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[$] Advances in font technology and GTK text rendering
At this year's GUADEC in Denver, Colorado, Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasen presented a two-part talk on a topic that's deeply important to desktop environments: fonts. Esfahbod covered advances in font technology that are making their way to becoming standards, and Clasen briefly discussed improvements in GTK text rendering. The talk presented some fascinating insights into the problems around accurately rendering writing systems on the desktop, and where font technologies may be going in the near future.
[$] A SpamAssassin surprise
Here is a piece of advice for anybody wanting an easy and frustration-free life: do not run your own email system. While there are numerous advantages to keeping some control over your communications, there is also a long list of things that can go wrong. A recent failure of spam filtering on the LWN email system illustrated one of those ways, as well as shining a light on how even a seemingly independent email system is tied to other services across the net.
[$] Plasma Mobile for highly configurable Linux phones
Plasma Mobile is an open-source user interface for mobile devices, developed by the KDE community. It's built on the same foundations as Plasma Desktop, including KDE Frameworks and the KWin window manager. Much like its desktop counterpart, Plasma Mobile caters to advanced users by offering extensive customizability. It is offered as an option on phones with various mobile Linux distributions.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 29, 2024
Posted Aug 29, 2024 1:41 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 29, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: MemHive; Reproducible builds; Modversions; File descriptor safety; Post-quantum encryption; Debian package maintenance.
- Briefs: Pidgin malware; SBAT; FreeBSD infrastructure; Calligra Office 4.0; Forgejo license; LibreOffice 24.8; WineHQ & Mono; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] MemHive: sharing immutable data between Python subinterpreters
Immutable data makes concurrent access easier, since it eliminates the data-race conditions that can plague multithreaded programs. At PyCon 2024, Yury Selivanov introduced an early-stage project called MemHive, which uses Python subinterpreters and immutable data to overcome the problems of thread serialization that are caused by the language's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Recent developments in the Python world have opened up different strategies for avoiding the longstanding problems with the GIL.
[$] Debian discusses principles for package maintenance
Achieving consensus among Debian Developers on technical topics and
procedures can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Nevertheless, that
is exactly what Otto Kekäläinen has tried to do with a proposal that
would set up "principles all Debian packages should follow to be
open for collaboration in package maintenance
". In the near term,
it seems unlikely that the proposal will be accepted, but the
discussion may be effective at improving collaboration nonetheless.
[$] NIST finalizes post-quantum encryption standards
On August 13, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the final form of its new post-quantum cryptographic standards. One key-exchange mechanism and two digital-signature schemes are now officially sanctioned by the institute. Adopting the new standards should be fairly painless for most developers, but the overhead added by the schemes could pose challenges for some applications.
[$] A new version of modversions
The genksyms tool has long been buried deeply within the kernel's build system; it is one of the two C-code parsers shipped with the kernel (the other being the horrifying kernel-doc script). It is a key part of how the kernel's module-loading infrastructure works. While genksyms has quietly done its job for decades, that period may soon be coming to an end. It would seem that genksyms is not up to the task of handling Rust code, so Sami Tolvanen is proposing a new tool to handle this task going forward.
[$] The history, status, and plans for reproducible builds
On the second day of DebConf24 in Busan, South Korea, Holger Levsen provided a history lesson on the "first 11 years" of the Reproducible Builds project. He has been involved in the project for most of that time and has been a Debian user since the mid-1990s, contributor since 2001, and a Debian member since 2007; "I love Debian". Meanwhile, his aim is to make all free software be reproducible, so that anyone can check that a binary program comes from the source code it purports to.
[$] A review of file descriptor memory safety in the kernel
On July 30, Al Viro sent a patch set to the linux-fsdevel mailing list with a comprehensive cover letter explaining his recent work on ensuring that the kernel's internal representation of file descriptors are used correctly in the kernel. File descriptors are ubiquitous; many system calls need to handle them. Viro's review identified a few existing bugs, and may prevent more in the future. He also had suggestions for ways to keep uses consistent throughout the kernel.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (postgresql:16), Debian (dovecot, pymatgen, ruby2.7, systemd, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (microcode_ctl, python3.11, vim, and xen), Oracle (kernel, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Slackware (libpcap), SUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, python-Django, and trivy), and Ubuntu (dovecot).
Kernel prepatch 6.11-rc6
Linus has released 6.11-rc6 for testing.
"Things look pretty normal, although we have perhaps unusually many
filesystem fixes here, spread out over smb, xfs, bcachefs and netfs.
"
Understanding the Postgres Hackers Mailing List Language
Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing list may leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. Greg Sabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainer for those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers) mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well:
The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not be familiar to younger people who did not grow up on email (although text messages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are a non-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped in the world of tech, I offer some solutions below.
To do this, I downloaded the last year's worth of hackers email, wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, code blocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on the results.
ElasticSearch and Kibana become free software (again)
Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualization platform were relicensed under the non-free Server Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning those projects) has announced that those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license.
We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.
Airlie: On Rust, Linux, developers, maintainers
Dave Airlie makes an analogy between the stages of road building and those of adding Rust to the Linux kernel.
For the wayfinders the process of interacting with maintainers is frustrating and slow, and they don't enjoy it as much as wayfinding, and because they still only care about the hotel at the end, when a maintainer gets into the details of their particular intersection they don't want to do anything but go stay in their hotel.The road will get built, it will get traffic on it. There will be tunnels where we should have intersections, there will be bridges that need to be built from both sides, but I do think it will get built.
AnandTech shuts down
The venerable AnandTech site has announced its closing after 27 years of technology-industry coverage.
Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.
The site will surely be missed.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libvpx, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (chromium and ghostscript), Fedora (python3.13), and SUSE (chromium and podman).
Graham: Asking for donations in Plasma
The KDE project plans to directly ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version 6.2. According to this blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a system notification once per year (in December) asking for a donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.:
Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like.
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.