Blog Section
On February 6 and 12, the releases of versions 2.0 and 2.0.1 of the lzbench console utility took place, designed for comparing many popular compression and decompression algorithms (a list can be obtained with the command lzbench -l). The utility is written in C and C++ and is distributed under the GNU GPL 2 or GPL 3 license. Change log: return an exit code > 0 in case of failure […]
Mozilla has extended support for the previous ESR branch of Firefox 115 until September 2025 (the support period was set to expire in March). Firefox 115 is the last branch capable of running on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, as well as macOS 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14. It is likely that the life of the Firefox 115 branch will not end in September, as the change note mentions that […]
Christoph Hellwig, maintainer of the DMA, KVM, Slab Allocator subsystems, and PowerPC architecture in the Linux kernel, has fundamentally refused to accept Rust bindings for the DMA subsystem into the kernel and has joined the discussion on the rules for supporting Rust as part of the kernel, published by the Rust for Linux project. In Christoph's opinion, such rules are useless until they are agreed upon with the community and included in […]
The release of the proprietary archiver RAR version 7.10 has taken place. The change list for the console version: 32-bit versions of Linux and FreeBSD for x86 are no longer supported. The name of the environment variable that stores the default set of RAR keys has been changed from RAR to RARINISWITCHES. It is quite typical for batch files to use the environment variable name RAR to store the path to the RAR executable, […]
Developers of the openSUSE distribution have reported successes in the project aimed at ensuring support for reproducible builds. As part of the project, a conceptual fork of the distribution, Reproducible-openSUSE (RBOS), has been prepared, which has achieved the ability to build 100% identical binary packages based on the proposed repository of source texts, totaling 3300 packages. In the course of the work on the project, about 40 patches (1, 2, 3) have been prepared to solve issues with […]
On February 15, version 6.13 of the btrfs-progs console utility set for working with the Btrfs file system in a user environment was released. One significant change in this version is the addition of the --compress option to the mkfs.btrfs utility. With this new option, you can enable and configure the compression algorithm and its level. It should be used in conjunction with the --rootdir argument to specify […]
A corrective release of OpenSSH 9.9p2 has been made available, which addresses two vulnerabilities identified by Qualys. An example of exploiting these vulnerabilities for a MITM attack was demonstrated, allowing traffic intended for an SSH server to be redirected to a malicious server, bypass the host key verification, and create the illusion for the client that they are connected to the desired server (the ssh client will accept the host key of the fake server instead of the key [...])
After nearly a year of development, the release of a new stable branch of the Postfix mail server — 3.10.0 — has been announced. At the same time, support for the Postfix 3.6 branch, released in early 2021, has been discontinued. The project's code is written in C and is distributed under the EPL 2.0 (Eclipse Public License) and IPL 1.0 (IBM Public License). Postfix is one of [...]
A year after the initial attempt to port Firefox to GTK4 made by Martin Stransky, the maintainer of the Firefox packages in Fedora and RHEL, an enthusiast has taken up further development of the initiative. The project is now in the hands of Jens Persson, co-author of the Panucci application for playing podcasts and audiobooks. The work on the port is not yet complete, but the latest in the project repository [...]
Luboš Kocman, responsible for preparing openSUSE releases, announced that SUSE is considering ending BIOS boot support, which would prevent the use of SUSE and openSUSE distributions on systems lacking UEFI support. The desire to discontinue BIOS support is explained by the fact that starting with the SLES 16 and openSUSE Leap 16 releases, package builds will be made for architectures [...]
The release of the wayland-protocols package 1.41 has been published, containing a set of protocols and extensions that enhance the basic Wayland protocol and provide features necessary for building composite servers and user environments. The new version includes the color-management protocol in the 'staging' category, developed since 2014, offering capabilities for color management and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). […]
AMD has announced the resolution of six vulnerabilities in its AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processors. The three most critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-31342, CVE-2023-31343, CVE-2023-31345) potentially allow for custom code execution at the System Management Mode (SMM), which has a higher priority than hypervisor mode and ring zero protection. Compromising SMM grants unrestricted access to all system memory and can […]