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Security updates have been issued by Debian (cifs-utils, ffmpeg, libxml2, and vim), Fedora (rsyslog), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, e2fsprogs, gzip, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformats-binary, jackson-annotations, jackson-bom, jackson-core, kernel, nodejs8, openldap2, pidgin, podofo, slurm, and tiff), and Ubuntu (clamav, containerd, libxml2, and openldap).

It is perhaps unusual to have a kernel tracing developer leading a filesystem session, Steven Rostedt said, at the beginning of such a session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). But he was doing so to try to find a good way to dynamically allocate kernel data structures for some of the pseudo-filesystems, such as sysfs, debugfs, and tracefs, in the kernel. Avoiding static allocations would save memory, especially on systems that are not actually using any of the files in those filesystems.

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced that it succeeded with its motion in US Federal Court to send the case back to California, where it was originally filed. The suit was filed in October 2021 by SFC, as an owner of Vizio televisions, to get the company to comply with the GPL on some of the code in the TVs. Back in November, Vizio had asked to move the case to Federal Court, because the GPL is only a copyright license (which is a dispute handled at the Federal level) and not a contract (that could be adjudicated in state court). Friday's ruling disagreed with that premise: The May 13 ruling by the Honorable Josephine L. Staton stated that the claim from Software Freedom Conservancy succeeded in the "extra element test" and was not preempted by copyright claims, and the court finds "that the enforcement of 'an additional contractual promise separate and distinct from any rights provided by the copyright laws' amounts to an 'extra element,' and therefore, SFC's claims are not preempted."

"The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as contractual agreements," says Karen M. Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy. Sandler noted that many in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community argue incorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function as copyright licenses.

A new helper library for network filesystems, called netfslib, was the subject of a filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). David Howells developed netfslib, which was merged for 5.13 a year ago, and led the session. Some filesystems, like AFS and Ceph, are already using some of the services that netfslib provides, while others are starting to look into it.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (gzip, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and zlib), Debian (adminer, htmldoc, imagemagick, libgoogle-gson-java, lrzip, openjdk-8, openssl, and ruby-nokogiri), Fedora (ecdsautils, et, libxml2, podman, and supertux), Mageia (cairo, clamav, curl, fish, freetype2, golang-github-prometheus-client, python-django-registration, python-nbxmpp, python-waitress, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (curl, kernel, pidgin, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (tiff).

The 5.18-rc7 kernel prepatch has been released for testing. Linus says: "So things continue to be fairly calm, and as such this is likely the last rc before 5.18 unless something bad happens next week".

The 5.17.8, 5.15.40, 5.10.116, 5.4.194, 4.19.243, 4.14.279, and 4.9.314 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Memory reclaim in Linux is largely a reactive practice; the kernel tries to find memory it can repurpose in response to the amount of free memory falling too low. Developers have often wondered if a proactive reclaim mechanism might lead to better performance, for some workloads at least, and optimal use of tiered-memory systems will likely require more active reclamation of memory as well. At the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Davidlohr Bueso led a brief session on the topic.

Compute Express Link (CXL) is an upcoming memory technology that is clearly on the minds of Linux memory-management developers; there were five sessions dedicated to the topic at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). The first three sessions, on May 3, covered various aspects of memory management in the presence of CXL. It seems that CXL may bring some welcome capabilities, especially for cloud-service providers, but that will come at the cost of some headaches on the kernel-development side.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, postgresql-11, postgresql-13, and waitress), Fedora (curl, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, keylime, and pcre2), Oracle (gzip and zlib), Red Hat (subversion:1.10), SUSE (clamav, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, kibana, openstack-keystone, openstack-monasca-notification, e2fsprogs, gzip, and kernel), and Ubuntu (libvorbis and rsyslog).

Many types of kernel changes can be hammered into shape on the mailing lists. There are certain types of patches, however, that have a hard time getting to the finish line that way; they are sufficiently large and invasive that they need an actual gathering of the developers involved. The multi-generational LRU work (MGLRU) falls into this category, which is why it was the subject of a full-hour session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM). The discussion held there may well have opened the doors for this code to be merged in the near future.

Just one day after the RHEL 8.6 release, AlmaLinux 8.6 Stable has been released. See the release notes for more information. The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is excited to announce that AlmaLinux OS 8.6 Stable is now available. Just like a flash after the beta release. This stable release is for the x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le architectures and is ready for production installations and to power all your computing needs and workloads. Grab it from the nearest mirror and join us on the AlmaLinux Community Chat to discuss.

Seven new stable kernels were released: 5.17.7, 5.15.39, 5.10.115, 5.4.193, 4.19.242, 4.14.278, and 4.9.313. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree and users of those series should upgrade.

The kernel's "direct map" makes the entirety of a system's physical memory available in the kernel's virtual address space. Normally, huge pages are used for this mapping, making it relatively efficient to access. Increasingly, though, there is a need to carve some pages out of the direct map; this splits up those huge pages and makes the system as a whole less efficient. During a memory-management session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Mike Rapoport led a session on direct-map fragmentation and how it might be avoided.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (microcode_ctl, mingw-SDL2_ttf, seamonkey, and thunderbird), Mageia (cifs-utils, gerbv, golang, libcaca, libxml2, openssl, python-pillow, python-rencode, python-twisted, python-ujson, slurm, and sqlite3), Red Hat (gzip, kernel, kpatch-patch, podman, rsync, subversion:1.10, and zlib), Scientific Linux (gzip), Slackware (curl), SUSE (clamav), and Ubuntu (curl, firefox, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.13, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.13, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, and linux-oem-5.14).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 12, 2022 is available.

On May 10, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9). Not surprisingly, the announcement is rather buzzword-heavy and full of marketing, though there are some technical details scattered in it. The release notes for the RHEL 9 beta are available, which have a lot more information. "The platform will be generally available in the coming weeks." Building on decades of relentless innovation, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform is the first production release built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This approach helps the broader Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem, from partners to customers to independent users, provide feedback, code and feature updates to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Phoronix reports that the days of proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers are coming to a close.

NVIDIA's open kernel modules is already considered "production ready, opt-in" for data center GPUs. For GeForce and workstation GPUs, the open kernel module code is considered "alpha quality" but will be ramped up moving forward with future releases. NVIDIA has already deprecated the monolithic kernel module approach for their data center GPU support to focus on this open kernel driver solution (and their existing proprietary kernel module using the GSP). Only Turing and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver. Pre-Turing GPUs are left to using the existing proprietary kernel drivers or the Nouveau DRM driver for that matter.

The user-space code remains proprietary, though, which could inhibit the eventual merging of this code into the mainline kernel.

Update: here is NVIDIA's press release on the new drivers.

In a filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Ted Ts'o brought up the subject of filesystems that get resized frequently and whether the default parameters for filesystem creation should change as a result. It stems from a conversation that he had with XFS developer Darrick Wong, who is experiencing some the same challenges as ext4 in this area. He outlined the problem and how it comes about, then led the discussion on ways to perhaps address it.

Out-of-memory (OOM) situations are dreaded by users, system administrators, and kernel developers alike. Usually, all that is known is that a lot of memory is being used somewhere and the system has run out, but the kernel provides little help to anybody trying to figure out where the memory has gone. In a memory-management session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Kent Overstreet asked what could be done to improve OOM reports and reduce the pain for all involved.