BlogFlock

<p> Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lsfmmbpf/"> Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit</a> with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to…

<p>The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has <a href="https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2026/08/announcing-packaging-council-election.html">announced</a> the <a href="https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2026-python-packaging-council/nominees/">candidates</a> running for the Python packaging council that was <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1068704/">approved by the Python steering council in April</a>.</p> <blockquote class="bq"> <p>This inaugural election fills all five seats on the PPC. The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes shall…

Security updates have been issued by <b>AlmaLinux</b> (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, bind9.16, and dracut), <b>Debian</b> (apr-util, chromium, postgresql-17, python-httplib2, unzip, and zip), <b>Fedora</b> (erlang-cowboy, erlang-cowlib, flatpak, and libnfs), <b>Gentoo</b> (Apache HTTPD, Bubblewrap, Dnsmasq, Exim, Flatpak, libinput, and rsync), <b>Mageia</b> (dhcpcd, qemu, and roundcubemail), <b>Oracle</b> (.NET 8.0, .NET…

<p> Christopher Domas has <a href="https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/skitter-creek-bath-salts#skitter-creek-bath-salts">published</a> a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor"> platform security processor</a>. Among other things,…

<p><a href="https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.5.0">Version 3.5.0</a> of rsync has been released with a <a href="https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#SECURITY_FIXES-3.5.0">huge number of security fixes</a>:</p> <blockquote class="bq"> This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -⁠-⁠ plus several robustness…

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app.…

Security updates have been issued by <b>AlmaLinux</b> (abrt, dhcpcd, edk2, freerdp, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, keylime, libarchive, libyang, nodejs-nodemon, opencryptoki, osbuild-composer, pacemaker, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18, python-idna, python3.9, udisks2, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), <b>Debian</b> (flatpak, lemonldap-ng, neutron, python-django, spip, xdg-dbus-proxy, and xorg-server), <b>Fedora</b> (apr-util, cri-o1.34, libcupsfilters, linux-firmware, sqlite,…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: <p> <ul> <li> <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1087432/">Front</a>: BPF and binfmt_misc; CrossPoint ebook firmware; KVM planes; BPF formal verification; shadow-utils; new storage-code testing features. <li> <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1087434/">Briefs</a>: Django releases; GNOME shell; LightDM 1.33.0; QEMU 11.1; uutils 0.10; Software Stewardship Lab; Quotes; ... <li> <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1087435/">Announcements</a>: Newsletters, conferences,…

<p>Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer <span class="nobreak">I/O</span> errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail,…