corbet

The long-running and sometimes acrimonious discussion on the memory folio patch set has come to an end:
the folio patches were the first thing pulled into the mainline repository
for the 5.16 development cycle. Now the developers involved just …

The 5.15 kernel was released on
October 31, with the code name appropriately changed to “Trick or
Treat”. By that time, 12,377 non-merge changesets had been merged into the
mainline, adding a net total of 332,000 lines of code. Read on fo…

The latest branded and trademarked vulnerability type is called “Trojan Source”. By playing tricks
with Unicode bidirectional support, an attacker can create malicious code
that appears to be benign to reviewers. “The attack is to use
control …

Linus has released the 5.15 kernel after
another nine-week development cycle.

This release may have started out with some -Werror pain, but it
calmed down fairly quickly and on the whole 5.15 was fair small and
calm. Let’s hope for more of …

For all of you youngsters out there, the Internet has always been
omnipresent, computers are something you carry in your pocket, the Unix
wars are about as relevant as the War of 1812, and the term “NIS” doesn’t
ring a bell. But, for a certain …

One does not normally expect to see a great deal of angst over a one-page
shell script, even on the Internet. But Debian is special, so it has been
having an extended discussion over the fate of the which command
that has been escalated to the …

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 28, 2021 is available.

For those of you still using the X.org display server, version 21.1 is
out. It includes “fully mature” meson build support, Glamor
support in Xvfb, variable refresh rate support, touchpad gestures, and
more.

The 5.15-rc7 kernel prepatch is out, rather
later than would have normally been expected due to Linus’s travel schedule.

But please do give it a good testing to make sure we’ve shaken out
any issues. I have yet more travel coming up next wee…

Memory management is a balancing act in a number of ways. The kernel must
balance the needs of current users of memory with anticipated future needs,
for example. The kernel must
also balance the act of reclaiming memory for other uses, which…