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Friday, September 27th, 2019
| Time |
Event |
| 1:25p |
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dcmtk), openSUSE (rust), Red Hat (redhat-virtualization-host), and SUSE (ghostscript, nghttp2, and u-boot). | | 3:39p |
[$] Fixing getrandom() A report of a boot hang in the 5.3 series has led to an enormous, somewhat contentious thread on the linux-kernel mailing list. The proximate cause was some changes that made the ext4 filesystem do less I/O early in the boot phase, incidentally causing fewer interrupts, but the underlying issue was the getrandom()
system call, which was blocking until the /dev/urandom pool was initialized—as designed. Since the system in question was not gathering enough entropy due to the lack of unpredictable interrupt timings, that would hang more or less forever. That has called into question the design and implementation of getrandom(). | | 6:27p |
How to contribute to Fedora (Fedora Magazine) Over at Fedora Magazine, Ben Cotton has an article on contributing to the Fedora distribution. Obviously, it is pretty Fedora-specific, but the general ideas can be applied to other distributions and/or projects. He lists several areas where contributors are needed—beyond just the obvious candidates: " Cooperative effort is a hallmark of open source communities. One of the best ways to contribute to any project is to help other users. In Fedora, that can mean answering questions on the Ask Fedora forum, the users mailing list, or in the #fedora IRC channel. Many third-party social media and news aggregator sites have discussion related to Fedora where you can help out as well." | | 7:23p |
Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica) Ars Technica reports on the Librem 5 smartphone from Purism, which has begun shipping. The article provides an initial review of the phone, with pictures of the interface and hardware inside the case. " The Librem 5 is unlike anything else on the market. Not only is it one of the only smartphones on Earth that doesn't ship with Android, a fork of Android, or iOS—Purism's commitment to 100% open software, with no binary blobs, puts severe restrictions on what hardware it can use. Android's core might be open source, but it was always built for wide adoption above all else, with provisions for manufacturers to include as much proprietary code as they want. Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question.
Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted." | | 9:14p |
RPM 4.15.0 released After " more than two years in development and half a year in testing", version 4.15.0 of the RPM package manager has been released. It has a wide range of new features, including faster parallel builds; support for %elif, %elifos, and %elifarch statements in RPM spec files; new %patchlist and %sourcelist sections; experimental support for non-privileged operation in a chroot() environment; and, of course, plenty of bug fixes and such. More details can be found in the release notes. | | 9:15p |
[$] Compiling to BPF with GCC The addition of extended BPF to the kernel has opened up a whole range of use cases, but few developers actually write BPF code. It is, like any other assembly-level language, a tedious pain to work with; developers would rather use a higher-level language. For BPF, the language of choice is C, which is compiled to BPF with the LLVM compiler. But, as Jose Marchesi described during the Toolchains
microconference at the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, LLVM will soon have company, as he has just added support for a BPF back-end to the GCC compiler. |
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