A discussion that began six years ago about the potential use of modern C++ code in the Linux kernel has resumed on the Linux kernel developers' mailing list, alongside the current use of the C language with assembly inserts and the promotion of the Rust language. The topic of kernel development in C++ was initially raised in 2018 by an engineer from Red Hat, who published it as an April Fool's joke […]
The Rust Embedded Working Group, established to develop technologies that enhance the quality and safety of applications, firmware, and drivers for embedded systems, has released the first version of the embedded-hal framework. This framework provides a set of software interfaces for interacting with common peripherals used with microcontrollers (for example, type definitions for working with GPIO, UART, SPI, and I2C). The project's developments are written in Rust and are distributed […]
The codebase from which Linux kernel 6.8 is formed has been updated with a set of changes that significantly enhance the performance of the TCP stack. In cases involving a large number of parallel TCP connections, the speedup can reach 40%. This improvement was made possible because variables in the network stack structures (socks, netdev, netns, mibs) were arranged as they were added, a decision based on historical reasons. The rearrangement of variable placement in […]
The release of the PulseAudio 17.0 sound server has been announced, which acts as an intermediary between applications and various low-level sound subsystems, abstracting hardware interactions. PulseAudio allows for volume control and sound mixing at the individual application level, enables the routing, mixing, and output of sound with multiple input and output channels or sound cards, and allows for on-the-fly changes to the sound format […]
After two and a half years of development, the release of the relational database management system Firebird 5.0 has been announced. Firebird continues the development of the InterBase 6.0 database code, which was opened by Borland in 2000. Firebird is distributed under the MPL open-source license and supports ANSI SQL standards, including features such as triggers, stored procedures, and replication. Binary builds are available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and […]
Quietly and discreetly, a new version of the Linux Mint 21.3 distribution has been released under its own name "Virginia" (or Virginiya for fans of the old school) — likely the friendliest and most refined version currently available. Among the key improvements, the developers highlighted enhanced functionality with Secure Boot and various versions of BIOS and UEFI. Additionally, several applications (hypnotix, for example, […]
The release of Linux Mint 21.3 has been announced, continuing the development of the branch based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS package base. The distribution is fully compatible with Ubuntu but significantly differs in its approach to user interface organization and the selection of default applications. The Linux Mint developers provide a desktop environment that adheres to classic desktop organization principles, which is more familiar to users not embracing new […]
The developers of the OpenSSH project have announced plans to discontinue support for keys based on the DSA algorithm. By modern standards, DSA keys do not provide an adequate level of protection, as they use a private key size of only 160 bits and SHA1 hashing, which corresponds in security level to approximately an 80-bit symmetric key. By default, the use of DSA keys was discontinued in 2015, but support […]
Corrective updates for the collaboration platform — GitLab 16.7.2, 16.6.4, and 16.5.6 have been released, addressing two critical vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability (CVE-2023-7028), which has been assigned the highest danger level (10 out of 10), allows for the capture of another user's account through manipulation of the forgot password recovery form. The vulnerability arises from the ability to send an email with a code to reset the password to unconfirmed […]
Details have emerged regarding the attack on the infrastructure used in the development of the PyTorch machine learning framework, which allowed for the extraction of access keys sufficient to host arbitrary data in the project's release repository on GitHub and AWS, as well as to inject code into the main branch of the repository and add a backdoor through dependencies. The alteration of PyTorch releases could have been used to carry out an attack on large companies, […]
On January 9, the official news section of the GNU Hurd project published the final news for Q3 2023: Samuel Thibault fixed the default PIE for gcc and added support for static PIE. He also added the whatis command to the GNU Mach kernel debugger, which can determine what an address points to (stack? port? kalloc?...). There were […]
The release of GodotOS has taken place – an interface for operating systems, fully created in the Godot game engine. GodotOS allows users to work with folders, edit text files, view images, run games, and much more in a streamlined interface that can even be used online. The developers note that GodotOS is more of an experimental toy than a serious project. GodotOS aims to expand […]