Saturday, May 4th, 2019

Time	Event
1:01p	Firefox bug disables all extensions The expiration of the extension signing certificate has evidently caused all extensions to be disabled, leading to a fair amount of discomfort on the net. There is evidently a fix being rolled out, but it requires that the "Studies" mechanism be enabled in the privacy preferences. Meanwhile, the best short-term approach seems to be to avoid restarting Firefox if possible. (Comment on this)
1:20p	More stable kernel updates The 5.0.12, 4.19.39, 4.14.116, and 4.9.173 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes. (Comment on this)
3:31p	[$] The search for available page flags Among the many other things crammed into the page structure that is used to represent a page of memory in the kernel is a set of flags to track the state of the page. These flags have been in short supply for some time; LWN looked at the problem nearly ten years ago. Jérôme Glisse ran a session during the memory-management track of the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit to explore ways of making some flags available for new uses. While there may be some easily available bits in the field that holds the page flags, obtaining a significant number of them may be tricky. (Comment on this)
3:32p	[$] Minimizing the use of tail pages Compound pages are created by the kernel as a way of combining a number of small pages into a single, larger unit. Such pages are implemented as a single "head page" at the beginning, followed by a number of "tail pages". Matthew Wilcox has concluded that it would be beneficial to minimize the use of tail pages in the kernel; he ran a session during the memory-management track at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit to explore how that could be done. The discussion ranged widely, veering into the representation of DMA I/O operations, but few hard conclusions were reached. (Comment on this)

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