Tech News Digest - 2025-04-22

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[$] Indirect calls in BPF

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:27:59 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Anton Protopopov discussed permitting indirect calls in BPF at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, as well as his ongoing work on static keys. The implementation of indirect jumps and static keys in the verifier use similar mechanisms for tracking control-flow, which could make it possible to make indirect calls in BPF without extra effort compared to normal C code.

Anton Protopopov kicked off the BPF track on the second day of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a discussion about permitting indirect calls in BPF. He also spoke about his continuing work on static keys, a topic which is related because the implementation of indirect jumps and static keys in the verifier use some of the same mechanisms for tracking indirect control-flow. Although some design work remains to be done, it may soon be possible to make indirect calls in BPF without any extra work compared to normal C.

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## RISC-V images for Fedora Linux 42 Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:06:25 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences: The Fedora Project's RISC-V special-interest group has announced the availability of Fedora Linux 42 images for supported RISC-V boards, QEMU, and container images, as part of their effort to make RISC-V a primary architecture for Fedora. The group acknowledges the significant progress made possible through collaboration with maintainers across the Fedora Project and beyond, and is excited about the growing compatibility of packages on the RISC-V platform.

The Fedora Project's RISC-V special-interest group (SIG) has announced the availability of Fedora Linux 42 images for supported RISC-V boards, as well as QEMU and container images. The SIG is working toward making RISC-V a primary architecture for Fedora, and has made significant progress in the past year.

Our upstreaming work continues apace, and we want to acknowledge that none of this progress would be possible without the incredible collaboration from maintainers across the Fedora Project and beyond. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, accepted, merged, and built our patches. Your support makes this architecture possible.

We're also excited about just how many packages build cleanly without special treatment or overlay repositories that need to be cared for. RISC-V is becoming just another architecture, and that's exactly how it should be.

Template strings accepted for Python 3.14

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:37:42 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The Python Steering Council accepted PEP 750, also known as "Template Strings", which allows library authors to build custom template-handling logic and produces structured data instead of raw strings. As a result, support for template strings will be included in Python 3.14, scheduled for release in October 2025.

The Python Steering Council accepted PEP 750 ("Template Strings") on April 10. LWN covered the discussion around the proposal, including the substantial revisions to the idea that were needed for it to be accepted. Template strings (t-strings) are a new kind of string that produces structured data instead of a raw string, allowing library authors to build their own custom template-handling logic. Since the approval happened before the cutoff for new features (May 6), support for template strings will be included in Python 3.14, scheduled for October 2025.

[$] Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution

Category: Linux
Tags: Linux
Published: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:05:20 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences:

The first Linux distribution with a proper installer was MCC Interim Linux, created by Owen Le Blanc and released publicly in early 1992. This milestone in Linux history often goes unnoticed, even among enthusiasts who can name Linus Torvalds as the creator of the Linux kernel.

Ask a Linux enthusiast who created the Linux kernel, and odds are they will have no trouble naming Linus Torvalds—but many would be stumped if asked what the first Linux distribution was, and who created it. Some might guess Slackware, or its predecessor, Softlanding Linux System (SLS); both were arguably more influential but arrived just a bit later. The first honest-to-goodness distribution with a proper installer was MCC Interim Linux, created by Owen Le Blanc, released publicly in early 1992. I recently reached out to Le Blanc to learn more about his work on the distribution, what he has been doing since, and his thoughts on Linux in 2025.

Security updates for Monday

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:47:59 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Multiple Linux distributions have issued security updates to fix various vulnerabilities. The affected distributions include Debian, Fedora, Slackware, SUSE, and Ubuntu, with packages such as erlang, chromium, imagemagick, and zabbix among those receiving updates.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (erlang, fig2dev, shadow, wget, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, jupyterlab, llama-cpp, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-notebook, python-pydantic-core, rpki-client, rust-adblock, rust-cookie_store, rust-gitui, rust-gstreamer, rust-icu_collections, rust-icu_locid, rust-icu_locid_transform, rust-icu_locid_transform_data, rust-icu_normalizer, rust-icu_normalizer_data, rust-icu_properties, rust-icu_properties_data, rust-icu_provider, rust-icu_provider_macros, rust-idna, rust-idna_adapter, rust-litemap, rust-ron, rust-sequoia-openpgp, rust-sequoia-openpgp1, rust-tinystr, rust-url, rust-utf16_iter, rust-version-ranges, rust-write16, rust-writeable, rust-zerovec, rust-zip, uv, and webkitgtk), Slackware (libxml2 and zsh), SUSE (argocd-cli, chromium, coredns, ffmpeg-6, and firefox), and Ubuntu (imagemagick).
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Tech News Digest – April 22, 2025