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Version 2.45.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. Changes include a new list command for git reflog, a couple of new configuration variables for git diff, the ability to drop redundant commits while cherry-picking, a number of performance improvements, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (org-mode), Oracle (shim and tigervnc), Red Hat (ansible-core, avahi, buildah, container-tools:4.0, containernetworking-plugins, edk2, exfatprogs, fence-agents, file, freeglut, freerdp, frr, grub2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, harfbuzz, httpd, ipa, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, libnbd, LibRaw, libsndfile, libssh, libtiff, libvirt, libX11, libXpm, mingw components, mingw-glib2, mingw-pixman, mod_http2, mod_jk and mod_proxy_cluster, motif, mutt, openssl and openssl-fips-provider, osbuild and osbuild-composer, pam, pcp, pcs, perl, pmix, podman, python-jinja2, python3.11, python3.11-cryptography, python3.11-urllib3, qemu-kvm, qt5-qtbase, runc, skopeo, squashfs-tools, systemd, tcpdump, tigervnc, toolbox, traceroute, webkit2gtk3, wpa_supplicant, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zziplib), SUSE (docker, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, frr, and kernel), and Ubuntu (anope, freerdp3, and php7.0, php7.2, php7.4, php8.1).

The Amarok music player project has announced the release of version 3.0, which is codenamed "Castaway". It is the first stable version using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, and the first stable release since the final Qt-4-based 2.9.0 in 2018. The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since. 3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions. Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.

Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009. However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now. It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't require huge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworks and your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0, you are extremely welcome to join in and help!

On April 21, a group of anonymous authors and non-anonymous signatories published a lengthy open letter to the Nix community and Nix founder Eelco Dolstra calling for his resignation from the project. They claimed ongoing problems with the project's leadership, primarily focusing on the way his actions have allegedly undermined people nominally empowered to perform various moderation and governance tasks. Since its release, the letter has gained more than 100 signatures.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-11-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, libreswan, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (chromium, emacs, frr, mediawiki, ruby-rack, trafficserver, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, grub2, python-idna, and python-reportlab), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, firefox, opencryptoki, and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:4.0, container-tools:rhel8, git-lfs, and shim), SUSE (frr, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, pdns-recursor, and shim), and Ubuntu (apache2, cpio, curl, glibc, gnutls28, less, libvirt, and pillow).

Robert McQueen has posted a message from the GNOME Foundation board describing the current financial situation, plans to improve it, and an increase in the size of the board.

The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now "hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets – to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.

The 6.9-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

Things continue to look pretty normal, and nothing here really stands out. The biggest single change that stands out in the diffstat is literally a documentation update, everything else looks pretty small and spread out.

The 6.8.8, 6.6.29, 6.1.88, and 5.15.157 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Video playback is undeniably one of the most important features in modern consumer devices. Yet, surprisingly, users are by and large unaware of the intricate engineering involved in the compression and decompression of video data, with codecs being left to find a delicate balance between image quality, bandwidth, and power consumption. In response to constant performance pressure, video codecs have become complex and hardware implementations are now common, but programming these devices is becoming increasingly difficult and fraught with opportunities for exploitation. I hope to convey how Rust can help fix this problem.

At the CPU level, a memory model describes, among other things, the amount of freedom the processor has to reorder memory operations. If low-level code does not take the memory model into account, unpleasant surprises are likely to follow. Naturally, different CPUs offer different memory models, complicating the portability of certain types of concurrent software. To make life easier, some Arm CPUs offer the ability to emulate the x86 memory model, but efforts to make that feature available in the kernel are running into opposition.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (knot-resolver, pdns-recursor, and putty), Fedora (xen), Mageia (editorconfig-core-c, glibc, mbedtls, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (buildah), Red Hat (buildah and yajl), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (dcmtk, openCryptoki, php7, php74, php8, python-gunicorn, python-idna, qemu, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cryptojs, freerdp2, nghttp2, and zabbix).

On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a non-experimental part of Python. The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised questions about how the JIT would fit into future iterations of the Python language.

Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu distribution is out.

This release continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs.

The list of changes and enhancements is long; click below for some details. More information can be found in the release notes; see also this page for a summary of security-related changes.

Linux, famously, appears in a wide range of systems. While servers and large data centers get a lot of the attention, and this year will always be the year of the Linux desktop, there is also a great deal of Linux to be found in realtime and embedded applications. Two talks held in the realtime and embedded tracks of the 2024 Open Source Summit North America provided listeners with an update on how Linux is doing in those areas. Work on realtime Linux appears to be nearing completion, while the embedded community is still pushing forward at full speed.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl, filezilla, flatpak, kubernetes, libfilezilla, thunderbird, and xen), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, kernel, libreswan, shim, and tigervnc), Red Hat (buildah, gnutls, libreswan, tigervnc, and unbound), SUSE (cockpit-wicked, nrpe, and python-idna), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, freerdp2, linux-azure-6.5, and thunderbird).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 25, 2024 is available.

BleepingComputer reported on April 20 that some malware was being distributed via GitHub. Uploading files as part of a comment gives them a URL that appears to be associated with a repository, even if the comment is never posted.

A GitHub flaw, or possibly a design decision, is being abused by threat actors to distribute malware using URLs associated with Microsoft repositories, making the files appear trustworthy.

While most of the malware activity has been based around the Microsoft GitHub URLs, this "flaw" could be abused with any public repository on GitHub, allowing threat actors to create very convincing lures.

On April 23, Mozilla announced that Firefox's crash reporter has been rewritten in Rust, allowing the project to address a backlog of issues.

Even though it is important to properly handle main process crashes, the crash reporter hasn't received significant development in a while (aside from development to ensure that crash reports and telemetry continue to reliably be delivered)! It has long been stuck in a local maximum of "good enough" and "scary to maintain": it features 3 individual GUI implementations (for Windows, GTK+ for Linux, and macOS), glue code abstracting a few things (mostly in C++, and Objective-C for macOS), a binary blob produced by obsoleted Apple development tools, and no test suite. Because of this, there is a backlog of features and improvements which haven't been acted on.

Version 9.0 of the QEMU emulator has been released. "This release contains 2700+ commits from 220 authors." The list of improvements is long; see the announcement and the changelog for details.

For several years, contributors to the Rust project have been working to improve support for asynchronous code. The benefits of these efforts are not confined to asynchronous code, however. Members of the Rust community have been working toward adding explicit existential types to Rust since 2017. Existential types are not a common feature of programming languages (something the RFC acknowledges), so the motivation for their inclusion might be somewhat obscure.