Tech News Digest – April 08, 2025
Dallas, a seasoned professional with a diverse background, transitions seamlessly between roles as a systems admin turned developer, technical writer, and curriculum developer at Red Hat. With a knack for unraveling complex concepts, he crafts engaging materials primarily in DocBook, guiding enthusiasts through the intricacies of Red Hat's certification courses. In his earlier days, Dallas's passion for Anime led him to contribute to Anime News Network, channeling his creativity and expertise into captivating content. His contributions extended beyond writing as he interviewed prominent figures in the Anime industry, offering insights into their creative processes and visions. Beyond his professional pursuits, he's a devoted husband and father, cherishing moments with his loved ones. Dallas's journey in the tech industry spans various roles, from a security developer at NTT Security to an operations architect overseeing Linux servers for commercial transcoding. His tenure at esteemed institutions like Goldman Sachs and Lockheed Martin has honed his skills as a systems engineer, instilling in him a deep-rooted understanding of complex systems. An avid FPV pilot, Dallas finds exhilaration in soaring through the skies with his drones, often contemplating the lessons learned from his aerial adventures. His diverse experiences, including serving as a naval submariner aboard the USS Alexandria and pursuing higher education in England, enrich his perspective and fuel his thirst for knowledge.
Tech News Digest - 2025-04-08
📢 No joke file found! 😢
[$] 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.
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[$] 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 — 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 April 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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