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LWN.net

[$] Restartable sequences, TCMalloc, and Hyrum's Law

Hyrum's Law states that any observable behavior of a system will eventually be depended upon by somebody. The kernel community is currently contending with a clear demonstration of that principle. The recent work to address some restartable-sequences performance problems in the 6.19 release maintained the documented API in all respects, but that was not enough; Google's TCMalloc library, as it turns out, violates the documented API, prevents other code from using restartable features, and breaks with 6.19. But the kernel's no-regressions rule is forcing developers to find a way to accommodate TCMalloc's behavior.

LWN.net

GCC 16.1 released

Version 16.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been released. The C++ frontend now defaults to the GNU C++20 dialect and the corresponding parts of the standard library are no longer experimental. Several C++26 features receive experimental support, including Reflection (-freflection), Contracts, expansion statements and std::simd. Other changes include the introduction of an experimental compiler frontend for the Algol68 language, ability to output GCC diagnostics in HTML form, and more.

LWN.net

Seven new stable kernels for Thursday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.0.3, 6.18.26, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254 stable kernels. The 7.0.3 and 6.18.26 kernels only contain fixes needed for Xen users; he advises that all users of the other kernel series must upgrade.

LWN.net

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequoia, skopeo, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Red Hat (buildah, gdk-pixbuf2, and nodejs:20), SUSE (dnsdist, libheif, openCryptoki, polkit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-bluefield, python-marshmallow, and roundcube).

Phoronix

Linux 7.1-rc1 Showing Off Some Wins On AMD Ryzen Threadripper

My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads...

Phoronix

3mdeb Gets More Bits Of AMD openSIL & Coreboot Working On Ryzen AM5 Motherboard

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI PRO B850-P motherboard...