[$] Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default
If all goes according to plan, the Ubuntu project will soon
be replacing many of the traditional GNU utilities with implementations written
in Rust, such as those created by the uutils project, which we covered in
February. Wholesale replacement of core utilities at the heart of a Linux
distribution is no small matter, which is why Canonical's VP of engineering, Jon
Seager, has released oxidizr. It is a command-line utility that helps users
easily enable or disable the Rust-based utilities to test their suitability.
Seager is calling for help with testing and for users to provide feedback with
their experiences ahead of a possible switch for Ubuntu 25.10, an interim
release scheduled for October 2025. So far, responses from the Ubuntu
community seem positive if slightly skeptical of such a major change.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (freetype and
rails), Fedora (mosquitto and python-django4.2), Mageia (libarchive,
libreoffice, php, and quictls), Red Hat (webkit2gtk3), SUSE (erlang, nethack,
python312, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (freetype and plantuml).
GIMP 3.0 released
The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release is now available. Major
changes in 3.0 include non‑destructive editing for most
commonly‑used filters, improved text creation, better color space
management, and an update to GTK 3.
This is the end result of seven
years of hard work by volunteer developers, designers, artists, and community
members (for reference, GIMP 2.10 was first published in 2018 and the initial
development version of GIMP 3.0 was released in 2020).
See the release notes
and NEWS file for more details about this release. LWN covered a near-final
release of GIMP 3.0 in November last year.
SystemRescue 12.00 released
Version 12.00 of the SystemRescue live Linux system has
been released. SystemRescue is an Arch Linux based bootable toolkit for
repairing systems in the event of a crash. Notable changes in this release
include an update to Linux 6.12.19, support for bcachefs, and a number of
updated disk utilities. See the package list for a complete list of software
included in this release.
[$] Looking forward to mapcount madness 2025
One of the many important tasks that the kernel's memory-
management subsystem must handle is keeping track of how pages of memory are
mapped into the address spaces of the processes running on the system. As long
as mappings to a given page exist, that page must be kept in place. As it turns
out, tracking these mappings is harder than it seems it should be, and the move
to folios within the memory-management subsystem is adding some complexities of
its own. As a follow-up to the "mapcount madness" session that he ran at the
2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF summit, David
Hildenbrand has posted a patch series intended to improve the handling of
mapping counts for folios — but exact accounting remains elusive in some
situations.