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A "uretprobe" is a dynamic, user-space tracepoint injected by the kernel into a running process; this document tersely describes their use. Among other things, uretprobes are used by the perf utility to time function calls. The 6.11 kernel saw a significant change to uretprobes that improved their performance, but that change is also creating trouble for some users. The best way to solve the...

As of this writing, just over 4,300 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 6.14 release. Many of the pull requests this time around include remarks saying that activity has been relatively low this time around, presumably due to the holidays. So those 4,300 changesets are probably closer to the merge-window halfway point than usual. Much of the work merged...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (redis:6), Debian (frr and git-lfs), Fedora (SDL2_sound and webkit2gtk4.0), Gentoo (firefox, GPL Ghostscript, libgsf, libuv, PHP, Qt, QtWebEngine, and Yubico pam-u2f), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (helmfile, nvidia-modprobe, qt6-webengine, ruby3.4-rubygem-actioncable-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionpack-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actiontext-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionview-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activejob-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activestorage-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, and ruby3.4-rubygem-railties-8.0-8.0.1-1.1), and Ubuntu (bluez, openjpeg2, and python-django).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Rsync vulnerability; Going mouseless; Commit IDs; 6.13 Development statistics; Python string formating; Python None-aware operators. Briefs: Kernel 6.13; Dillo 3.2.0; GDB 16.1; OpenVox; Wine 10.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that it has undertaken a project to deliver zero-trust builds commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA). The Zero-Trust Build project is scheduled from Jan-Aug 2025 and centers on the FreeBSD build process, and in particular, release building. The primary goal of this work is to enable the entire release process to run without requiring root access, and that...

The proposal to add a more general facility for string formatting to Python, which we looked at in August 2024, has changed a great deal since, so it merits another look. The changes take multiple forms: a new title for PEP 750 ("Template Strings"), a different mechanism for creating and using templates, a new Template type to hold them, and several additional authors for...

The computer mouse is a wonderful invention, but for the past few months I've been working to use mine as little as possible for productivity and ergonomic reasons. It should not be surprising that there are quite a few open-source applications, utilities, and configuration options that are either designed to or incidentally assist in creating a keyboard-driven desktop. This includes tiling window management with...

The Vox Pupuli project has announced the first release of OpenVox, a "soft-fork" of the Puppet automation framework. The intention to fork was announced in December 2024. OpenVox 8.11 is functionally equivalent to Puppet and should be a drop-in replacement. Be aware, of course, that even though you can type the same commands, use all the same modules and extensions, and configure the same settings,...

Version 10.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. "This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes". Those changes include full support for the Arm64EC architecture, better high-DPI display support, Wayland enabled by default, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (snapcast), Fedora (python-jinja2), Mageia (rsync), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, gh, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-6.11 and vim).

On January 14, Nick Tait announced the discovery of six vulnerabilities in rsync, the popular file-synchronization tool. While software vulnerabilities are not uncommon, the most serious one he announced allows for remote code execution on servers that run rsyncd — and possibly other configurations. The bug itself is fairly simple, but this event provides a nice opportunity to dig into it, show why it is...

The series of singleton stable kernel updates continues with 6.6.73, which reverts three changes that were causing problems for users of the overlayfs filesystem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (libebml, poco, redis, sympa, tiff, and ucf), Fedora (rsync), Mageia (dcmtk, git, proftpd, and raptor2), Red Hat (grafana, iperf3, kernel, microcode_ctl, and redis), SUSE (chromium, dhcp, git, libqt5-qtwebkit, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (python3.10, python3.8 and python3.12).

The 6.13 development cycle ended on January 19 with the release of the 6.13 kernel. This cycle was, on its surface, one of the slowest we have seen in some time; the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page can be consulted for a refresher on all it contains. Here, instead, we will take our usual look at where all of those...

Version 3.2.0 of the Dillo web browser has been released about a month after its 25th anniversary. Notable new features in 3.2.0 include SVG support for math formulas, optional support for WebP images, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, ipa, and NetworkManager), Debian (389-ds-base, busybox, libreoffice, rsync, ruby2.7, tomcat10, and tryton-server), Fedora (chromium and stb), Mageia (openafs and vim), Oracle (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, chromedriver, git, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, hplip, pam_u2f, perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib, perl-IO-Compress, redis, redis7, rsync, and velociraptor), and Ubuntu (libpodofo and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

Version 16.1 of the GDB debugger is out. There are a lot of changes, including watchpoints for tagged data pointers, a new script to print the stack trace of a running process, better Intel Processor Trace support, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.126 stable kernel to fix build failures with the 6.1.125 stable release. Only upgrade if 6.1.125 did not build properly for you. If it did build properly, no need to upgrade. Thanks to Ron Economos for the fix for this issue.

A reminder has gone out that the deadline for proposals for the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit is February 1; anybody wanting to attend will need to make themselves known before then. The reminder also says that there will be no remote participation option (or live streams) this year.

The idea of adding None-aware operators to Python has sprung up once again. These would make traversing structures with None values in them easier, by short-circuiting lookups when a None is encountered. Almost exactly a year ago, LWN covered the previous attempt to bring the operators to Python, but there have been periodic discussions stretching back to 2015 and possibly before. This time Noah...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (rsync and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, mingw-python-jinja2, redict, and valkey), Gentoo (GIMP and pip), Oracle (.NET, fence-agents, ipa, kernel, python-virtualenv, raptor2, and rsync), Red Hat (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), SUSE (apache2-mod_jk, git, git-lfs, kernel, python-Django, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (audacity, bcel, dotnet8, dotnet9, gimp-dds, harfbuzz, libxml2, poppler, rsync, and tqdm).

The kernel is, on its face, a single large development project, but internally it is better viewed as 100 or so semi-independent projects all crammed into one big tent. Within those projects, there is a fair amount of latitude about how changes are managed, and some subsystems are using that freedom in the search for more efficient ways of working. In the end, though,...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, raptor2, and rsync), Debian (chromium), Fedora (rsync and seamonkey), Mageia (openjpeg2), Red Hat (tuned), Slackware (git), SUSE (dcmtk, dnsmasq, govulncheck-vulndb, libQtWebKit4, libraptor-devel, opera, python311-Pillow, python311-translate-toolkit, rsync, and SDL2_sound-devel), and Ubuntu (linux-raspi-5.4, neomutt, and python2.7).