[$] Page allocation for address-space isolation
Address-space isolation may well be, as Brendan Jackman
said at the beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, "some security
bullshit". But it also holds the potential to protect the kernel from a wide
range of vulnerabilities, both known and unknown, while reducing the impact of
existing mitigations. Implementing address-space isolation with reasonable
performance, though, is going to require some significant changes. Jackman was
there to get feedback from the memory-management community on how those changes
should be implemented.
[$] Better hugetlb page-table walking
The kernel must often step through the page tables of one
or more processes to carry out various operations. This "page-table walking"
tends to be performed by ad-hoc (duplicated) code all over the kernel. Oscar
Salvador used a memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit to talk about strategies to unify
the kernel's page-table walking code just a little bit by making hugetlb pages
look more like ordinary pages.
Rust 1.86.0 released
Version 1.86.0 of the Rust language has been released.
Changes include support for trait upcasting, the ability to index multiple
elements of HashMaps and slices mutably, and a number of stabilized APIs.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (expat),
Debian (chromium, commons-vfs, firefox-esr, php-horde-editor, php-horde-imp, and
thunderbird), Fedora (corosync, firefox, nextcloud, and suricata), Mageia (curl
and upx), Oracle (emacs, fence-agents, freetype, kernel, libreoffice, libxml2,
nginx:1.24, podman, python-jinja2, and tigervnc), Red Hat (firefox and python-
jinja2), SUSE (assimp, ffmpeg-4, firefox, ghostscript, GraphicsMagick, libxslt,
and tomcat), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke,
linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-
lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-meta-raspi, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oracle, linux-
oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield,
linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-xilinx-
zynqmp, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.15,
and linux-realtime, linux-intel-iot-realtime).
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 3, 2025
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Calibre 8.0; Fedora reproducibility; OpenWrt One; 6.15 Merge Window;
LSFMM+BPF coverage including BPF in GCC, Rust merging process, and more.
Briefs: Ubuntu namespaces; New FPL; PorteuX 2.0; Firefox 137.0; GCC Rust;
Rockbox 4.0; Rust specification; Thundermail; Dave Täht RIP; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and
more.