[$] Giving Rust a chance for in-kernel codecs
Video playback is undeniably one of the most important
features in modern consumer devices. Yet, surprisingly, users are by and large
unaware of the intricate engineering involved in the compression and
decompression of video data, with codecs being left to find a delicate balance
between image quality, bandwidth, and power consumption. In response to constant
performance pressure, video codecs have become complex and hardware
implementations are now common, but programming these devices is becoming
increasingly difficult and fraught with opportunities for exploitation. I hope
to convey how Rust can help fix this problem.
[$] Support for the TSO memory model on Arm CPUs
At the CPU level, a memory model describes, among other
things, the amount of freedom the processor has to reorder memory operations.
If low-level code does not take the memory model into account, unpleasant
surprises are likely to follow. Naturally, different CPUs offer different
memory models, complicating the portability of certain types of concurrent
software. To make life easier, some Arm CPUs offer the ability to emulate the
x86 memory model, but efforts to make that feature available in the kernel are
running into opposition.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (knot-resolver,
pdns-recursor, and putty), Fedora (xen), Mageia (editorconfig-core-c, glibc,
mbedtls, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (buildah), Red Hat (buildah and yajl),
Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (dcmtk, openCryptoki, php7, php74, php8, python-
gunicorn, python-idna, qemu, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cryptojs, freerdp2,
nghttp2, and zabbix).
[$] Python JIT stabilization
On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT
Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-
patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the
PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a
non-experimental part of Python.
The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a
conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised questions
about how the JIT would fit into future iterations of the Python language.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) released
Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu distribution is out.
This release continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest
and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use
Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together
with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix
bugs.
The list of changes and enhancements is long; click below for some
details.
More information can be found in the release notes; see also this
page for a summary of security-related changes.