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Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), SUSE (docker and patch), and Ubuntu (bind9, gross, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, and tomcat8, tomcat9).

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has announced a fellowship program to support "the dedicated individuals who keep our digital infrastructure running":

Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. However, the activities of maintainers, who often work on multiple FOSS projects, are hard to quantify for funding applications, as the demands and challenges vary and can change quickly. This is where the fellowship for maintainers comes into play.

According to the fellowship page the STF plans to fund five fellowships, beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, for a period of 12 months.

Like many projects written in C, the kernel makes extensive use of the C preprocessor; indeed, the kernel's use is rather more extensive than most. The preprocessor famously has a number of sharp edges associated with it. One might not normally think of increased compilation time as one of them, though. It turns out that some changes to a couple of conceptually simple preprocessor macros — min() and max() — led to some truly pathological, but hidden, behavior where those macros were used.

We have received the sad news that Dr. Mel Chua has passed away. Mel was probably best known in the free-software community as a contributor to the Fedora Project in its early days. The Fedora Community blog honored Mel recently after she had moved to hospice care with tributes from several Fedorans. Stephen Jacobs wrote:

I can't find the words to express how much of a positive impact Mel has had on my work, our shared work, my family, the experiences of my students, and the world of FOSS writ large. Nor can I find the words to convey just how much I will miss her.

Mel will be greatly missed.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (kernel, obs-cef, and xen), Mageia (emacs), Oracle (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, and kernel), Red Hat (emacs, httpd, and kpatch-patch-4_18_0-305_120_1), Slackware (curl), SUSE (apache2, cockpit-wicked, glibc, gnutls, gvfs, less, nghttp2, opensc, python-idna, python-requests, qemu, rpm, tpm2-0-tss, tpm2.0-tools, and unbound), and Ubuntu (clickhouse, exim4, libcommons-collections3-java, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, mysql-8.0, openssl, php-cas, prometheus-alertmanager, and snapd).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 1, 2024 is available.

Arnd Bergmann has posted a detailed timeline for the deprecation of support for old Arm CPUs in both the kernel and the compiler toolchain. Anybody who is working with that hardware will likely want to review this list and let the relevant developers know if any of that support is still needed.

Version 2.0 of the Vanilla OS image-based Linux distribution has been released. Dubbed "Orchid", Vanilla OS is now based on Debian Sid (prior versions were Ubuntu-based), allows creation of customized Linux environments, support for running Android applications using Waydroid, and many other improvements.

A few years ago, PyGObject—the Python package that provides bindings for GTK and GNOME applications—was not faring particularly well. Several maintainers had left the project and its development was not keeping pace with changes in GTK. At this year's GUADEC, Dan Yeaw presented a talk about the project's decline, improvements in the last year, and his experience getting involved in an undermaintained project.

Version 8.0 of the Forgejo software-development platform has been released. Notable changes include the removal of non-free software found in the codebase, improved stability, and a reduction in "seemingly random User Interface changes":

A gentle way of describing Forgejo User eXperience is that it is an acquired taste: it grew over the years, driven by the inspiration of the person with the keyboard in their hand. Once implemented it almost never changed. A user who started with Forgejo in 2022 can only see minor changes in 2024 and not all of them make intuitive sense. The solution to this problem is simple and was identified early on: User Research. But only in the making of Forgejo v8.0 did it get some momentum.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

A bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch — for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes — not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process. Now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland), Red Hat (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, git-lfs, httpd, kernel, openssh, and varnish:6), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, git, gtk2, gtk3, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, orc, postgresql14, python-dnspython, python-urllib3, shadow, and xen), and Ubuntu (openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, and python3.10, python3.8).

At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Groves led a session on famfs, which is a filesystem he has developed that uses the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism to access memory that is shareable between hosts. The discussion was aimed at whether a different approach should be taken and, in particular, whether FUSE should be used instead of implementing as an in-kernel filesystem. As noted in the thread about his proposal for an LSFMM+BPF session, and the mailing-list discussions on the first and second version of his patch set, there is some skepticism that a new in-kernel filesystem is warranted for the use case.

Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux distribution and its spinoff Funtoo Linux, has announced that he has decided to end the Funtoo project:

Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else. You can expect the project to wind down through August. If you have a Funtoo container, it will continue to be online through the end of August so you have time to find another hosting solution if you need one.

At GUADEC in Denver, Colorado on July 21, the GNOME Foundation held its annual general meeting (AGM) to provide updates from the foundation's board and committees. Topics included work accomplished in the past year, challenges facing the GNOME Foundation–including fundraising and finding a new executive director–and some insight into plans for the next year. And last, but not least, the awarding of the Pants of Thanks.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl), Mageia (virtualbox), Oracle (squid), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (apache2, bind, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, devscripts, espeak-ng, freerdp, ghostscript, gnome-shell, gtk2, gtk3, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kubevirt, libgit2, openssl-3, orc, p7zip, python-dnspython, and shadow), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-oem-6.8, linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-raspi, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-raspi, linux-gcp-5.15, and linux-lowlatency).

Version 2.46.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. This release seems to consist of a long list of interface and performance improvements rather than big new features; see the announcement for the details.

The release of 6.11-rc1 marked the end of the 6.11 merge window on July 28. By that time, 12,102 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; about 8,000 of those came in after the first-half summary was written. Quite a few significant changes were to be found in those changesets; there is also one big change that did not make it.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-11-openjdk), Debian (bind9), Fedora (darkhttpd, mod_http2, and python-scrapy), Red Hat (python3.11, rhc-worker-script, and thunderbird), SUSE (assimp, gh, opera, python-Django, and python-nltk), and Ubuntu (edk2, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, and lua5.4).

Linus has released 6.11-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "The merge window felt pretty normal, and the stats all look pretty normal too. I was expecting things to be quieter because of summer vacations, but that (still) doesn't actually seem to have been the case."