[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 6, 2025
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Finding concurrency bugs with sched_ext; Rust abstractions; 6.14 Merge
window; Sealed system mappings; OpenSUSE board; Julia; Site tour.
Briefs: Binutils 2.44; Firefox 135.0; Freedesktop GitLab; GNU C Library 2.41;
GTK; Servo; Thunderbird updates; Sanctions; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and
more.
Servo in 2024: stats, features and donations
The Servo Rust-based rendering engine project has published
an article summarizing its progress in 2024, and plans for the future:
Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been upgraded,
the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for floats, tables,
flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT
subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under active development:
WebGPU, Shadow DOM, ReadableStream, WebXR, ... Servo now supports two new
platforms: Android and OpenHarmony. And we have got the first experiments of
applications using Servo as a web engine (like Tauri, Blitz, QtWebView, Cuervo,
Verso and Moto).
LWN site tour 2025
Over the past year or so, LWN has added a number of useful
new features for our subscribers to enhance the experience of reading and
commenting on our content. Those features are of little use, however, to readers
who do not know about them. It has been more than a decade since we last
provided a tour of the site—it seems that another is in order. Walk this
way for a look at the LWN kernel source database (KSDB), enhanced commenting
features, EPUB downloads, and more.
[$] Exposing concurrency bugs with a custom scheduler
Jake Hillion gave a presentation at FOSDEM about using
sched_ext, the BPF scheduling framework that was introduced in kernel version
6.12, to help find elusive concurrency problems. In collaboration with Johannes
Bechberger, he has built a scheduler that can reveal theoretically possible but
unobserved concurrency bugs in test code in a few minutes. Since their scheduler
only relies on mainline kernel features, it can theoretically be applied to any
application that runs on Linux — although there are a number of caveats since
the project is still in its early days.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr),
Fedora (fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libreoffice), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE
(google-osconfig-agent, grafana, helm, and rime-schema-all), and Ubuntu (linux-
azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-23,
openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).