Tech News Digest - 2025-04-08
π’ No joke file found! π’
[$] An update on pahole
Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 21:01:52 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:
Pahole is a tool for exploring and editing debug information, similar to a Swiss Army knife. It is currently used as part of the kernel's build process to prepare debug data for the BPF verifier, but plans are in place to make it unnecessary in the future.
Pahole (originally "Poke-a-hole") is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and
editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved
in the kernel's build process to rearrange the information
produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although
there are plans to render it unnecessary.
Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status
updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF summit. Interested readers can find his slides
here.
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Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security (Queue)
Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 19:56:36 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:
The ACM Queue article discusses the security problem in the context of a report published in 1974 on Multics security, highlighting that many of the same issues persist today despite advances in software reuse. The article emphasizes the need for continuous improvements to open source software supply chain security to make attacks more difficult and expensive, reflecting the fundamental nature of these problems.
ACM Queue looks at
the security problem in the light of a report on Multics security that
was published in 1974.
We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the
past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software
reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real. Modern
programming environments such as Go, Node, and Rust have made it
trivial to reuse work by others, but our instincts about
responsible behaviors have not yet adapted to this new reality.
The fact that the 1974 Multics review anticipated many of the
problems we face today is evidence that these problems are
fundamental and have no easy answers. We must work to make
continuous improvements to open source software supply chain
security, making attacks more and more difficult and expensive.
Read more
[$] Three ways to rework the swap subsystem
Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:01:21 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:
The Linux swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized, but has some issues that need to be addressed for modern workloads. Three presenters at the 2025 Linux Summit discussed problems they're trying to solve with the swap subsystem, including proposing additional layers of indirection in the kernel's swap map and enabling large folio swapping.
The kernel's swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized β though not
always optimized for today's workloads. In three adjacent sessions during
the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Kairui Song, Nhat Pham, and Usama Arif
all talked about some of the problems that they are trying to solve in the
Linux swap subsystem. In the first two cases, the solutions take the form of
an additional layer of indirection in the kernel's swap map; the third,
which enables swap-in of large folios, may or may not be worthwhile in the
end.
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[$] The rest of the 6.15 merge window
Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:42:38 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:
Linus Torvalds released version 6.15-rc1 and closed the 6.15 merge window on April 6, with a total of 12,633 non-merge changesets incorporated into his repository. This represents a significant increase in changes compared to the entire 6.14 development cycle, with around 6,000 additional changesets merged after the first-half summary was written.
Linus Torvalds released 6.15-rc1 and
closed the 6.15 merge window on AprilΒ 6. By that time, 12,633
non-merge changesets had found their way into his repository; that is
substantially more than were merged during the entire 6.14
development cycle. Just under 6,000 of those changesets were merged after
the first-half merge-window summary was
written.
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Five new stable kernels
Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:48:00 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:
The Linux kernel has released several new stable versions, including 6.14.1, 6.13.10, 6.12.22, 6.6.86, and 6.1.133. These updates contain a small but important collection of fixes across the entire kernel tree.
The 6.14.1, 6.13.10, 6.12.22, 6.6.86, and 6.1.133 stable kernels have all been
released. They contain a relatively small collection of important fixes
across the kernel tree.
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