corbet

The
5.13.9,
5.10.57,
5.4.139,
4.19.202,
4.14.243,
4.9.279, and
4.4.279
stable kernel updates have been released. Each contains a small set of
important fixes. Users of 4.4 should note that 4.4.280
is already in the review process; it is due on…

The memfd_secret() system call has, in one form or another, been
covered here since February 2020. In the
beginning, it was a flag to memfd_create(),
but its functionality was later moved to a separate system call. There
have been many change…

The Android
12 beta release first appeared in May of this year. As is almost
obligatory, this release features “the biggest design change in
Android’s history”; what’s an Android release without requiring
users to relearn everything? That hist…

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 5, 2021 is available.

The kernel-development community is a busy place, with thousands of emails
flying by every day and many different projects under development at any
given time. Much of
that work ends up inspiring articles at LWN, but there is no way to ever
cov…

Version 2.34 of the GNU C library has been released. Significant changes
include the folding of libpthread, libdl, libutil, and libanl into the main
library, support for 64-bit (year-2038 safe) times on 32-bit systems,
support for the close_ran…

The 5.14-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4”.

The C programming language is famously prone to memory-safety problems
that lead to buffer overflows and a seemingly endless stream of security
vulnerabilities. But, even in C, it is possible to improve the
situation in many cases. One of…

The change in copyright-assignment policy proposed in June for the GNU C Library project
has now
been adopted:

The changes to accept patches with or without FSF copyright
assignment will be effective after August 2nd, and will apply to
all …

Filesystem developers tend to disagree with each other about many things,
but they are nearly unanimous in their dislike for the truncate()
system call, which chops data off the end of a file. Implementing
truncate() tends to be full of traps f…