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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 26, 2020 is available.

The effects of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are horrific and far-reaching; we really do not yet know just how bad it will get. One far less serious area that has been affected is conferences for and about free and open-source software (FOSS). On the grand scale, these problems are pretty low on the priority list. There are a fair number of non-profit organizations behind the gatherings, however, that have spent considerable sums setting up now-canceled events or depend on the conferences for a big chunk of their budget—or both. A new organization, FOSS Responders, has formed to try to help out.

O'Reilly has announced that it is canceling all of its upcoming in-person conferences and shutting down its conference group permanently. "Without understanding when this global health emergency may come to an end, we can’t plan for or execute on a business that will be forever changed as a result of this crisis. With large technology vendors moving their events completely on-line, we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events." There is still no notice to this effect on the OSCON page, but one assumes that is coming.

Stable kernels 5.5.13, 5.5.12, 5.4.28, and 4.19.113 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

The Django web framework has come a long way since it was first released as open source in 2005. It started with a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) governance model, like the language it is implemented in, Python, but switched to a different model in 2014. When Python switched away from the BDFL model in 2018, it followed Django's lead to some extent. But now Django is changing yet again, moving from governance based around a "core team" to one that is more inclusive and better reflects the way the project is operating now.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (e2fsprogs, ruby2.1, and weechat), Fedora (java-1.8.0-openjdk and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, glibc, mcpp, nghttp2, and skopeo), Oracle (libvncserver and thunderbird), and SUSE (keepalived).

The Cloudflare blog has an article on the company's work to improve the performance of Linux disk encryption. "As we can see the default Linux disk encryption implementation has a significant impact on our cache latency in worst case scenarios, whereas the patched implementation is indistinguishable from not using encryption at all. In other words the improved encryption implementation does not have any impact at all on our cache response speed, so we basically get it for free!" Patches are available, but they are apparently not in any form to go upstream.

Version 10.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. New features include support for C++ concepts, Window control flow guard support, and much more; click below for pointers to a set of language-specific release notes.

The Python Software Foundation blog looks at some changes to pip, the Python Package installer, in the process of developing a new resolver. The new resolver will reduce inconsistency and be stricter, refusing to install two packages with incompatible requirements. Also, this is a major change to a key part of pip - it's quite possible there will initially be bugs. We would like to make sure that those get caught before people start using the new version in production. [...]

We recognize that everyone's work is being disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that many data scientists and medical researchers use Python and pip in their work. We want to make the upgrade process as smooth and bug-free as possible for our users; if you can help us, you'll be helping each other.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (tomcat8), Fedora (chromium and okular), openSUSE (texlive-filesystem), Oracle (tomcat6), Scientific Linux (libvncserver, thunderbird, and tomcat6), Slackware (gd), SUSE (cloud-init, postgresql10, python36, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (ibus and vim).

Spring is coming to the northern hemisphere, and one's thoughts naturally turn to ... being locked up inside the house and not allowed to go anywhere. That has, in turn, led to an increasing interest in alternative mechanisms for keeping up with family and coworkers, especially video conferencing. There are a number of proprietary video-conferencing services out there; your editor decided to look into what solutions exist in the free-software realm. It turns out that there are a few; the first to be looked at is Jitsi.

Google Open Source has announced the 2020 edition of Season of Docs, a program to connect open source projects with technical writers to improve documentation. Open source organizations may apply from April 14-May 4. Once mentoring organizations and technical writers are connected, there will be a month long community bonding period, beginning August 11. Writers will then work with mentors to complete documentation projects by the December 6 deadline.

For those stuck at home looking for something to do, version 31 of the MythTV DVR and home media center hub, has been released. Features include, significant changes to video decoding and playback, improved channel scanning, and Python 3 support. See the release notes for more information.

Parrot OS is a security and privacy focused distribution, with tools for cyber security operations. Parrot 4.8 follows Debian testing and has many updates from the Debian repositories. Parrot Docker containers allow you to use Parrot tools on docker-supported operating systems. Since the previous release last September the Parrot team has put some effort into re-organizing its internal structure, from the operations and workflow of developers, up to the infrastructure. "After such a huge work, we have finally moved to the new workflow, and Parrot 4.8 is the proof of how hard we wanted such changes to take place in the project and how smooth development and cooperation became after achieving this goal."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, chromium, graphicsmagick, jackson-databind, phpmyadmin, python-bleach, and tor), Gentoo (exim and nodejs), openSUSE (chromium and thunderbird), Oracle (tomcat), Red Hat (devtoolset-8-gcc, libvncserver, runc, samba, thunderbird, and tomcat6), and SUSE (ruby2.5).

Version 2.26.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Significant changes include a reimplementation of the "rebase" mechanism, improvements to sparse checkouts, performance improvements, and more. See this GitHub blog entry for more information.

The 5.6-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing; this may be the last one before the final release. "The world around us may be going through strange times, but at least so far kernel development looks normal."

A new batch of stable kernels has just been released: 5.5.11, 5.4.27, 4.19.112, 4.14.174, 4.9.217, and 4.4.217. As usual, these contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users should upgrade.

The io_uring subsystem has, in the last year, redefined how asynchronous I/O is done on Linux systems. As this subsystem grows in both capability and users, though, it starts to run into limitations in the types of operations that can be expressed. That is driving a number of changes in how operations are programmed for io_uring. One example is the mechanisms considered for carrying a file descriptor between operations that was covered here in early March. Another has to do with how I/O buffers are chosen for operations.

The Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 4 has been released. "LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for 'Linux Mint Debian Edition'. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu. LMDE aims to be as similar as possible to Linux Mint, but without using Ubuntu. The package base is provided by Debian instead." It is based on Debian 10 ("Buster") with lots of new features, including many improvements from Linux Mint 19.3. More information can be found in the release notes.