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Thursday, March 25th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 1:22a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 25, 2021
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 25, 2021 is available. | | 1:54p |
Open Collective's funds for open source Open Collective has put out an
announcement describing its "Funds for Open Source" initiative, which is aimed at making it easy for corporations to fund the work of individual developers. " Big companies call the process for paying for stuff
'procurement'. It’s often pretty involved, with contracts, invoices,
purchasing order numbers, and bureaucracy—a painful thing to go through
repeatedly for small amounts. It's practically a blocker. It is so much
simpler and more practical to ask corporations to make one large payment,
to one vendor. Make it easy and companies will invest more." | | 2:13p |
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and lxml), Fedora (jasper), openSUSE (gnutls, hawk2, ldb, libass, nghttp2, and ruby2.5), Oracle (pki-core:10.6), Red Hat (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (evolution-data-server, ldb, python3, and zstd), and Ubuntu (ldb, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-signed, linux-snapdragon, and linux, linux-lts-xenial). | | 2:21p |
Two stable kernels Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of 5.10.26—delayed from the large batch on March 24—with the usual important fixes throughout the kernel tree, and 5.11.10, which just contains some relatively minor fixes: " This is a 'quick revert' of some 5.11.9 commits that
caused noisy warnings to
show up in the kernel log of some systems. If you do not have this issue, or
are not bothered by these messages, no need to upgrade." | | 2:34p |
A new "board process" at the FSF The Free Software Foundation has announced
changes in how its board of directors is selected. " We will adopt a
transparent, formal process for identifying candidates and appointing new
board members who are wise, capable, and committed to the FSF's mission. We
will establish ways for our supporters to contribute to the discussion. We
will require all existing board members to go through this process as soon
as possible, in stages, to decide which of them remain on the
board."
Meanwhile, numerous community members have posted an open letter calling for
the resignation of the entire Free Software Foundation board of directors
after the announcement that Richard Stallman would be returning. The Free
Software Foundation Europe has made its
disapproval known, as has the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. The Debian project has started
discussing a general resolution affirming its support for the open
letter. Various other organizations have expressed concern as well.
For those who feel differently, there is also an open letter in support
of Stallman's return to the FSF. | | 4:30p |
[$] Patching until the COWs come home (part 2) Part 1 of this series described the copy-on-write (COW) mechanism used to avoid unnecessary copying of pages in memory, then went into the details of a bug in that mechanism that could result in the disclosure of sensitive data. A patch written by Linus Torvalds and merged for the 5.8 kernel appeared to fix that problem without unfortunate side effects elsewhere in the system. But COW is a complicated beast and surprises are not uncommon; this particular story was nowhere near as close to an end as had been thought. |
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