[$] Toward a real "too small to fail" rule
Kernel developers have long been told that any attempt to
allocate memory might fail, so their code must be prepared for memory to be
unavailable.
Informally, though, the kernel's memory-management subsystem
implements a policy whereby requests below a certain size will not fail (in
process context, at least), regardless of how tight memory may be. A recent
discussion on the linux-mm list has looked at the idea of making the "too small
to fail" rule a policy that developers can rely on.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, spip,
and unadf), Fedora (chromium, iwd, opensc, openvswitch, python3.6, shim, shim-
unsigned-aarch64, and shim-unsigned-x64), Mageia (batik, imagemagick, irssi,
jackson-databind, jupyter-notebook, ncurses, and yajl), Oracle (.NET 7.0, .NET
8.0, and dnsmasq), Red Hat (postgresql:10), SUSE (chromium, kernel, openvswitch,
python-rpyc, and tiff), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8).
[$] Cranelift code generation comes to Rust
Cranelift is an Apache-2.0-licensed code-generation backend
being developed as part of the Wasmtime runtime for WebAssembly.
In October
2023, the Rust project made Cranelift available as an optional component in its
nightly toolchain.
Users can now use Cranelift as the code-generation backend
for debug builds of projects written in Rust, making it an opportune time to
look at what makes Cranelift different.
Cranelift is designed to compete with
existing compilers by generating code more quickly than they can, thanks to a
stripped-down design that prioritizes only the most important
optimizations.
Mitchell: Today we launched Flox 1.0
Zach Mitchell has announced the 1.0 release of Flox, a tool
that lets its users install packages from nixpkgs inside portable virtual
environments, and share those virtual environments with others as an alternative
to Docker-style containers. Flox is based on Nix but allows users to skip
learning how to work with the Nix language: With Flox we're providing a
substantially better user experience. We provide the suite of package manager
functionality with install, uninstall, etc, but we also provide an entire new
suite of functionality with the ability to share environments via flox push,
flox pull, and flox activate --remote.
Flox is GPLv2-licensed, and releases
are available as RPMs and Debian packages for x86_64 and arm64 systems.
Eight stable kernel updates for the weekend
Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.8.1, 6.7.10,
6.6.22, 6.1.82, 5.15.152, 5.10.213, 5.4.272, and 4.19.310 stable kernels. As
always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernels
should upgrade.