Tech News Digest - 2025-03-24

📢 Do you remember Stretch Armstrong?

[$] Lessons from open source in the Mexican government

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 24 Mar 2025 11:49:35 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The adoption of open-source software (FOSS) in governments has had its challenges, despite its potential benefits, due to various reasons for resistance. Federico González Waite shared his experiences working with and for the Mexican government at SCALE 22x, recounting both successful and unsuccessful efforts to switch away from proprietary software companies.
The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He led multiple projects to switch away from proprietary, often predatory, software companies with some success—and failure.
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Security updates for Monday

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:59:42 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Multiple Linux distributions have issued security updates to fix various vulnerabilities, including Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. The updates address issues in libraries and applications such as libxslt, chromium, mercurial, kernel, and more, aimed at improving system security and protecting users from potential threats.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxslt, mercurial, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (chromium, dotnet8.0, ffmpeg, jupyterlab, and kitty), Mageia (expat and libxslt), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (apptainer, chromium, kernel, libarchive, mercurial, python311, radare2, xorg-x11-server, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (golang-github-cli-go-gh-v2 and nltk).
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Three Saturday stable kernels

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Sat, 22 Mar 2025 20:29:38 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three new stable kernels: 6.13.8, 6.12.20, and 6.6.84. These kernels contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, and users using these series should upgrade to ensure they have the latest security patches and bug fixes.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.13.8, 6.12.20, and 6.6.84 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

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[$] OSI election ends with unsatisfying results

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Fri, 21 Mar 2025 21:46:10 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election, with Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith joining the board and Carlo Piana serving another term. However, some have raised concerns about the fairness of the election process, which was marred by missteps and ultimately led to the exclusion of three candidates who didn't meet a newly-added requirement.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three candidates for failing to meet a requirement to sign the OSI board agreement, which was added after the election was over and before results were tallied or announced.

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[$] The guaranteed contiguous memory allocator

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:33:53 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, it becomes increasingly difficult to allocate large, physically contiguous regions of memory. A new patch set, led by Suren Baghdasaryan, aims to improve the kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem to make such allocations more possible and efficient.
As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult. Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot be avoided. The kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible, but it has never been a perfect solution. Suren Baghdasaryan is is trying to improve that situation with the guaranteed contiguous memory allocator patch set, which includes work from Minchan Kim as well.
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