[$] Warning about WARN_ON()
Kernel developers, like conscientious developers for many
projects, will often include checks in the code for conditions that are never
expected to occur, but which would indicate a serious problem should that
expectation turn out to be incorrect. For years, developers have been
encouraged (to put it politely) to avoid using assertions that crash the machine
for such conditions unless there is truly no alternative. Increasingly, though,
use of the kernel's WARN_ON() family of macros, which developers were told to
use instead, is also being discouraged.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr,
jetty9, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tomcat10, and tzdata), Fedora (cockpit,
filezilla, and libfilezilla), Red Hat (firefox, gnutls, java-1.8.0-openjdk,
java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, less, mod_http2, nodejs:18, rhc-worker-
script, and shim), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (apache2,
glibc, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 18, 2024
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 18, 2024 is
available.
[$] Managing to-do lists on the command line with Taskwarrior
Managing to-do lists is something of a universal necessity.
While some people handle them mentally or on paper, others resort to a web-based
tool or a mobile application. For those preferring the command line, the MIT-
licensed Taskwarrior offers a flexible solution with a healthy community and
lots of extensions.
Four more stable kernels
The 6.8.7, 6.6.28, 6.1.87, and 5.15.156 stable kernel
updates have all been released.