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[$] The race to replace Redis
On March 21, Redis Ltd. announced that the Redis "in-memory data store
" project would now be
released under non-free, source-available licenses, starting with Redis 7.4. The
news is unwelcome, but not entirely unexpected. What is unusual with this situation is
the number of Redis alternatives to choose from; there are at least
four options to choose as a replacement for those who wish to stay
with free software, including a pre-existing fork called KeyDB and the Linux Foundation's newly-announced Valkey project. The question now is which one(s)
Linux distributions, users, and providers will choose to take its place.
[$] Declarative partitioning in PostgreSQL
Keith Fiske gave a talk (with slides) about the state of partitioning — splitting a large table into smaller tables for performance reasons — in PostgreSQL at SCALE this year. He spoke about the existing support for partitioning, what work still needs to be done, and what place existing partitioning tools, like his own pg_partman, still have as PostgreSQL gains more built-in features.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 28, 2024
Posted Mar 28, 2024 0:22 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 28, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: GNOME 46; Ubuntu HPC; Heap-spraying hardening; 6.9 merge window; Nix talks
- Briefs: Emacs 29.3; Linux 6.9-rc1; Nova for NVIDIA devices; Redis license; Rust 1.77; Simon Riggs RIP; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] High-performance computing with Ubuntu
Jason Nucciarone and Felipe Reyes gave back-to-back talks about high-performance computing (HPC) using Ubuntu at SCALE this year. Nucciarone talked about ongoing work packaging Open OnDemand — a web-based HPC cluster interface — to make high-performance-computing clusters more user friendly. Reyes presented on using OpenStack — a cloud-computing platform — to pass the performance benefits of one's hardware through to virtual machines (VMs) running on a cluster.
[$] GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center
The GNOME project announced GNOME 46 (code-named "Kathmandu") on March 20. The release has quite a few updates and improvements across user applications, developer tools, and under the hood. One thing stood out while looking over this release—a major emphasis on Flatpaks as the way to acquire and update GNOME software.
[$] Nix at SCALE
The first-ever NixCon in North America was co-located with SCALE this year. The event drew a mix of experienced Nix users and people new to the project. I attended talks that covered using Nix to build Docker images, upcoming changes to how NixOS performs early booting, and ideas for making the set of services provided in nixpkgs more useful for self hosting. (LWN covered the relationship between Nix, NixOS, and nixpkgs in a recent article.) Near the end of the conference, a collection of Nix contributors gave a "State of the Union" about the growth of the project and highlighting areas of concern.
[$] The rest of the 6.9 merge window
The 6.9-rc1 kernel prepatch was released on March 24, closing the merge window for this development cycle. By that time, 12,435 non-merge changesets had been merged into the mainline, making for a less-busy merge window than the last couple of kernel releases (but similar to the 12,492 seen for 6.5). Well over 7,000 of those changes were merged after the first-half merge-window summary was written, meaning that the latter part of the merge window brought many more interesting changes.
[$] Hardening the kernel against heap-spraying attacks
While a programming error in the kernel may be subject to direct exploitation, usually a more roundabout approach is required to take advantage of a security bug. One popular approach for those wishing to take advantage of vulnerabilities is heap spraying, and it has often been employed to compromise the kernel. In the future, though, heap-spraying attacks may be a bit harder to pull off, thanks to the "dedicated bucket allocator" proposed by Kees Cook.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 21, 2024
Posted Mar 21, 2024 0:50 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 21, 2024 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Cranelift; 6.9 merge window; Kernel allocations; Cockpit; Python lambdas
- Briefs: Code execution on Pixel 8; Python security releases; Firefox 124; Flox 1.0; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Managing Linux servers with Cockpit
Cockpit is an interesting project for web-based Linux administration that has received relatively little attention over the years. Part of that may be due to the project's strategy of minor releases roughly every two weeks, rather than larger releases with many new features. While the strategy has done little to garner headlines, it has delivered a useful and extensible tool to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Linux servers.
Samba 4.20.0 released
Version 4.20.0 of the Samba Windows interoperability suite has been released. Changes include better support for group-managed service accounts, an experimental Windows search protocol client, support for conditional access control entries, and more.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (perl-Data-UUID, python-pygments, and thunderbird), Mageia (clojure, grub2, kernel,kmod-xtables-addons,kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, nss firefox, nss, python3, python, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), Oracle (nodejs:18), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and dnsmasq), SUSE (avahi and python39), and Ubuntu (curl, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, unixodbc, and util-linux).
The PostgreSQL community mourns Simon Riggs
The PostgreSQL community is dealing with the loss of Simon Riggs, who passed away on March 26:
Simon was responsible for many of the enterprise features we find in PostgreSQL today, including point in time recovery, hot standby, and synchronous replication. He was the founder of 2ndQuadrant which employed many of the PostgreSQL developers, later becoming part of EDB where he worked as a Postgres Fellow until his retirement. He was responsible for the UK PostgreSQL conferences for many years until he passed that responsibility to PostgreSQL Europe last year.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (composer and nodejs), Fedora (w3m), Mageia (tomcat), Oracle (expat, firefox, go-toolset:ol8, grafana, grafana-pcp, nodejs:18, and thunderbird), Red Hat (dnsmasq, expat, kernel, kernel-rt, libreoffice, and squid), and SUSE (firefox, krb5, libvirt, and shadow).
Eight new stable kernels
Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.8.2, 6.7.11, 6.6.23, 6.1.83, 5.15.153, 5.10.214, 5.4.273, and 4.19.311 stable kernels. Each contains a long list of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (curaengine & blender and gnutls), Red Hat (firefox, grafana, grafana-pcp, libreoffice, nodejs:18, and thunderbird), SUSE (glade), and Ubuntu (crmsh, debian-goodies, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, pam, and thunderbird).
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti, firefox-esr, freeipa, gross, libnet-cidr-lite-perl, python2.7, python3.7, samba, and thunderbird), Fedora (amavis, chromium, clojure, firefox, gnutls, kubernetes, and tcpreplay), Mageia (freeimage, libreswan, nodejs-hawk, and python, python3), Oracle (golang, nodejs, nodejs:16, and postgresql-jdbc), Slackware (emacs and mozilla), SUSE (dav1d, ghostscript, go1.22, indent, kernel, openvswitch, PackageKit, python-uamqp, rubygem-rack-1_4, shadow, ucode-intel, xen, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (firefox, graphviz, libnet-cidr-lite-perl, and qpdf).
Emacs 29.3 released
Version 29.3 of the Emacs editor has been released:
Emacs 29.3 is an emergency bugfix release; it includes no new features except a small number of changes intended to resolve security vulnerabilities uncovered in Emacs 29.2.
Those vulnerabilities mostly have to do with executing untrusted Lisp code; see the NEWS file for a bit more information.
Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc1
The 6.9-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus Torvalds described some rather large updates to the core kernel code that are coming for 6.9:
The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested use-case, but not realistic in many cases).
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, pillow, and thunderbird), Fedora (apptainer, chromium, ovn, and webkitgtk), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, ffmpeg, fontforge, libuv, and nodejs-tough-cookie), Oracle (kernel, libreoffice, postgresql-jdbc, ruby:3.1, squid, and squid:4), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8 and libreoffice), SUSE (firefox, jbcrypt, trilead-ssh2, jsch-agent-proxy, kernel, tiff, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (linux-aws and openssl1.0).