corbet

The
5.13.11,
5.10.59,
5.4.141,
4.19.204,
4.14.244,
4.9.280, and
4.4.281
stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively small
number of important fixes.

Device drivers, along with the hardware they control, have long been
considered to be a trusted part of the system. This faith has been under
assault for some time, though, and it fails entirely in some situations,
including virtual machines th…

While it may seem like the number of developers would be the limiting factor
in a free-software project, the truth of the matter is that, for all but
the smallest of project, the scarcest resource is reviewer time. Lots of
people like to crank …

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 12, 2021 is available.

David A. Wheeler lists
some of the security-related projects he is overseeing at the Linux
Foundation. For example:

Ariadne Conill is improving Alpine Linux security, including
significant improvements to its vulnerability processing and ma…

Version
6 of the elementary OS distribution is now available. “It’s been
a long road to elementary OS 6—what with a whole global pandemic dropped on
us in the middle of development—but it’s finally here. elementary OS 6 Odin
is available to dow…

The 4.4.280 stable kernel update is
available; it contains a small set of fixes, mostly focused on the futex
subsystem.

The Firefox
91 release is available. Changes include stronger tracking-cookie
protection, use of HTTPS within anonymous windows whenever possible, and
more.

Traditionally, in virtualized environments, the host is trusted by its
guests, and must
protect itself from potentially malicious guests. With initiatives
like confidential computing, this rule is extended in the other direction: the
guest no lo…

The fifth 5.14 prepatch is out for testing.
“Things are looking perfectly normal. Size is nominal, diffstat looks
pretty normal, and the changes are all in the usual places”