Tech News Digest - 2025-04-14

📢 Tell Your Parents It's Educational

[$] In search of a stable BPF verifier

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:47:53 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) does not guarantee user-space stability and can be broken by new kernel versions, making it difficult for users to deploy BPF programs across multiple kernel versions. In response, researchers Shung-Hsi Yu and Daniel Xu presented different approaches to addressing this issue at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

BPF is, famously, not part of the kernel's promises of user-space stability. New kernels can and do break existing BPF programs; the BPF developers try to fix unintentional regressions as they happen, but the whole thing can be something of a bumpy ride for users trying to deploy BPF programs across multiple kernel versions. Shung-Hsi Yu and Daniel Xu had two different approaches to fixing the problem that they presented at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

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[$] The state of the memory-management development process, 2025 edition

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:42:29 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Andrew Morton, lead maintainer for the kernel's memory-management subsystem, typically takes a hands-off approach at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, allowing developers to work independently. However, during his traditional development-process session in the memory-management track, he leads discussions on how to improve the process, which did not reveal any significant issues at the 2025 gathering.
Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer for the kernel's memory-management subsystem, tends to be quiet during the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, preferring to let the developers work things out on their own. That changes, though, when he leads the traditional development-process session in the memory-management track. At the 2025 gathering, this discussion covered a number of ways in which the process could be improved, but did not unearth any significant problems.
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Security updates for Monday

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:35:33 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Multiple Linux distributions have issued security updates to fix vulnerabilities in various packages, including Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. The affected packages include glib2.0, kernel, perl, subversion, chromium, firefox, openvpn, and others, with the specific updates varying by distribution.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (glib2.0, jinja2, kernel, mediawiki, perl, subversion, twitter-bootstrap3, twitter-bootstrap4, and wpa), Fedora (c-ares, chromium, condor, corosync, cri-tools1.29, exim, firefox, matrix-synapse, nextcloud, openvpn, perl-Data-Entropy, suricata, upx, varnish, webkitgtk, yarnpkg, and zabbix), Mageia (giflib, gnupg2, graphicsmagick, and poppler), Oracle (delve and golang, go-toolset:ol8, grub2, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (chromium, fontforge-20230101, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, liblzma5-32bit, pgadmin4, python311-Django, and python311-PyJWT), and Ubuntu (graphicsmagick).
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Kernel prepatch 6.15-rc2

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Sun, 13 Apr 2025 22:04:47 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Linus has released Linux version 6.15-rc2 (release candidate 2) for testing purposes. He notes that nothing particularly stands out to him at this early stage in the release cycle, so he's eager to see how it goes.
Linus has released 6.15-rc2 for testing. "Nothing particularly stands out to me, but it's early in the release yet, so let's see how it goes."
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[$] Managing multiple sources of page-hotness data

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 23:56:02 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The frequency of memory page access (its "hotness") is an important factor in many memory management strategies. A speaker at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit discussed the growing number of sources providing this data and explored whether it's possible to combine them in some way.
Knowing how frequently accessed a page of memory is (its "hotness") is a key input to many memory-management heuristics. Jonathan Cameron, in a memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, pointed out that the number of sources of that kind of data is growing over time. He wanted to explore the questions of what commonality exists between data from those sources, and whether it makes sense to aggregate them all somehow.
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