Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.19-rc3, released on June 19. "5.19-rc3 is fairly small, and just looking at the diffstat, a lot of it ends up being in the documentation subdirectory. With another chunk in selftests."

Stable updates: 5.18.5, 5.15.48, 5.10.123, 5.4.199, 4.19.248, 4.14.284, and 4.9.319 were released on June 16 (with mitigations for the recently disclosed processor MMIO stale-data vulnerabilities), followed by 5.18.6, 5.15.49, 5.10.124, and 5.4.200 on June 22.

Comments (none posted)

Meta: Transparent memory offloading

This Meta blog post by Johannes Weiner and Dan Schatzberg describes a set of memory-management changes used there that they call "transparent memory offloading".

Transparent Memory Offloading (TMO) is Meta’s solution for heterogeneous data center environments. It introduces a new Linux kernel mechanism that measures the lost work due to resource shortage across CPU, memory, and I/O in real time. Guided by this information and without any prior application knowledge, TMO automatically adjusts the amount of memory to offload to a heterogeneous device, such as compressed memory or an SSD.

The article doesn't say where to find the relevant code, not all of which is in the mainline kernel (and some of which runs in user space).

Comments (23 posted)

Quotes of the week

I think there's a growing problem in Linux which is exemplified by this Rust debate but which goes way beyond it: We're becoming too fearful of making big decisions to sustain innovation in some areas. This really is a creeping cancer of inertia that has destroyed many projects before us and if we're not careful, we'll go the same way.

The biggest area where we currently squelch innovation is around anything that touches the user space ABI. Allegations of having to get everything right ab initio because we have to support it "forever" and all the subsequent wittering and second guessing are really stifling innovation in pretty much anything that could be exposed to user space. I really think, to counter this, we need a crash course reminder of all of our mistakes and how we climbed out of the hole they dug us into, because without that we're becoming too fearful of making mistakes.

The object is not to avoid mistakes at any cost, it's to be confident that if you make them, you're good enough to find a pathway out of them again.

— James Bottomley

My biggest worry is that the kernel community can become irrelevant for young people as a demographic. Young people like things like Rust and web-based merge requests on github. They are also very smart. So I see it as partly an inclusion problem.

— Linus Walleij

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Tor Project 2020-2021 annual report

The Tor Project has released a new annual report.

One element of this year's work that inspires me, and shows the power of the Tor community, is the response to the internet censorship in Russia and Ukraine. The entire Tor community immediately jumped into action to keep people online. Seeing this passion in action, while keeping tens of thousands of Russians connected to the open internet, has been inspiring.

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Wielaard: Sourceware – GNU Toolchain Infrastructure roadmap

Mark Wielaard writes about improvements at Sourceware, the site that holds the repository for many projects in the GNU toolchain and beyond.

Although email based git workflows are great for real patch discussions, they do not always make tracking the state of patches easy. Just like our other services, such as bugzilla, mailinglists and git repos, we like to provide zero maintenance infrastructure for tracking and automation of patches and testing. So we are trying to consolidate around a shared buildbot for (test) automation and patchwork for tracking the state of contributions.

Comments (7 posted)