Tech News Digest - 2025-04-29

📢 Larva-tested, pupa-approved

Valgrind-3.25.0 is available

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:44:30 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Valgrind version 3.25.0 has been released, featuring several new enhancements including initial support for RISC-V on Linux and handling zstd-compressed debug sections. The update also includes integration with the Linux Test Project test suite, expanded support for Linux system calls, and numerous bug fixes.
Version 3.25.0 of the Valgrind dynamic-analysis tool has been released. It has lots of new features, including initial support for RISC-V on Linux, handling zstd-compressed debug sections, integration of the Linux Test Project test suite, support for lots more Linux system calls, and more. It also has plenty of bug fixes, of course.
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OSI publishes election retrospective

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:28:04 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has published takeaways from its recent board of directors election, which was marred by controversy and poor communication. The organization has committed to improving candidate selection and communication for future elections, including requiring candidates to sign an agreement at nomination time and providing more information beforehand.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has quietly published "takeaways" from its internal retrospective on the recent board of directors election as an update to the March blog post that announced the new members of the board. The election was controversial, in part, due to poor communication and OSI changing the election rules and disqualifying several candidates after the election finished. LWN covered the election and results in March. The update commits to improvements in communication and candidate selection:

What this election exposed was the need for the organization to also assess whether candidates were fully eligible to run and prepared to be seated on the board before voting begins. This is something we will add to the election timeline next year. While we have not finished figuring out all of the requirements for that assessment, part of it will be asking candidates to sign a Candidate Agreement at nomination time. We also have some ideas on ways for potential candidates to have more information even before submitting a nomination.

In a related note, there is a petition asking OSI to publish the "complete, unaltered" results of the board of directors election. Thanks to Josh Triplett for the tip on the petition.

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[$] Inline socket-local storage for BPF

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:57:09 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

Martin Lau presented a talk at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about a performance issue affecting the networking subsystem, which he attributed to retrieving socket-local data. His proposed solution sparked discussion on how to optimize the data layout, with the goal of improving performance for his specific use case.

Martin Lau gave a talk in the BPF track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about a performance problem plaguing the networking subsystem, and some potential ways to fix it. He works on BPF programs that need to store socket-local data; amid other improvements to the networking and BPF subsystems, retrieving that data has become a noticeable bottleneck for his use case. His proposed fix prompted a good deal of discussion about how the data should be laid out.

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Security updates for Monday

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:27:14 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Multiple Linux distributions, including AlmaLinux, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, have released security updates to address various vulnerabilities. The updates affect a range of packages, including web browsers, libraries, and applications such as Thunderbird, Java, Chromium, and others.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (thunderbird), Debian (distro-info-data, imagemagick, kernel, libsoup2.4, and poppler), Fedora (chromium, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-1.8.0-openjdk-portable, java-17-openjdk, java-17-openjdk-portable, java-latest-openjdk, pgadmin4, thunderbird, and xz), Mageia (haproxy and libxml2), Oracle (bluez, firefox, gnutls, libtasn1, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, ruby:3.1, thunderbird, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat (delve and golang, glibc, mod_auth_openidc, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, and thunderbird), SUSE (augeas, chromedriver, cifs-utils, govulncheck-vulndb, java-11-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kyverno, libraw, opentofu, runc, subfinder, and valkey), and Ubuntu (jupyter-notebook and libxml2).
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Kernel prepatch 6.15-rc4

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Sun, 27 Apr 2025 23:21:28 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The kernel prepatch version 6.15-rc4 has been released for testing. According to the release note, everything looks normal and there were no last-minute changes due to system upgrades, suggesting that this version may not have any major issues.
The 6.15-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So let's see if this rc ends up avoiding any silly issues - things certainly look pretty normal, and there were no hurried last-minute changes this week due to system upgrades".
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