lwn.net

Linus has released 6.8-rc6 for testing.

Last week I said that I was hoping things would calm down a bit. Technically things did calm down a bit, and rc6 is smaller than rc5 was. But not by a huge amount, and honestly, while there's nothing really alarming here, there's more here than I would really like at this point in the release.

So this may end up being one of those releases that get an rc8. We'll see.

Version 2.44.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. There is a long list of changes, including the git replay command for faster, server-side rebasing, a number of command-line completion improvements, and more.

The world of open-source "forges" is becoming a little more fragmented. The Forgejo project is a software-development platform that started as a "soft" fork of Gitea in late 2022. On February 16, Forgejo announced its intent to become a "hard fork" of Gitea to help address its mission of community-controlled development and to "liberate software development from the shackles of proprietary tools". In a world where proprietary tools cast a long shadow over open-source development that's a welcome sentiment—if the project can deliver.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of seven new stable kernels: 6.7.6, 6.6.18, 6.1.79, 5.15.149, 5.10.210, 5.4.269, and 4.19.307. As usual, they contain many important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, imagemagick, and iwd), Fedora (chromium, firefox, and pdns-recursor), Mageia (nodejs and yarnpkg), Red Hat (firefox, postgresql, and postgresql:15), and SUSE (bind, mozilla-nss, openssh, php-composer2, python-pycryptodome, python-uamqp, python310, and tiff).

The Curl project has previously had problems with CVEs issued for things that are not security issues. On February 21, Daniel Stenberg wrote about the Curl project's most recent issue with the CVE system, saying:

I keep insisting that the CVE system is broken and that the database of existing CVEs hosted by MITRE (and imported into lots of other databases) is full of questionable content and plenty of downright lies. A primary explanation for us being in this ugly situation is that it is simply next to impossible to get rid of invalid CVEs.

The Linux kernel uses a number of hardening techniques to try to protect itself against compromise; one of those is kernel address-space layout randomization (KASLR). But randomization is of little benefit if the kernel spills the beans on where its code has ended up. As it happens, the kernel has been doing exactly that — since 2007, in a behavior that predates the addition of KASLR. Some changes are in the works to close that hole, but it is illustrative of just how hard some secrets are to keep.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (python-pillow), Debian (firefox-esr and imagemagick), Fedora (kernel, mbedtls, rust-asyncgit, rust-bat, rust-cargo-c, rust-eza, rust-git-absorb, rust-git-delta, rust-git2, rust-gitui, rust-libgit2-sys, rust-lsd, rust-pore, rust-pretty-git-prompt, rust-shadow-rs, rust-silver, rust-tokei, and rust-vergen), Gentoo (LibreOffice), Red Hat (kpatch-patch), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (docker, python-pycryptodome, python3, and qemu), and Ubuntu (firefox and linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 22, 2024 is available.

Sudo is a ubiquitous tool for running commands with the privileges of another user on Unix-like operating systems. Over the past decade or so, some alternatives have been developed; the base system of OpenBSD now comes with doas instead, sudo-rs is a subset of sudo reimplemented in Rust, and, somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft also recently announced its own Sudo for Windows. Each of these offers a different approach to the task of providing limited privileges to unprivileged users.

Alexei Starovoitov introduced a patch series for the Linux kernel on February 6 to add bpf_arena, a new type of shared memory between BPF programs and user space. Starovitov expects arenas to be useful both for bidirectional communication between user space and BPF programs, and for use as an additional heap for BPF programs. This will likely be useful to BPF programs that implement complex data structures directly, instead of relying on the kernel to supply them. Starovoitov cited Google's ghOSt project as an example and inspiration for the work.

Version 5.10 of the RawTherapee raw photo editor is out. The list of changes is long, and includes improved support for many camera-specific formats. (LWN looked at RawTherapee in 2022).

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (linux-firmware and python-reportlab), Debian (unbound), Fedora (freeglut and syncthing), Red Hat (edk2, go-toolset:rhel8, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, kernel-rt, mysql:8.0, oniguruma, and python-pillow), Slackware (libuv and mozilla), SUSE (abseil-cpp, grpc, opencensus-proto, protobuf, python- abseil, python-grpcio, re2, bind, dpdk, firefox, hdf5, libssh, libssh2_org, libxml2, mozilla-nss, openssl-1_1, openvswitch, postgresql12, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, python-aiohttp, python-time-machine, python-pycryptodomex, runc, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (kernel, libspf2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, and linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial).

DNS resolvers (those that handle DNSSEC, at least) are almost uniformly vulnerable to an exploit that has been named "KeyTrap". In short, the right type of packet can send a DNS system into something close to an infinite loop, taking it out of service indefinitely.

With just a single DNS packet, hackers could paralyze all common DNS implementations and public DNS providers. Exploiting this attack would have serious consequences for any application that uses the internet, including the unavailability of technologies such as web browsers, email and instant messaging. This devastating effect prompted major DNS vendors to call KeyTrap "The worst attack on DNS ever discovered"

Some more information and pointers to updates can be found on the CVE-2023-50387 page; some distributors have been faster to get updates out than others.

(Thanks to Dave Täht).

Qubes OS is a security-focused desktop Linux distribution built on Fedora Linux and the Xen hypervisor. Qubes uses virtualization to run applications, system services, and devices access via virtual machines called "qubes" that have varying levels of trust and persistence to provide an open-source "reasonably secure" operating system with "serious privacy". The Qubes 4.2.0 release, from December 2023, brings a number of refinements to make Qubes OS easier to manage and use.

Andrea Righi has started a blog series on writing a user-space CPU scheduler with the BPF-based extensible scheduler class:

.select_cpu() implements the logic to assign a target CPU to a task that wants to run, typically you have to decide if you want to keep the task on the same CPU or if it needs to be migrated to a different one (for example if the current CPU is busy); if we can find an idle CPU at this stage there’s no reason to call the scheduler, the task can be immediately dispatched here.

Drew DeVault announced the first numbered release of the Hare programming language on February 16.

Many Hare users want to ship their Hare projects to users, and as such, software written in Hare is making its way into Linux distributions and the like. However, due to Hare's unstable nature, we have not provided any versioned releases, forcing any distributions who want to package Hare to package Hare's master branch, which is less than ideal.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (freeglut, hugin, libmodsecurity, qemu, rust-asyncgit, rust-bat, rust-cargo-c, rust-eza, rust-git-absorb, rust-git-delta, rust-git2, rust-gitui, rust-libgit2-sys, rust-lsd, rust-pore, rust-pretty-git-prompt, rust-shadow-rs, rust-silver, rust-tokei, and rust-vergen), Mageia (packages, radare2, ruby-rack, and wireshark), Oracle (.NET 8.0 and python-pillow), Red Hat (gimp:2.8, java-1.8.0-ibm, and kpatch-patch), SUSE (dpdk and opera), and Ubuntu (bind9, curl, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, node-ip, and tiff).

Spritely is a project seeking to build a platform for sovereign distributed applications — applications where users run their own nodes in order to control their own data — as the basis of a new social internet. While there are many such existing projects, Spritely takes an unusual approach based on a new interoperable protocol for efficient, secure remote procedure calls (RPC). The project is in its early stages, with many additional features planned, but it is already possible to play around with Goblins, the distributed actor library that Spritely intends to build on.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (engrampa, openvswitch, pdns-recursor, and runc), Fedora (caddy, expat, freerdp, libgit2, libgit2_1.6, mbedtls, python-cryptography, qt5-qtbase, and sudo), Gentoo (Apache Log4j, Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, CUPS, e2fsprogs, Exim, firefox, Glade, GNU Tar, intel-microcode, libcaca, QtNetwork, QtWebEngine, Samba, Seamonkey, TACACS+, Thunar, and thunderbird), Mageia (dnsmasq, unbound, and vim), Oracle (container-tools:4.0, container-tools:ol8, dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, kernel, nss, openssh, and sudo), Red Hat (python-pillow), and SUSE (bitcoin, dpdk, libssh, openvswitch, postgresql12, and postgresql13).