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Thursday, March 19th, 2020
| Time |
Event |
| 12:37a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 19, 2020
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 19, 2020 is available. | | 1:49p |
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (gdal), Fedora (nethack), Mageia (okular, sleuthkit, and webkit2), openSUSE (salt), Oracle (icu, kernel, python-pip, python-virtualenv, and zsh), Red Hat (icu, python-imaging, thunderbird, and zsh), Scientific Linux (icu, python-imaging, and zsh), SUSE (postgresql10), and Ubuntu (apache2). | | 2:30p |
Qubes Architecture Next Steps: The GUI Domain Here's a
detailed blog post on how the Qubes distribution is working to isolate the graphical interface from the rest of the system. " The upcoming
4.1 release changes this protocol to a more flexible form. It will no
longer use direct memory addresses, but an abstract mechanism in which the
qube has to explicitly allow access to a particular memory page. In our
current implementation — under Xen — we use the grant tables mechanism,
which provides a separate memory allocation API and allows working on
grants and not directly on memory pages. Other implementations will also be
possible: whether for another hypervisor (e.g. KVM) or for a completely
different architecture not based on shared memory (e.g. directly sending
frames to another machine)." | | 3:36p |
[$] Working-set protection for anonymous pages The kernel's memory-management subsystem goes to great lengths to keep the pages that are actually in use in memory. But sometimes it gets things wrong, leading to reduced performance or, in the worst cases, flat-out thrashing. We may be about to see a significant improvement, though, thanks to a
patch set from Joonsoo Kim changing how anonymous pages (those containing data not backed by files on disk) are managed. As it turns out, all that had to be done was to make use of some work that already exists in related parts of the memory-management code. | | 6:38p |
Hacking the planet with Notcurses Author Nick Black has written an extensive book on the creation of textual user interfaces using the notcurses library; it's available under the Apache
license [PDF]. " Many people asked how such a thing was
useful. My usual response was that numerous devices don’t present a bitmap
interface, that X11 GUIs run remotely over SSH are effectively unusable,
that plenty of machines don’t have a GUI environment installed, that there
are obvious applications for large outdoor displays, and that Sixel isn’t
well-supported across different terminal emulators. It seems impossible in
an age of gigatransistor graphics cards, but the text environment still
presents perceivably less latency than most GUI toolkits." |
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