Welcome to LWN.net

LWN featured content

The 2013 Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management Summit was held April 18 and 19 in San Francisco, California, immediately after the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. The first set of notes from that gathering is now available; at this point, we have most of the plenary sessions and the entire memory management track written up. The rest of our notes from the Summit will be added in the near future.

Full Story (comments: none)

Since the demise of core memory, there has been a fundamental dichotomy in data storage technology: memory is either fast and ephemeral, or slow and persistent. The situation is changing, though, and that leads to some interesting challenges for the Linux kernel. How will we adapt to the coming world where nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices are commonplace? Ric Wheeler led a session at the 2013 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to discuss this issue.

Full Story (comments: 24)

Rust, the new programming language being developed by the Mozilla project, has a number of interesting features. One that stands out is the focus on safety. There are clear attempts to increase the range of errors that the compiler can detect and prevent, and thereby reduce the number of errors that end up in production code.

Click below (subscribers only) for an overview of the Rust language by LWN contributor Neil Brown.

Full Story (comments: 72)

Given Eben Moglen's long association with the Free Software Foundation, his work on drafting the GPLv3, and his role as President and Executive Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, his talk at the 2013 Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop promised to be thought-provoking. He chose to focus on two topics that he saw as particularly relevant for the free software ecosystem within the next five years: patents and the decline of copyleft licenses.

Full Story (comments: 55)

The sixth Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop, which took place on 4-5 April 2013 in Amsterdam, opened with a keynote from Stefano "Zack" Zacchiroli, the Debian Project Leader (DPL) for the last three years. Zack's aim was to provide the assembled lawyers with an overview of the kinds of legal issues that are faced by Debian and other free software projects and provide suggestions about how lawyers can help free software projects.

Full Story (comments: 13)

On April 4th, 2013, the PostgreSQL project announced a security vulnerability (CVE-2013-1899) and resulting patch for one of the worst security holes in project history. According to the project web page, "this is the first security issue of this magnitude since 2006." Subscribers can click below for PostgreSQL core developer Josh Berkus's look at the vulnerability, its impact, and some questions raised by the project's handling of the vulnerability and release.

Full Story (comments: 22)

Linus Torvalds has railed frequently and loudly against kernel developers breaking user space. But that rule is not ironclad; there are exceptions. The story of how a kernel change caused a GlusterFS breakage shows that there are sometimes unfortunate twists to those exceptions.

Full Story (comments: 30)

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 keynote had elements of a revival meeting sermon, but it was also meant to spread the "religion" well beyond those inside the meeting tent. Hettinger specifically tasked attendees to use his "What makes Python awesome?" talk as a sales tool with management and other Python skeptics. Subscribers can get the full coverage of the talk from this week's edition at the link below.

Full Story (comments: 81)

The world was a simpler place when the TCP/IP network protocol suite was first designed. The net was slow and primitive and it was often a triumph to get a connection to a far-away host at all. The machines at either end of a TCP session normally did not have to concern themselves with how that connection was made; such details were left to routers. As a result, TCP is built around the notion of a (single) connection between two hosts. The Multipath TCP (MPTCP) project looks to change that view of networking by adding support for multiple transport paths to the endpoints; it offers a lot of benefits, but designing a deployable protocol for today's Internet is surprisingly hard.

Full Story (comments: 72)

An exploit posted on March 13 revealed a rather easily exploitable security vulnerability (CVE 2013-1858) in the implementation of user namespaces. That exploit enables an unprivileged user to escalate to full root privileges. Although a fix was quickly provided, it is nevertheless instructive to look in some detail at the vulnerability, both to better understand the nature of this kind of exploit and also to briefly consider how this vulnerability came to appear inside the user namespaces implementation.

Full Story (comments: 30)

Current news

The Linux Foundation has announced that it will be supporting three kernel internships for the upcoming Outreach Program for Women cycle. "The official deadline for applying to OPW is May 1st. However, the kernel project joined late, so that deadline is flexible. Please fill out your initial application, and then update by May 17th with your initial patch." Acceptance in the program brings a $5000 stipend plus $500 in travel funding.

Comments (none posted)

Fedora has updated haproxy (F18; F17: code execution), php-twig-Twig (F18; F17: file disclosure), and kernel (F18: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated util-linux (information disclosure) and fuse (denial of service).

Comments (none posted)

Andy Lutomirski has posted a description of a set of security vulnerabilities fixed in recent stable updates. One is a fairly severe user namespace vulnerability that appeared in the 3.8 kernel; another dates back to 2.6.36. Exploit code is included.

Full Story (comments: 4)

Linus has announced the release of the 3.9 kernel. "Anyway. Whatever the reason, this week has been very quiet, which makes me much more comfortable doing the final 3.9 release, so I guess the last -rc8 ended up working. Because not only aren't there very many commits here, even the ones that made it really are tiny and not pretty obscure and not very interesting." Headline features in 3.9 include KVM virtualization on the ARM architecture, the near-completion of user namespace support, PowerClamp support, the dm-cache device mapper target, RAID5/6 support in the Btrfs filesystem, and more. The KernelNewbies 3.9 page will have details eventually, but is very much a work in progress as of this writing.

Comments (8 posted)

Version 7.6 of the GDB debugger is out. New features include 64-bit ARM support, an update of the C++ ABI to the GNU v3 version (" This has been the default for GCC since November 2000"), some Python scripting improvements, a number of new options, and more.

Full Story (comments: none)

A fresh batch of new stable kernels is now available. Greg Kroah-Hartman has released 3.8.9, 3.4.42, and 3.0.75, while Ben Hutchings has released 3.2.44. Each release includes the usual battery of important fixes and updates.

UPDATE: Greg Kroah-Hartman has subsequently released 3.8.10, which fixes a build error in 3.8.9 when compiling with user namespaces enabled.

Comments (1 posted)

CentOS has updated mysql (C6; multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated qemu (F18; host file disclosure).

Mandriva has updated curl (session hijacking) and subversion (ES5, BS1; multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated icedtea-web (multiple vulnerabilities).

Oracle has updated mysql (multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated mysql (multiple vulnerabilities).

Scientific Linux has updated mysql (SL6; multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated mysql (multiple vulnerabilities).

Comments (none posted)

Hot on the heels of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the OpenShot video editor project has announced its schedule (still targeting December 2013, more detailed plan coming soon) and a switch to Qt 5. "One of the biggest decisions we have made so far is to switch the user interface toolkit that OpenShot uses from GTK+ to Qt. We have carefully considered our options, and our team believes it is the only reasonable path forward. A few big contributing factors to choosing Qt was the performance of embedding HTML and JavaScript (for our timeline and curve editing widgets), native-looking widget rendering (on Mac, Windows, and Linux), improved tools for designing interfaces, and the easy ability to use OpenGL to display our video preview widget."

Comments (20 posted)

In a lengthy blog post, Emmanuel Deloget interviews nine developers of GPU drivers and tools for ARM system-on-chip (SoC) devices. Questions range from the status of various projects and how the projects got started to intra-project collaboration and the future of the ARM platform. The developers and projects are: Connor Abbot - Open GPU Tools, Eric Faye-Lund - grate (for Tegra GPUs), Herman H. Hermitage - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs), Luc Verhaegen - lima (for MALI GPUs), Matthias Gottschlag - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs), Rob Clark - freedreno (for Adreno GPUs), Thierry Reding - grate (for Tegra GPUs), Scott Mansell - Videocore (for Broadcom GPUs), and Wladimir J. van der Laan - etna_viv (for Vivante GPUs).

Comments (1 posted)

On his blog, Mark Shuttleworth dashes the hopes of those looking for a Mary Poppins-inspired release name for Ubuntu 13.10. "Slipping the phrase 'ring ring' into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high ... For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick's Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department." No spoilers here, other than: the name is two words, an adjective and an animal, both of which start with "S".

Comments (28 posted)

--> More news items