Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.11-rc7, released on September 8. Linus said:

And I wish I could say that things have calmed down, but I can't really say that. In fact, rc7 is slightly bigger than both rc6 and rc5 were, both in number of commits, and in actual diff size. That's not really how it should work out.

That said, there's nothing *scary* in here.

He was apparently "still waffling" about whether to release 6.11 next weekend, which would cause the 6.12 merge window to land on top of the Maintainers Summit, Linux Plumbers Conference, and Open Source Summit. He has since said, though, that he plans go go ahead with a release on September 15.

Stable updates: 6.10.9, 6.6.50, and 6.1.109 were released on September 8.

The 6.10.10, 6.6.51, 6.1.110, 5.15.167, 5.10.226, 5.4.284, and 4.19.322 stable updates are in the review process; they are due on September 12.

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The realtime preemption end game — for real this time

Work on realtime preemption for the Linux kernel got its start almost exactly 20 years ago (though it had its roots in earlier work, of course). It is fair to say that finishing that job has taken a bit longer than anybody involved would have expected. Now, though, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has posted a brief patch series making it possible to enable realtime preemption in the mainline kernel on three architectures.

With the printk bits merged, PREEMPT_RT could be enabled on X86, ARM64 and Risc-V. These three architectures merged required changes over the years leaving me in a position where I have no essential changes in the queue that would affect them.

Congratulations are due to the many developers who have worked on this project for the last two decades.

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Adams: Linux's bedtime routine

Jacob Adams wanders into the kernel's hibernation code:

How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.

Comments (1 posted)

Redox OS 0.9.0

Version 0.9.0 of Redox OS, an open-source, Unix-like operating system written in Rust, has been released. Notable changes in this release include performance and stability improvements, better management of physical and virtual memory, bootloader improvements, and more. It also brings support for RustPython, Perl 5, Simple HTTP Server, the addition of several applications including GNU Nano, Helix, and the COSMIC Files, Editor, and Terminal applications. See the changelog section of the announcement for a full list of changes in the release.

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Man pages maintenance suspended

Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the Linux man pages for the last four years, has announced that he will have to stop that work.

I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Comments (51 posted)

NGINX has moved to GitHub

The NGINX team has announced that official NGINX open-source development has moved away from Mercurial to GitHub, and the project will now be taking contributions in the form of pull requests:

Additionally, starting today, we will begin accepting bugs reports, feature requests and enhancements directly through GitHub, under the "Issues" tab. Moreover, we've moved our community forums to the GitHub "Discussions" area, where you will now be able to engage in conversation, ask, and answer questions.

[...] We understand that changes like these may require adjustment, so to give you more time, we will continue accepting patches and provide community support via mailing lists until December 31st, 2024.

Comments (26 posted)

Pandoc 3.4 released

Version 3.4 of the Pandoc document-conversion tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include a new ANSI output format (for console output), a switch to WeasyPrint as the PDF engine for HTML to PDF conversion, the ability to position captions above or below tables and figures, and much more.

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Radicle 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of the Radicle development platform has been released.

Radicle 1.0 represents the culmination of years of experimentation and hard work from our team and community, where we set out to ensure that free and open source software ecosystems can flourish without having to rely on the whims of Big Tech. We designed Radicle with a first-principles approach, as a natural extension to Git, expanding it to work in a collaborative, local-first, peer-to-peer setting.

LWN looked at Radicle in March.

Comments (8 posted)

Rust 1.81.0 released

Version 1.81.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the stabilization of the Error trait in core, some new sort algorithms, some linting improvements, and more.

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Samba 4.21.0 released

Version 4.21.0 of the Samba Windows interoperability suite has been released. Changes include some authentication hardening, a number of LDAP improvements, per-user and per-group veto and hide files, group-managed service accounts, and quite a bit more.

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GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released

Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has been released. Notable changes in this release include new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

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Development quote of the week

It's not just that dependencies are a fertile field for CVEs (*cough* xz *cough*) and tech debt, they're also an enemy of predictable performance.

Also, they're unavoidable. When you take a dependency, often you're standing on the shoulders of giants. (Unfortunately, sometimes you're standing in the shoes of clowns.) Software is accretive and it's a good thing that that's OK because it's also inevitable.

In particular, don't write your own crypto, etc. Because in software, as in life, you're gonna have to take some dependencies. But… how about we take less? And how about, sometimes we strive for zero?

[...] So, get your dependencies to zero and display the badge proudly. Or if you can't, think about each of your dependencies. Does each of them add enough value, compared to you writing the code yourself? In particular, taking a dependency on a huge general-purpose library for one small simple function is an antipattern.

— Tim Bray

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