Tech News Digest - 2025-03-26

Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 15:07:50 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Roland Clobus, a Debian developer, announced that live images for Debian 12.10 ("bookworm") are now 100% reproducible. The reproducibility of these images can be found on the Debian wiki's reproducible live images and Debian Live todo pages.

In a short note to the Reproducible Builds mailing list, Debian developer Roland Clobus announced that live images for Debian 12.10 ("bookworm") are now 100% reproducible. See the reproducible live images and Debian Live todo pages on the Debian wiki for more information on the images.

[Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1015402/)

[$] The state of the page in 2025

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:26:26 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The "folio transition" is a fundamental change to the Linux kernel that is akin to rebuilding the foundation of a building while it remains in use. At the annual Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit in 2025, Matthew Wilcox gave an update on the state of this transition, discussing what has been accomplished, what remains to be done, and the significant problems that have arisen.
The folio transition is one of the most fundamental kernel changes ever made; it can be thought of as being similar to replacing the foundation of a building while it remains open for business. So it is not surprising that, for some years, the annual Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit has included a session on the state of this transition. The 2025 Summit was no exception, with Matthew Wilcox updating the group on what has been accomplished, what remains to be done, and where some of the significant problems are.
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Security updates for Wednesday

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:17:42 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Several Linux distributions have released security updates to patch vulnerabilities in various software packages. The affected distributions are Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, which have issued updates for packages such as nginx, ruby-rack, expat, libxslt, bluez, and others.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (nginx and ruby-rack), Fedora (expat and libxslt), Mageia (bluez, dcmtk, ffmpeg, and radare2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, kernel-rt, libreoffice, and podman), SUSE (buildah, forgejo, gitleaks, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, helm, libxslt, php8, python-gunicorn, and python-Jinja2), and Ubuntu (freerdp2 and varnish).
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Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:20:37 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

The Freedesktop project has announced that it will drop OpenH264 from its SDK for Flatpak applications and runtimes, effective with the release of version 23.08 in April. This change means that some Flatpak apps will lose H.264 playback support unless developers replace OpenH264 with the ffmpeg-full extension, while future releases will include a new codecs-extra extension to provide alternative codec support.

Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy article about the announcement that the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK for Flatpak applications and runtimes.

Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtime version 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with the release scheduled for April, unless application developers replace it with the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime is unaffected, and future releases will include a new codecs-extra extension to replace OpenH264 that includes FFmpeg with support for a number of patented codecs.

Considering all things, I think and hope we made the correct decision and hopefully the new org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra works out. libx264, libx265 and others are built from source and there are no binaries or extra-data involved. So we should theoretically be able to patch and fix any issues that come up in the future.

Apart from all this, I'm slightly worried at the prospects of legal issues cropping up with this setup and also that the new extension contains "too much", but we will have to see where things flow.

[Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1015408/)

[$] Development statistics for 6.14

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:55:40 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Linus Torvalds released the 6.14 kernel, which had only 11,003 non-merge changesets, making it one of the smallest releases in recent times. Despite being relatively small, the 6.14 release still contains many significant changes and marks a milestone compared to previous releases.
By the time that Linus Torvalds released the 6.14 kernel, 11,003 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline, making this one of the smallest releases we have seen in some time. Indeed, one must go back to the 4.0 release, which happened almost exactly ten years ago, to find a release with fewer changesets than 6.14. Even so, "small" is relative, and 6.14 contains a lot of significant changes.
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