🚀 Tech News Digest: March 20, 2025 – AI, Linux, Ansible & Automation

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[$] MM medley: huge page allocation, page promotion, KSM, and BPF

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:54:31 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) is approaching, with an increasing number of patches related to memory management being discussed on the mailing lists. These patches aim to improve reliability and performance of huge-page allocation, implement page promotion on tiered-memory systems, add a new deduplication approach, and replace the BPF memory allocator.
As the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) approaches, the density of memory-management patches on the mailing lists has increased. Included among those are patches aimed at improving the reliability and performance of huge-page allocation, implementing page promotion on tiered-memory systems, adding a different approach to deduplicating memory, and replacing the BPF memory allocator. Read on for an overview of each.
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Security updates for Thursday

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:15:56 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Multiple Linux distributions have released security updates to address various vulnerabilities, including Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. The updates affect packages such as PHP, Python, Firefox, Chromium, and others, with specific details varying by distribution.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.4, python-django, and python3.9), Fedora (bluez, iwd, libell, and radare2), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, mosquitto, tomcat, tomcat packages, and vim), Oracle (firefox, grub2, python3, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (fence-agents, php:7.4, and python-jinja2), SUSE (assimp-devel, crane, ffmpeg-4, freetype2, helm, kernel, kured, python-Django, python-Jinja2, python311-Django4, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (alpine, djoser, libxslt, postgresql-9.5, and valkey).
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 20, 2025

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:04:22 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the article in 2 sentences:

The LWN.net Weekly Edition has been published, featuring articles on various topics including Oxidizr, Spectre mitigations, frozen pages, open-source risks, and /e/OS. Additionally, the edition includes brief summaries of recent news items, such as supply chain attacks, new software releases, and security updates.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: Oxidizr; Spectre mitigations; Frozen pages; Mapcount madness; Open-source risks; /e/OS.
Briefs: Supply chain attacks; SystemRescue 12.00; Casual Make; GIMP 3.0; Git 2.49.0; GNOME 48; PeerTube 7.1; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

GNOME 48 released

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 18:14:05 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

GNOME 48, also known as "Bengaluru", has been released with several new features and enhancements, including support for shortcuts in the Orca screen reader on Wayland, new fonts, and image editing capabilities in Image Viewer. Additionally, the release includes notable performance improvements, such as dynamic triple buffering, which improves the perceived smoothness of changes on screen and enhances Mutter's concurrency capabilities.

GNOME 48 ("Bengaluru") has been released. As usual, this release includes a number of new features and enhancements including support for shortcuts in the Orca screen reader on Wayland, new fonts, addition of image editing to Image Viewer, and more.

GNOME 48 includes a number of notable performance improvements. The most significant of these is the introduction of dynamic triple buffering. This change has undergone significant review and testing over a period of five years and improves the perceived smoothness of changes on screen, with fewer skipped frames and more fluid animations. This has been achieved by enhancing the concurrency capabilities of Mutter, the GNOME display manager, and is particularly effective at handling sudden bursts of activity.

The GNOME 48 release also adds new applications to the GNOME Circle collection, such as Drum Machine and the Iotas note-taking application. See "What's new for developers" a rundown of improvements for developers in GNOME 48.

[$] Better CPU vulnerability mitigation configuration

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:45:44 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

The Linux kernel has to mitigate multiple hardware vulnerabilities in modern CPUs, with 14 security-sensitive bugs on x86_64 alone, leading to confusion among users trying to configure their systems. A recent patch set aims to simplify the process by introducing a single unified command-line option for controlling mitigations and streamlining the logic for detecting and applying them.

Modern CPUs all have multiple hardware vulnerabilities that the kernel needs to mitigate; the 6.13 kernel has workarounds for 14 security-sensitive CPU bugs just on x86_64. Several of those have multiple variants, or multiple mitigations that apply on different microarchitectures. There are different kernel command-line options for each of these mitigations, which leads to a confusing situation for users trying to figure out how to configure their systems. David Kaplan recently posted a patch set that adds a single, unified command-line option for controlling mitigations and simplifies the logic for detecting, configuring, and applying them as well. If it is merged, the patch set could make it much easier for users to navigate the complicated web of CPU vulnerabilities and their mitigations.

Tech News Digest - 2025-03-20