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Two kernel panel sessions were held last week in San Francisco, one for each of two conferences sharing facilities—and participants. In both cases, the kernel developers making up the panel were asked about various kernel features and developments, both from a historical and future perspective, but each had its own focus as well. The Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) panel was, unsurprisingly, focused on topics of most interest to the embedded community, while the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (LFCS) panel looked at more mainstream kernel concerns. Click below (subscribers only) for a report from the event.

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One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used. It's impressive what can happen when attention is drawn to a problem; the 2.6.30 kernel will contain fixes which seemingly eliminate many of the latencies experienced by ext3 users. This article will look at the changes that were made, including a surprising change to the default journaling mode made just before the 2.6.30-rc1 release.

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Given the ubiquity of Git as a version control system throughout the free software community, one would expect there to be more books about it. So far, that is not the case—though there are indications that is changing—so Travis Swicegood's Pragmatic Version Control Using Git is welcome for those trying to come up to speed on Git. Click below, subscribers only, for the full review.

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The second and final day of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop was held in San Francisco, California on April 7. Conflicting commitments kept your editor from attending the entire event, but he was able to participate in sessions on solid-state device support, storage topology information, and more. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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The annual Linux kernel summit may gain the most attention, but the size of the kernel community makes it hard to get deeply into subsystem-specific topics at that event. So, increasingly, kernel developers gather for more focused events where some real work can be done. One of those gatherings is the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop; the 2009 workshop began on April 6. Here is your editor's summary of the discussions which took place on the first day. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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There are many things which could be said to be a part of the Unix philosophy. One of those, certainly, is that the operating system should stay out of the user's way to the greatest extent possible, even if said user is intent on doing something harmful. There is a classic quote attributed to Eric Allman: "Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself -- and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure." Recently, some attempts by developers to shorten that rope a bit have run into criticism; click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

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Long, highly-technical, and animated discussion threads are certainly not unheard of on the linux-kernel mailing list. Even by linux-kernel standards, though, the thread that followed the 2.6.29 announcement was impressive. Over the course of hundreds of messages, kernel developers argued about several aspects of how filesystems and block I/O work on contemporary Linux systems. In the end (your editor will be optimistic and say that it has mostly ended), we had a lot of heat - and some useful, concrete results. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

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The Open Source Business Conference, held at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, draws a lot of lawyers, from both corporate legal departments and law firms. Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit is available. Jeff Norman, a partner at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, delivered a talk on "Shims and Shams: Firewalling Proprietary Code in a Copyleft Context." This talk gives some insights into the current thinking on how difficult it can be to create a combined software product using both copyleft and proprietary code. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article by Don Marti.

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Packet filtering and firewalling has a long history in Linux. The first filtering mechanism, called "ipfwadm," was released in 1995 for the 1.2.1 kernel. This code was used until the 2.2.0 stable release (January, 1999), when the new "ipchains" module took over. While ipchains was useful, it only lasted until 2.4.0 (January, 2001), when it, too, was replaced by iptables/netfilter, which remains in the kernel now. If netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy has his way, though, iptables, too, will be gone in the future, replaced by yet another mechanism called "nftables." This article will give an overview of how nftables works, followed by a discussion of the motivations behind this change.

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Sometimes, even the best job can call for extraordinary sacrifices. Even grumpy editorial jobs. Let it never be said that your editor is unwilling to take one for his readers; why else would he choose to spend four hours in the company of around 100 lawyers gathered to talk about software patents? This event, entitled Evaluating software patents, was held on March 19 at the local law school. The conversation was sometimes dry and often painful to listen to, but it did provide an interesting view into how patent attorneys see the software patent regime in the U.S. Click below (subscribers only) for your editor's report.

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Current news

The beta release of PostgreSQL 8.4 is out; the PostgreSQL developers are looking for testers to help find the remaining bugs. There's a lot of new features in this release; see the announcement (click below) for the list of the most important additions.

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CentOS has updated ghostscript (multiple vulnerabilities).

Gentoo has updated ventrilo (denial of service) and F-PROT antivirus (denial of service).

Red Hat has updated php (RHAS2: multiple vulnerabilities) and ghostscript (RHEL3/4, RHEL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated ghostscript (multiple vulnerabilities).

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Free Software Magazine has posted a review of gNewSense for those of you wanting to live a firmware-free life. "Considering the explanations above it is no surprise that using gNewSense is more restricting than using Ubuntu. Missing support for many WLAN cards, missing GLX as well as no Firefox do not make gNewSense more attractive for the user. In order to prevent disappointment it is strongly recommended to read up on hardware support and provided software before the installation."

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The Free Software Foundation has posted a set of audio recordings from the LibrePlanet conference, held on March 21. Speakers included Jeremy Allison, Mako Hill, Rob Savoye, Ciaran O'Riordan, and Richard Stallman.

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Dark Reading reports on a "new" way to install rootkits on a Linux system. "At Black Hat Europe this week in Amsterdam, Anthony Lineberry, senior software engineer for Flexilis, will demonstrate how to hack the Linux kernel by exploiting the driver interface to physically addressable memory in Linux, called /dev/mem." Of course, this attack would be blocked by the STRICT_DEVMEM configuration option, introduced into the mainline kernel in 2.6.25 (and by some distributors prior to that).

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Linus has released the 2.6.30-rc2 prepatch. "New 'microblaze' architecture, a somewhat late 'input' layer merge, a new intel virtual networking driver and some firmware loading updates. And mn10300 and frv moved their header files from include/asm to arch. That accounts for the bulk, but shouldn't affect anybody." The short-form changelog is in the announcement; see the full changelog for all the details.

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The Register looks at an IDC prognostication. "Economic turmoil has always driven change (and sometimes innovation) in the data centre, and this global recession will be no different. This time around, like the recession that started in 2001, it looks like Linux is going to be one of the big beneficiaries."

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Fedora has updated ntop (F10: world-writable log file), pam (F10, F9: denial of service, possible privilege escalation).

Mandriva has updated ntp (arbitrary code execution).

Slackware has updated seamonkey (XSL Transformation vulnerability).

Ubuntu has updated clamav (denial of service).

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Back in November, the Free Software Foundation released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License; this version contained a special escape clause allowing sites like Wikipedia to shift to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. Some months later, the Wikimedia Foundation is voting on whether to make this change. Anybody with at least 25 edits is able to vote; the vote closes on May 3. "The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity."

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In the Linux Graphics Users forum, there is an interview with the Fedora art team, which looks at graphics tools as well as how the art team operates. It also gives some advice that would be useful for others who want to put together such a team for their project. "Nicu Buculei- The general community is contributing indirectly: we try to do everything in the open, publishing the progress of our work and asking for the feedback from the larger community and then using the feedback to improve the graphics. [...] As an example, for Fedora 11 Máirín Duffy conducted an informal survey on her blog and learned that a lot of users prefer a photo realistic wallpaper, so we are trying such an approach for the next release. Since the graphics are included in the Beta release, we are eagerly awaiting for the post-Beta feedback in a few days."

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