Kernel prepatch 6.2-rc7
The 6.2-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
So the 6.2 rc releases are continuing to be fairly small and controlled, to
the point where normally I'd just say that this is the last rc. But since
I've stated multiple times that I'll do an rc8 due to the holiday start of
the release, that's what I'll do.
[$] Constant-time instructions and processor optimizations
Of all the attacks on cryptographic code, timing attacks
may be among the most insidious. An algorithm that appears to be coded
correctly, perhaps even with a formal proof of its correctness, may be
undermined by information leaked as the result of data-dependent timing
differences.
Both Arm and Intel have introduced modes that are intended to
help defend against timing attacks, but the extent to which those modes should
be used in the kernel is still under discussion.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium and
vim), Slackware (openssh), and Ubuntu (lrzip and tiff).
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.5 Community
Version 7.5 of the LibreOffice Community edition is now
available. LibreOffice is, of course, the FOSS desktop office suite;
version 7.5 brings new features to multiple parts of the tool, including
major improvements to dark mode, better PDF exports, improved bookmarks in
Writer, data tables for charts in Calc, better interoperability with Microsoft
Office, and lots more. Check out the release notes for further information.
LibreOffice 7.5 Community's new features have been developed by 144
contributors: 63% of code commits are from the 47 developers employed by three
companies sitting in TDF's Advisory Board - Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia -
or other organizations, 12% are from 6 developers at The Document Foundation,
and the remaining 25% are from 91 individual volunteers.
Other 112
volunteers - representing hundreds of other people providing translations - have
committed localizations in 158 languages. LibreOffice 7.5 Community is released
in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary
software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4
billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of
those 120 languages as their second language (L2).
Ekstrand: Exploring Rust for Vulkan drivers, part 1
Faith Ekstrand begins an exploration of using the Rust
language to write Vulkan graphics drivers.
Whenever a Vulkan object is
created or destroyed, the parent object is passed to both the create and
destroy functions. This ensures that the lifetime of the child object is
contained within the lifetime of the parent object. In Rust terms, this means
it's safe for the child object to contain a non-mutable reference to the
parent object. Vulkan also defines which entrypoint parameters must be
externally synchronized by the client. Externally synchronized objects
follow the same rules as mutable references in Rust.