lwn.net

We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun. That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how the year will actually go. We have to try; it's traditional, after all. Read on for our view of what's coming and how it may play out.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.8, 6.6.69, and 6.1.123 stable kernels. They contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as usual.

Security updates have been issued by Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8) and SUSE (liboqs, oqs-provider and python-Jinja2).

While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front end for the Algol 68 language.

This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see.

For those who see Algol 68 as too new, there was also a COBOL front end posted in December.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-django and python-tornado), Fedora (libxml2), and Red Hat (python-virtualenv and python36:3.6).

Version 22.1 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution is out.

We've been hard at work since Android 15's release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15's code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more devices are ready on day one that we'd typically expect to have up this early in the cycle!

Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one, Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one, Camelot, will let you view PDF files.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (debootstrap) and SUSE (assimp-devel, grpc, libQt6Pdf6, and poppler).

Kees Cook describes his work resulting in a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the same first 12 characters as the initial commit in the kernel's repository.

This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead of any future collisions (or this commit actually landing).

LWN looked at commit-ID collisions a few weeks back.

The origins of the TCP and UDP network protocols can be traced back a full 50 years. Even though networks and their use have changed radically since those protocols were designed, they can still be found behind most networking applications. Unsurprisingly, these protocols are not optimal for all situations, so there is ongoing interest in the development of alternatives. One such is the Homa transport protocol, developed by John Ousterhout (of Tcl/Tk and Raft fame, among other accomplishments), which is aimed at data-center applications. Ousterhout is currently trying to get a minimal Homa implementation into the kernel.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-good1.0 and opensc), Fedora (iwd and libell), and SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, and poppler).

The 6.13-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus says: "It's been another week, but I'm happy to report that clearly most people actually seem to have been enjoying the holidays, because rc5 is tiny"

Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted three new stable kernel updates: 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122. As usual, he warns that all users of stable kernels must upgrade, although for many systems that seems unlikely to happen until January.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-postcss), Fedora (age, dr_libs, incus, libxml2, moodle, and python-sql), and SUSE (poppler and python-grpcio).

Continuing its tradition of yearly major releases on December 25, the Ruby programming-language project has released Ruby 3.4.0 (followed quickly by 3.4.1, which simply updates the version number). Ruby 3.4 includes lots of changes, including the addition of it as a less-confusing shorthand for _1 as a block parameter, switching to Prism as the default parser, adding the Happy Eyeballs version 2 algorithm to the socket library, just-in-time (JIT) compiler (YJIT) improvements, garbage-collection modularization, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (fastnetmon, webkit2gtk, and xen), Fedora (sympa), Oracle (postgresql), and Red Hat (pcp, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 26, 2024 is available.

It is often said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results. Be that as it may, LWN has repeatedly started a new year with a set of predictions, only to have to review how badly they went at the end. There was no break in that pattern this year, so there is no help for it; the time has come to review our 2024 predictions in the hope that they came out better this time around.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (sympa and tomcat), Red Hat (kernel), and SUSE (poppler).

The systemd v257 release brings a number of incremental enhancements to various components and utilities for working with Linux systems. This includes more support for varlink, automated downloading of disk images at boot time, and a number of improvements to the secure-boot process for unified kernel images (UKIs), which we have covered in a separate article.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, edk2:20240524, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libsndfile:1.0.31, mpg123:1.32.9, pam, php:8.1, php:8.2, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.9:3.9.21, skopeo, and unbound:1.16.2), Debian (intel-microcode), Fedora (python3-docs and python3.12), Mageia (emacs), Red Hat (podman), and SUSE (gdb, govulncheck-vulndb, libparaview5_12, mozjs115, mozjs78, and vhostmd).