[$] Reports from OSPM 2025, day two
The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling
in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as "OSPM") took place on March 18-20, 2025.
Topics discussed on the second day include improvements to device suspend and
resume, the status and future of sched_ext, the scx_lavd scheduler, improving
the efficiency of load balancing, and hierarchical constant bandwidth server
scheduling.
[$] Formally verifying the BPF verifier
The BPF verifier is an increasingly complex and security-
critical piece of code.
When the kinds of people who are apt to work on BPF
see a situation like that, they naturally question whether it's possible to use
formal verification to ensure that the implementation of the code in question is
correct. Santosh Nagarakatte led the first of two extra-long sessions in the BPF
track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit
about his team's work formally verifying the BPF verifier with a custom tool
called Agni.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet9.0,
dropbear, ghostscript, nbdkit, openssh, python-watchfiles, rpm-ostree, yelp,
yelp-xsl, and zsync), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (osbuild-composer),
Slackware (aaa_glibc and mozilla), SUSE (chromedriver, open-vm-tools,
postgresql14, python-cryptography, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws,
linux-hwe-5.4, python, and sqlite3).
Mozilla is shutting down Pocket
Mozilla has announced that it is shutting down Pocket, a
bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla in 2017, this coming July. "Pocket has
helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way
people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects
that better match their browsing habits and online needs."
Home Assistant deprecates the "core" and "supervised" installation modes
Our recent article on Home Assistant observed that the
project emphasizes installations using its own Linux distribution or within
containers. The project has now made that emphasis rather stronger with this
announcement of the deprecation of the "core" and "supervised" installation
modes, which allowed Home Assistant to be installed as an ordinary application
on a Linux system.
These are advanced installation methods, with
only a small percentage of the community opting to use them. If you are
using these methods, you can continue to do so (you can even continue to
update your system), but in six months time, you will no longer be
supported, which I'll explain the impacts of in the next section.
References to these installation methods will be removed from our
documentation after our next release (2025.6).
Support for 32-bit Arm and
x86 architectures has also been deprecated.