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Cockpit is an interesting project for web-based Linux administration that has received relatively little attention over the years. Part of that may be due to the project's strategy of minor releases roughly every two weeks, rather than larger releases with many new features. While the strategy has done little to garner headlines, it has delivered a useful and extensible tool to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Linux servers.

The Python project has announced three security releases, 3.10.14, 3.9.19, and 3.8.19. In addition to the security fixes, these releases are notable for two reasons; they are the first to make use of GitHub Actions to perform public builds instead of building artifacts "on a local computer of one of the release managers", and the first since Python became a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA).

Python release team member Łukasz Langa said that being a CNA means Python is able to "ensure the quality of the vulnerability reports is high, and that the severity estimates are accurate." It also allows Python to coordinate CVE announcements with the patched versions of Python, as it has with two CVEs addressed in these releases. CVE-2023-6597 describes a flaw in CPython's zipfile module that made it vulnerable to a zip-bomb exploit. CVE-2024-0450 is an issue with Python's tempfile.TemporaryDirectory class which could be exploited to modify permissions of files referenced by symbolic links. Users of affected versions should upgrade soon.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (fontforge and imagemagick), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (cherrytree, python-django, qpdf, and sqlite3), Red Hat (bind, cups, emacs, fwupd, gmp, kernel, libreoffice, libX11, nodejs, opencryptoki, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql:10, postgresql:13, and ruby:3.1), Slackware (gnutls and mozilla), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, and linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15).

There are a number of different language-enhancement ideas that crop up with some regularity in the Python community; many of them have been debated and shot down multiple times over the years. When one inevitably arises anew, it can sometimes be difficult to tamp it down, even if it is unlikely that the idea will go any further than the last N times it cropped up. A recent discussion about "real" anonymous functions follows a somewhat predictable path, but there are still reasons to participate in vetting these "new" ideas, despite the tiresome, repetitive nature of the exercise—examples of recurring feature ideas that were eventually adopted definitely exist.

Version 124.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include support for "caret browsing mode" in the PDF viewer and the ability to control the sorting of tabs in the Firefox View screen.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti, postgresql-11, and zfs-linux), Fedora (freeimage, mingw-expat, and mingw-freeimage), Mageia (apache-mod_security-crs, expat, and multipath-tools), Oracle (.NET 7.0 and kernel), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and kpatch-patch), and Ubuntu (bash, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, and vim).

Man Yue Mo explains how to compromise a Pixel 8 phone even when the Arm memory-tagging extension is in use, by taking advantage of the Mali GPU.

So, by using the GPU to access physical addresses directly, I'm able to completely bypass the protection that MTE offers. Ultimately, there is no memory safe code in the code that manages memory accesses. At some point, physical addresses will have to be used directly to access memory.

Kernel developers have long been told that any attempt to allocate memory might fail, so their code must be prepared for memory to be unavailable. Informally, though, the kernel's memory-management subsystem implements a policy whereby requests below a certain size will not fail (in process context, at least), regardless of how tight memory may be. A recent discussion on the linux-mm list has looked at the idea of making the "too small to fail" rule a policy that developers can rely on.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, spip, and unadf), Fedora (chromium, iwd, opensc, openvswitch, python3.6, shim, shim-unsigned-aarch64, and shim-unsigned-x64), Mageia (batik, imagemagick, irssi, jackson-databind, jupyter-notebook, ncurses, and yajl), Oracle (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, and dnsmasq), Red Hat (postgresql:10), SUSE (chromium, kernel, openvswitch, python-rpyc, and tiff), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8).

Cranelift is an Apache-2.0-licensed code-generation backend being developed as part of the Wasmtime runtime for WebAssembly. In October 2023, the Rust project made Cranelift available as an optional component in its nightly toolchain. Users can now use Cranelift as the code-generation backend for debug builds of projects written in Rust, making it an opportune time to look at what makes Cranelift different. Cranelift is designed to compete with existing compilers by generating code more quickly than they can, thanks to a stripped-down design that prioritizes only the most important optimizations.

Zach Mitchell has announced the 1.0 release of Flox, a tool that lets its users install packages from nixpkgs inside portable virtual environments, and share those virtual environments with others as an alternative to Docker-style containers. Flox is based on Nix but allows users to skip learning how to work with the Nix language:

With Flox we're providing a substantially better user experience. We provide the suite of package manager functionality with install, uninstall, etc, but we also provide an entire new suite of functionality with the ability to share environments via flox push, flox pull, and flox activate --remote.

Flox is GPLv2-licensed, and releases are available as RPMs and Debian packages for x86_64 and arm64 systems.

Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.8.1, 6.7.10, 6.6.22, 6.1.82, 5.15.152, 5.10.213, 5.4.272, and 4.19.310 stable kernels. As always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (composer and node-xml2js), Fedora (baresip), Mageia (fonttools, libgit2, mplayer, open-vm-tools, and packages), Red Hat (dnsmasq, gimp:2.8, and kernel-rt), and SUSE (389-ds, gdb, kernel, python-Django, python3, python36-pip, spectre-meltdown-checker, sudo, and thunderbird).

As of this writing, just over 4,900 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for the 6.9 release. This work includes the usual array of changes all over the kernel tree; read on for a summary of the most significant work merged during the first part of the 6.9 merge window.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and openvswitch), Fedora (chromium, python-multipart, thunderbird, and xen), Mageia (java-17-openjdk and screen), Red Hat (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, postgresql:13, and postgresql:15), Slackware (expat), SUSE (glibc, python-Django, python-Django1, sudo, and vim), and Ubuntu (expat, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-lowlatency, linux-raspi, python-cryptography, texlive-bin, and xorg-server).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 14, 2024 is available.

Kaitlyn Abdo of Fedora's AI/ML SIG opened an issue with the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) recently that carried a few tricky questions about packaging machine-learning (ML) models for Fedora. Specifically, the SIG is looking for guidance on whether pre-trained weights for PyTorch constitute code or content. And, if the models are released under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), does it matter what data the models were trained on? The issue was quickly tossed over to Fedora's legal mailing list and sparked an interesting discussion about how to handle these items, and a temporary path forward.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (edk2, freeipa, kernel, and liblas), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (docker, edk2, kernel, kernel-rt, and kpatch-patch), SUSE (axis, fontforge, gnutls, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, python3, sudo, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (dotnet7, dotnet8, libgoogle-gson-java, openssl, and ovn).

The pidfd abstraction is a Linux-specific way of referring to processes that avoids the race conditions inherent in Unix process ID numbers. Since a pidfd is a file descriptor, it needs a filesystem to implement the usual operations performed on files. As the use of pidfds has grown, they have stressed the limits of the simple filesystem that was created for them. Christian Brauner has created a new filesystem for pidfds that seems likely to debut in the 6.9 kernel, but it ran into a little bump along the way, demonstrating that things you cannot see can still hurt you.

The mainline kernel has just received a set of commits addressing the "register file data sampling" hardware vulnerability.

RFDS may allow a malicious actor to infer data values previously used in floating point registers, vector registers, or integer registers. RFDS does not provide the ability to choose which data is inferred

Only Atom cores are affected, but those cores can be found inside a number of processors. See this documentation commit for more information.