Tech News Digest - 2025-04-24

📢 You can't prove it won't happen

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 24, 2025

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:47:45 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the content in 2 sentences:

The LWN.net Weekly Edition features articles on various topics such as UID/GID drift, DMA for UIO, and coverage of the LSFMM+BPF 2025 conference. The edition also includes briefs on news from the EU OS, RISC-V Fedora, Ubuntu 25.04, and more, as well as announcements on newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and other industry developments.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Owen Le Blanc and MCC; UID/GID drift; DMA for UIO; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: EU OS; RISC-V Fedora; Ubuntu 25.04; NLnet funding; Template strings; Tor Browser 14.5; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

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[$] Addressing UID/GID drift in rpm-ostree and bootc

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:05:31 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

The Fedora Project is looking for solutions to an issue called "UID/GID drift" that can occur when dynamic user or group accounts are created during installation of image-based editions, such as Atomic Desktops and CoreOS. This issue can cause files to have incorrect ownership after updates, leading to problems ranging from minor inconveniences to serious issues.

The Fedora Project is looking for solutions to an interesting problem with its image-based editions and spins, such as the Atomic Desktops or CoreOS, that are created with rpm-ostree or bootc. If a package that is part of a image-based version has a user or group created dynamically on installation, and it owns files installed on the system, the system may be subject to user ID (UID) and group ID (GID) "drift" on updates. This "UID/GID drift" may come about when a new image with updates is generated, and therefore files may have the wrong ownership. This can have side-effects ranging from mildly inconvenient to serious. No solutions have been adopted just yet, but there are a few ideas on how to deal with the problem.

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## NLnet announces funding for 42 FOSS projects Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:16:54 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences: The NLnet Foundation has announced the selection of 42 projects that will receive funding from its October call for grant proposals from the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund, which aims to reclaim the public nature of the internet. The funded projects include open hardware initiatives, such as tablets and motherboards, as well as efforts to enable running open-source language models locally on programmable chips and developing a next-generation filesystem for Linux.

The NLnet Foundation has announced the projects that have received funding from its October call for grant proposals from the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.

The selected projects all contribute, one way or another, to the mission of the Commons Fund: reclaiming the public nature of the internet. For example, there are people working on interesting open hardware projects such as the tablet MNT Reform Touch and the Solar FemtoTX motherboard — a collaborative effort to create an ultra-low power motherboard that can run on solar power. LLM2FPGA aims to enable running open source LLMs locally on programmable chips ("FPGAs") using a fully open-source toolchain. bcachefs readies itself as the next generation filesystem for Linux, improving performance, scalability and reliability when compared to legacy filesystems.

In all, 42 projects have been selected for the NGI grants which are between €5,000 and €50,000. See the announcement for the full list of selected projects, and the current projects page for other recent projects funded by NLnet.

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[$] VFS write barriers

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:32:41 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Amir Goldstein discussed "write barriers" at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, which would allow in-flight writes to complete before blocking new writes, without freezing the filesystem. The idea has potential use cases beyond its current implementation in a hierarchical storage management system, and Goldstein sought input on implementation options and an API for user-space applications.
In the filesystem track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Amir Goldstein wanted to resume discussing a feature that he had briefly introduced at the end of a 2023 summit session: filesystem "write barriers". The idea is to have an operation that would wait for any in-flight write() system calls, but not block any new write() calls as bigger hammers, such as freezing the filesystem, would do. His prototype implementation is used by a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system to create a crash-consistent change log, but there may be other use cases to consider. He wanted to discuss implementation options and the possibility of providing an API for user-space applications.
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Security updates for Wednesday

Category: Linux
Tags: General
Published: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:10:12 +0000
TL;DR: Here is a 2-sentence summary:

Various Linux distributions have released security updates to address vulnerabilities, including AlmaLinux, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. The updates cover a range of packages, such as bluez, expat, chromium, ruby, and more, across multiple distribution versions and cloud providers.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bluez, expat, and postgresql:12), Fedora (chromium, golang, LibRaw, moodle, openiked, ruby, and trafficserver), Red Hat (bluez, expat, gnutls, libtasn1, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, ruby:3.1, thunderbird, and xmlrpc-c), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, linux-oem-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-gcp-6.8, and matrix-synapse).
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