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[$] The OpenWrt One system
OpenWrt is, despite its relatively low profile, one of our community's most important distributions; it runs untold numbers of network routers and has served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done. At the beginning of 2024, a few members of the project announced a plan to design and produce a router device specifically designed to run OpenWrt. This device, dubbed the "OpenWrt One", is now becoming available; the kind folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy were kind enough to ship one to LWN, where the desire to play with a new toy is never lacking.
[$] OSI board AMA at All Things Open
Members of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board sat down for a 45-minute "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC on October 29. Though the floor was open to any topic the audience might want to ask of the OSI board, many of the questions were focused on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID), which was announced the day before. The new definition has been somewhat controversial, and the board spent a lot of time addressing concerns about it during the session, as well as questions on open washing, and a need for more education about open source in general.
[$] The Overture open-mapping project
OpenStreetMap tends to dominate the space for open mapping data, but it is not the only project working in this area. At the 2024 Open Source Summit Japan, Marc Prioleau presented the Overture Maps Foundation, which is building and distributing a set of worldwide maps under open licenses. Overture may have a similar goal to OpenStreetMap, but its approach and intended uses are significantly different.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024
Posted Oct 31, 2024 0:42 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Open AI definition; M1/M2 GPU drivers; Rust compiler; realloc(0); BOLT; AutoFDO and Propeller; Test-suite validation.
- Briefs: CUPS vulnerability; Fedora 41; Firefox 132.0; Flock; OSAID 1.0; Thunderbird for Android; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] An update on Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers
The kernel graphics driver for the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs is, rather famously, written in Rust, but it has achieved conformance with various graphics standards, which is also noteworthy. At the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) 2024, Alyssa Rosenzweig gave an update on the status of the driver, along with some news about the kinds of games it can support (YouTube video, slides). There has been lots of progress since her talk at XDC last year (YouTube video), with, of course, still more to come.
[$] A new approach to validating test suites
The first program that Martin Pool ever wrote, he said, had bugs; the ones he's writing now most likely have bugs too. The talk Pool gave at RustConf this year was about a way to try to write programs with fewer bugs. He has developed a tool called cargo-mutants that highlights gaps in test coverage by identifying functions that can be broken without causing any tests to fail. This can be a valuable complement to other testing techniques, he explained.
[$] The performance of the Rust compiler
Sparrow Li presented virtually at RustConf 2024 about the current state of and future plans for the Rust compiler's performance. The compiler is relatively slow to compile large programs, although it has been getting better over time. The next big performance improvement to come will be parallelizing the compiler's parsing, type-checking, and related operations, but even after that, the project has several avenues left to explore.
[$] AutoFDO and Propeller
Rong Xu and Han Shen described the kernel-optimization techniques that Google uses in the toolchains track at the 2024 Linux Plumbers Conference. They talked about automatic feedback-directed optimization (AutoFDO), which can be used with the Propeller optimizer to produce kernels with better performance using profile information gathered from real workloads. There is a fair amount of overlap between these tools and the BOLT post-link optimizer, which was the subject of a talk that directly preceded this session.
[$] OSI readies controversial Open AI definition
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been working on defining Open Source AI—that is what constitutes an AI system that can be used, studied, modified, and shared for any purpose—for almost two years. Its board will be voting on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on Sunday, October 27, with the 1.0 version slated to be published on October 28. It is never possible to please everyone in such an endeavor, and it would be folly to make that a goal. However, a number of prominent figures in the open-source community have voiced concerns that OSI is setting the bar too low with the OSAID—which will undo decades of community work to cajole vendors into adhering to or respecting the original Open Source Definition (OSD).
[$] Kernel optimization with BOLT
A pair of talks in the toolchains track at the 2024 Linux Plumbers Conference covered different tools that can be used to optimize the kernel. First up was Maksim Panchenko to describe the binary optimization and layout tool (BOLT) that Meta uses on its production kernels. It optimizes the kernel binary by rearranging it to improve its code locality for better performance. A subsequent article will cover the second talk, which looked at automatic feedback-directed optimization (AutoFDO) and other related techniques that are used to optimize Google's kernels.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, grafana, kernel, and mod_http2), Debian (chromium, openssl, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, krb5, mysql8.0, polkit, python-single-version, and webkitgtk), Mageia (bind, buildah, podman, skopeo, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons. kmod-virtualbox, kernel-firmware & kernel-firmware-nonfree radeon-firmware, and kernel-linus), SUSE (apache2, chromedriver, cups-filters, docker-stable, firefox, gama, govulncheck-vulndb, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-23-openjdk, libnss_slurm2, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, python-waitress, python3, python310-waitress, ruby2.5, rubygem-actionmailer-5_1, rubygem-actionpack-5_1, rubygem-bundler, webkit2gtk3, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-6.8).
Kernel prepatch 6.12-rc6
The 6.12-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus says: "Another week, another rc. Nothing odd or special
seems to be going on - this may be a bit on the bigger side for an rc6, but
not hugely so, and nothing stands out.
"
Four Friday stable kernel updates
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released another four stable Linux kernel updates: 6.11.6, 6.6.59, 6.1.115, and 5.15.170.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Oracle (buildah, e2fsprogs, grafana, kernel, and mod_http2), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, firefox, grafana, grafana:7.3.6, podman, and thunderbird), SUSE (alloy, cargo-audit-advisory-db-20241030, chromedriver, corepack22, netty, openvpn, python310-Werkzeug, thunderbird, uwsgi, and xsd), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure-6.8, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-hwe-6.8 and linux, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4).
October project goals update (Rust Blog)
The Rust blog has an update on its progress on some of its project goals. One of the project's flagship goals is to resolve the biggest blockers to Linux building on stable Rust:
Finally, we have been finding an increasing number of stabilization requests at the compiler level, and so @wesleywiser and @davidtwco from the compiler team have started attending meetings to create a faster response. One of the results of that collaboration is RFC #3716, authored by Alice Ryhl, which proposes a method to manage compiler flags that modify the target ABI. Our previous approach has been to create distinct targets for each combination of flags, but the number of flags needed by the kernel make that impractical. Authoring the RFC revealed more such flags than previously recognized, including those that modify LLVM behavior.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and openssl), Fedora (firefox, libarchive, micropython, NetworkManager-libreswan, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (nano), Slackware (mozilla-firefox, mozilla-thunderbird, tigervnc, and xorg), SUSE (389-ds, Botan, go1.21-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, java-11-openjdk, lxc, python-Werkzeug, and uwsgi), and Ubuntu (firefox, libarchive, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, python-pip, and xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, xorg-server-hwe-18.04).
Ravier: What's new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 41
Timothée Ravier has written a blog post about changes in the Fedora Atomic Desktops for Fedora Linux 41. Some of the notable new features for Atomic Desktops include bootloader updates enabled by default for UEFI systems, first steps towards using bootable containers, and more.
A new release of Raspberry Pi OS
The Raspberry Pi project has announced a new version of Raspberry Pi OS. It includes a number of significant changes, the most notable of which is that the Raspberry Pi Desktop now uses Wayland by default for all Pi models using the labwc compositor:
For most of this year, we have been working on porting labwc to the Raspberry Pi Desktop. This has very much been a collaborative process with the developers of both labwc and wlroots: both have helped us immensely with their support as we contribute features and optimisations needed for our desktop.
This release also features Linux 6.6.51, improved touchscreen support, a new screen configuration tool called raindrop, and more. See the release notes for a full list of changes.
Thunderbird for Android now available
The first stable release of the Thunderbird mail client for Android is now available:
Just over two years ago, we announced our plans to bring Thunderbird to Android by taking K-9 Mail under our wing. The journey took a little longer than we had originally anticipated and there was a lot to learn along the way, but the wait is finally over! For all of you who have ever asked "when is Thunderbird for Android coming out?", the answer is – today!
It is immediately available on the Google
Play Store, via GitHub
Releases, or from the Thunderbird web site, and
it will be "coming soon
" to the F-Droid repository for FOSS Android
applications. See the release
notes for detailed information about Thunderbird 8.0 for
Android.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah), Debian (python-git, texlive-bin, and xorg-server), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (Botan, go1.22-openssl, go1.23-openssl, grafana, libgsf, pcp, pgadmin4, python310-pytest-html, python313, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (nano, python-urllib3, and xorg-server, xwayland).