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Monday, November 5th, 2012
| Time |
Event |
| 8:26a |
Kernel prepatch 3.7-rc4 The 3.7-rc4 prepatch has been released. Linus says: " Perhaps notable just because of the noise it caused in certain
circles, there's the ext4 bitmap journaling fix for the issue that
caused such a ruckus. It's a tiny patch and despite all the noise
about it you couldn't actually trigger the problem unless you were
doing crazy things with special mount options." | | 2:12p |
[$] Many more words on volatile ranges John Stultz continues to push the volatile ranges feature toward the
kernel mainline. Volatile ranges allow web browsers and similar
applications that cache large amounts of data to advise the kernel that the
pages containing that data can be discarded if the system is under memory
pressure. John's latest iteration of the patches is accompanied by a
lengthy description of the current state of the implementation, open
questions, and recent changes to the user-space API. The ensuing
conversation prompted Minchan Kim to propose a patch set of his own that
supports a similar feature for anonymous mappings, with a different use
case in mind.
Click below (subscribers only) for a full report on both approaches. | | 3:58p |
Stable kernels 3.0.51, 3.4.18, and 3.6.6 released Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.0.51 ( diffs), 3.4.18( diffs), and 3.6.6 ( diffs) stable kernels. They contain fixes throughout the tree and users should upgrade. The latter two (3.4.18, 3.6.6) contain the fix for the ext4 corruption
problem that initially looked much worse than it turned out to be. | | 5:33p |
Security advisories for Monday Debian has updated libproxy (buffer
overflow) and iceape (multiple
vulnerabilities).
Mandriva has updated firefox
(multiple vulnerabilities).
openSUSE has updated deb,
update-alternatives (symlink attack), kernel (multiple vulnerabilities), mcrypt (buffer overflow) and ruby (two access restriction bypass flaws).
Ubuntu has updated mysql (multiple
unspecified vulnerabilities) and munin
(multiple vulnerabilities). | | 7:16p |
OpenBSD 5.2 Released
OpenBSD 5.2 has been released. "The most significant change in this
release is the replacement of the user-level uthreads by kernel-level
rthreads, allowing multithreaded programs to utilize multiple
CPUs/cores." There are lots more new features and updates listed in
the release announcement (click below). | | 8:15p |
Android turns 5 years old (The H) The H covers
five years of Android. " Five years ago on 5 November 2007, the then newly formed Open Handset Alliance (OHA) announced the launch of Android, described as a "truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices". Headed by Google, the OHA is a consortium of various organisations involved in developing the open source mobile platform. When it was founded, the group had 34 members including T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola, and has since grown to 84 members including various other handset manufacturers, mobile carriers, application developers and semiconductor companies." | | 11:45p |
Let’s Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can’t Eliminate Them (Wired) Richard Stallman shares
some ideas to alleviate the patent problem. " The usual
suggestions for correcting the problem legislatively involve changing the
criteria for granting patents – for instance, to ban issuing patents on
computational practices and systems to perform them. But this approach has
two drawbacks. First, patent lawyers are clever at reformulating patents
to fit whatever rules may apply; they transform any attempt at limiting the
substance of patents into a requirement of mere form. For instance, many
U.S. computational idea patents describe a system including an arithmetic
unit, an instruction sequencer, a memory, plus controls to carry out a
particular computation. This is a peculiar way of describing a computer
running a program that does a certain computation; it was designed to make
the patent application satisfy criteria that the U.S. patent system was
believed for a time to require." (Thanks to Paul Wise) |
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