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Friday, May 7th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 1:45p |
An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Open Source And Beyond - Part 2 (Tag1) The second
half of the interview with Linus Torvalds on the Tag1 Consulting site
has been posted.
I think one of the reasons Linux succeeded was
exactly the fact that I actually did NOT have a big plan, and did not have
high expectations of where things would go, and so when people started
sending me patches, or sending me requests for features, to me that was all
great, and I had no preconceived notion of what Linux should be. End
result: all those individuals (and later big companies) that wanted to
participate in Linux kernel development had a fairly easy time to do so,
because I was quite open to Linux doing things that I personally had had no
real interest in originally.
| | 1:55p |
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and unbound1.9), Fedora (djvulibre and samba), Mageia (ceph, messagelib, and pagure), openSUSE (alpine and exim), Oracle (kernel and postgresql), Scientific Linux (postgresql), and Ubuntu (thunderbird and unbound). | | 2:15p |
Five new stable kernels New stable kernels 5.12.2, 5.11.19, 5.10.35, 5.4.117, and 4.19.190 have been released. They contain a relatively short list of updates throughout the tree; users of those series should upgrade. | | 2:18p |
[$] Noncoherent DMA mappings
While it is sometimes possible to perform I/O by moving data through the
CPU, the only way to get the required level of performance is usually for devices
to move data directly to and from memory. Direct memory access (DMA) I/O
has been well supported in the Linux kernel since the early days, but there
are always ways in which that support can be improved, especially when
hardware adds some challenges of its own. The somewhat confusingly named
"non-contiguous" DMA API that
was added for 5.13 shows the kinds of things that have to be done to get
the best performance on current systems. | | 10:31p |
An IEEE statement on the UMN paper The IEEE, whose Symposium on Security and Privacy conference had accepted
the "hypocrite commits" paper for publication, has posted
a statement [PDF] on the episode.
The paper was reviewed by
four reviewers in the Fall S&P 2021 review cycle and received a very
positive overall rating (2 Accept and 2 Weak Accept scores, putting it in
the top 5% of submitted papers). The reviewers noted that the fact that a
malicious actor can attempt to intentionally add a vulnerability to an open
source project is not new, but also acknowledged that the authors provide
several new insights by describing why this might be easier than expected,
and why it might be difficult for maintainers to detect the problem. One of
the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their
review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the
time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
The statement concludes with some actions to be taken by IEEE to ensure
that ethically questionable papers are not accepted again. |
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