl George, and Jonathan Wright.

Comments (1 posted)

Opt Green: KDE Eco's New Sustainable Software Project

[Development] Posted May 31, 2024 19:24 UTC (Fri) by jzb

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.

Comments (68 posted)

CFP: the 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit

[Kernel] Posted May 31, 2024 15:37 UTC (Fri) by corbet

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.

Comments (none posted)

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