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.
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.
[Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1018320/) ## 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). [Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1019212/) ## 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". [Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1019110/)