Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports via ZDNet: While Linux and open-source software (OSS) are no longer constantly under intellectual property (IP) attacks, the Open Invention Network (OIN) patent consortium still stands guard over its patents. Now, OIN, the largest patent non-aggression community, has expanded its protection once again by updating its Linux System definition. Covering more than just Linux, the Linux System definition also protects adjacent open-source technologies. In the past, protection was expanded to Android, Kubernetes, and OpenStack. The OIN accomplishes this by providing a shared defensive patent pool of over 3 million patents from over 3,900 community members. OIN members include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and essentially all Linux-based companies.

This latest update extends OIN's existing patent risk mitigation efforts to cloud-native computing and enterprise software. In the cloud computing realm, OIN has added patent coverage for projects such as Istio, Falco, Argo, Grafana, and Spire. For enterprise computing, packages such as Apache Atlas and Apache Solr -- used for data management and search at scale, respectively -- are now protected. The update also enhances patent protection for the Internet of Things (IoT), networking, and automotive technologies. OpenThread and packages such as agl-compositor and kukusa.val have been added to the Linux System definition. In the embedded systems space, OIN has supplemented its coverage of technologies like OpenEmbedded by adding the OpenAMP and Matter, the home IoT standard. OIN has included open hardware development tools such as Edalize, cocotb, Amaranth, and Migen, building upon its existing coverage of hardware design tools like Verilator and FuseSoc.

Keith Bergelt, OIN's CEO, emphasized the importance of this update, stating, "Linux and other open-source software projects continue to accelerate the pace of innovation across a growing number of industries. By design, periodic expansion of OIN's Linux System definition enables OIN to keep pace with OSS's growth." [...] Looking ahead, Bergelt said, "We made this conscious decision not to include AI. It's so dynamic. We wait until we see what AI programs have significant usage and adoption levels." This is how the OIN has always worked. The consortium takes its time to ensure it extends its protection to projects that will be around for the long haul. The OIN practices patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open-source technologies by cross-licensing their Linux System patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. When OIN signees are attacked because of their patents, the OIN can spring into action.

T2's open development process and the collection of exotic, vintage and retro hardware can be followed live on YouTube and Twitch.

Now Slashdot reader ReneR writes: Embedded T2 Linux is known for its sophisticated cross compile features as well as supporting all CPU architectures, including: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), SuperH, x86(64). But now it's going Desktop!

24.6 comes as a major convenience update, with out-of-the-box Windows application compatibility as well as LibreOffice and Thunderbird cross-compiled and in the default base ISO for the most popular CPU architectures.

Continuing to keep Intel IA-64 Itanium alive, a major, up-to-3x performance improvement was found for OpenSSL, doubling crypto performance for many popular algorithms and SSH.

The project's CI unit testing was further expanded to now cover the whole installation in two variants. The graphical desktop defaults were also polished -- and a T2 branded wallpaper was added! ;-) The release contains 606 changesets, including approximately 750 package updates, 67 issues fixed, 80 packages or features added, 21 removed and 9 other improvements.

"Researchers observed a new Linux variant of the TargetCompany ransomware family that targets VMware ESXi environments," reports BleepingComputer: In a report Wednesday, cybersecurity company Trend Micro says that the new Linux variant for TargetCompany ransomware makes sure that it has administrative privileges before continuing the malicious routine... Once on the target system, the payload checks if it runs in a VMware ESXi environment by executing the 'uname' command and looking for 'vmkernel.' Next, a "TargetInfo.txt" file is created and sent to the command and control (C2) server. It contains victim information such as hostname, IP address, OS details, logged-in users and privileges, unique identifiers, and details about the encrypted files and directories. The ransomware will encrypt files that have VM-related extensions (vmdk, vmem, vswp, vmx, vmsn, nvram), appending the ".locked" extension to the resulting files.

Finally, a ransom note named "HOW TO DECRYPT.txt" is dropped, containing instructions for the victim on how to pay the ransom and retrieve a valid decryption key. "After all tasks have been completed, the shell script deletes the payload using the 'rm -f x' command so all traces that can be used in post-incident investigations are wiped from impacted machines."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

"Lansweeper's scans of its customers' networks found an awful lot of Linux boxes facing imminent end of life," reports the Register, "with no direct upgrade path." Belgian corporate network scanner vendor Lansweeper periodically collates some of the statistics collected by its users and publishes the results... This year's report says that while a third of its users' Linux machines run Ubuntu, second place goes to CentOS Linux [with 26.05%].

Back in 2020, Red Hat brought CentOS Linux 8's end of life forward from 2029 to the end of 2021. CentOS Linux 9 was canceled, CentOS Linux 8 is dead and gone, leaving only CentOS Linux 7. As we reported in May, CentOS 7's end of life is very close now — the end of June. After this month, no more updates.

Of course, Red Hat will be happy to help you migrate to RHEL. It offers a free tool to switch boxes' package source, but RHEL 7 hits what Red Hat terms "the end of its maintenance support 2 phase" on the same day. RHEL 7 isn't EOL, but you'll need to pay extra for "Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS)" to keep security fixes coming. Lansweeper seems confident this will happen: "Assuming most of the CentOS devices will migrate over to RHEL, we can expect RHEL to comfortably take over first place from Ubuntu soon."
RHEL was already on 20% of the machines scanned by Lansweeper (with Rocky Linux at 1.5%). But the Register argues that instead of switching to RHEL, "the freeloaders running CentOS Linux might well migrate to one of the RHELatives instead. CIQ publishes guidance on how to migrate to Rocky Linux, and will help if you buy its CIQ Bridge service. AlmaLinux has more than that with its ELevate tool to perform in-place version upgrades, as we described back in 2022.

"Or, of course, you could just reinstall with Debian, and run anything you can't immediately reprovision in a free RHEL container image."

"The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical security bug in Linux to its list of vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited in the wild," reported Ars Technica on Friday.

"The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges." It's the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation. The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations... It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.

A deep-dive write-up of the vulnerability reveals that these exploits provide "a very powerful double-free primitive when the correct code paths are hit." Double-free vulnerabilities are a subclass of use-after-free errors...

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud. Stephen Smoogen of Red Hat wrote a blog post today around 5+ million more EPEL-7 systems beginning in March. Fedora hosts the packaging mirrors for Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux (EPEL) to augment the package selection available on RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, etc.

The past three months now there has been a 5+ million surge in Fedora/EPEL traffic and it's placed a strain on the systems. It's about doubling the number of unique IPs connecting to the mirror system. The massive uptick in Fedora/EPEL activity puts additional pressure on Fedora web proxies for mirror data and then the mirrors themselves that tend to be volunteer run. Much of this new traffic is coming from the Amazon/AWS cloud.

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has officially released the optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a credit-card-sized RISC-V single board computer (SBC) developed by Shenzhen MilkV Technology Co., Ltd.

The Milk-V Mars is the world's first high-performance RISC-V SBC of its size. Powered by the StarFive JH7110 quad-core processor, the board is equipped with up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory and supports various modern interfaces, including USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0 for 4K output, and Ethernet with PoE capabilities. It also offers comprehensive expansion options with M.2 E-Key and extensive MIPI CSI channels, making it an ideal choice for developers and tech enthusiasts.

"Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing," reports Phoronix: The mseal system call was led by Jeff Xu of Google's Chrome team. The goal with memory sealing is to also protect the memory mapping itself against modification. The new mseal Linux documentation explains:

"Modern CPUs support memory permissions such as RW and NX bits. The memory permission feature improves security stance on memory corruption bugs, i.e. the attacker can't just write to arbitrary memory and point the code to it, the memory has to be marked with X bit, or else an exception will happen. Memory sealing additionally protects the mapping itself against modifications. This is useful to mitigate memory corruption issues where a corrupted pointer is passed to a memory management system... Memory sealing can automatically be applied by the runtime loader to seal .text and .rodata pages and applications can additionally seal security-critical data at runtime. A similar feature already exists in the XNU kernel with the VM_FLAGS_PERMANENT flag and on OpenBSD with the mimmutable syscall."

The mseal system call is designed to be used by the likes of the GNU C Library "glibc" while loading ELF executables to seal non-writable memory segments or by the Google Chrome web browser and other browsers for protecting security sensitive data structures.

"The fact it's possible at all is a credit to the ingenuity of the open-source community," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: Switchroot is an open-source project that allows Android and Linux-based distros like Ubuntu to run on the Nintendo Switch — absolutely not something Nintendo approves of much less supports, endorses, or encourages, etc! I covered the loophole that made this possible back in 2018. Back then the NVIDIA Tegra X1-powered Nintendo Switch was still new and Linux support for much of the console's internal hardware in a formative state (a polite way to say 'not everything worked'). But as the popularity of Nintendo's handheld console ballooned (to understate it) so the 'alternative OS' Switch scene grew, and before long Linux support for Switch hardware was in full bloom...

A number of Linux for Switchroot (L4S) distributions have since been released, designated as Linux for Tegra (L4T) builds. As these can boot from a microSD card it's even possible to dualboot the Switch OS with Linux, which is neat! Recently, a fresh set of L4T Ubuntu images were released based on the newest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release. These builds work on all Switch versions, from the OG (exploit-friendly) unit through to newer, patched models (where a modchip is required)...

I'm told all of the Nintendo Switch internal hardware now works under Linux, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sleep mode, accelerated graphics, the official dock... Everything, basically. And despite being a 7 year old ARM device the performance is said to remain decent.
"Upstream snafus have delayed the release of builds with GNOME Shell..."

This week Red Hat announced one of America's leading pediatric hospitals is using AI to analyze X-rays, "to improve image quality and the speed and accuracy of image interpretation."

Red Hat's CTO said the move exemplifies "the positive impact AI can have in the healthcare field". Before Boston Children's Hospital began piloting AI in radiology, quantitative measurements had to be done manually, which was a time-consuming task. Other, more complex image analyses were performed completely offline and outside of the clinical workflow. In a field where time is of the essence, the hospital is piloting Red Hat OpenShift via the ChRIS Research Integration Service, a web-based medical image platform. The AI application running in ChRIS on the Red Hat OpenShift foundation has the potential to automatically examine x-rays, identify the most valuable diagnostic images among the thousands taken and flag any discrepancies for the radiologist. This decreases the interpretation time for radiologists.
But it also seems to be a big win for openness: Innovation developed internally is immediately transferable to public research clouds such as the Massachusetts Open Cloud, where large-scale data sharing and additional innovation can be fostered. Boston Children's Hospital aims to extend the reach of advanced healthcare solutions globally through this approach, amplifying their impact on patient well-being worldwide.
"Red Hat believes open unlocks the world's potential," the announcement concludes, "including the potential to share knowledge and build upon each other's discoveries. Additionally, Red Hat believes innovation — including AI — should be available everywhere, making any application, anywhere a reality.

"With open source, enabling AI-fueled innovation across hybrid IT environments that can lead to faster clinical breakthroughs and better patient outcomes is a reality."

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. Most notable with today's RISC-V merge to Linux 6.10 is now supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel. RISC-V joins the likes of x86_64, LoongArch, and ARM64 already supporting the use of the in-kernel Rust language support. The use of Rust within the mainline Linux kernel is still rather limited with just a few basic drivers so far and a lot of infrastructure work taking place, but there are a number of new drivers and other subsystem support on the horizon. RISC-V now supporting Rust within the Linux kernel will become more important moving forward.

The RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 also add byte/half-word compare-and-exchange, support for Zihintpause within hwprobe, a PR_RISCV_SET_ICACHE_FLUSH_CTX prctl(), and support for lockless lockrefs. More details on these RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 via this Git merge.

Longtime Slashdot reader DVega shares a report from Phoronix: ReiserFS lead developer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser a few months back wrote letters to be made public apologizing for his social mistakes and other commentary. In his written communications he also made a last request for ReiserFS in the Linux kernel: "Assuming that the decision is to remove [ReiserFS] V3 from the kernel, I have just one request: that for one last release the README be edited to add Mikhail Gilula, Konstantin Shvachko, and Anatoly Pinchuk to the credits, and to delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited. It is time to let go."

Hans credits his improved social and communication skills learned in prison among other details shared in the public letters. Per the indirect request by Hans Reiser, SUSE's Jan Kara has now altered the ReiserFS README file with the changes going in today to the Linux 6.10 kernel. The negative language was removed and instead acknowledging their contributions.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog OMG Ubuntu: Ubuntu first switched to using Wayland as its default display server in 2017 before reverting the following year. It tried again in 2021 and has stuck with it since. But while Wayland is what most of us now log into after installing Ubuntu, anyone doing so on a PC or laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card present instead logs into an Xorg/X11 session.

This is because NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers (which many, especially gamers, opt for to get the best performance, access to full hardware capabilities, etc) have not supported Wayland as well as as they could've. Past tense as, thankfully, things have changed in the past few years. NVIDIA's warmed up to Wayland (partly as it has no choice given that Wayland is now standard and a 'maybe one day' solution, and partly because it wants to: opportunities/benefits/security).

With the NVIDIA + Wayland sitch' now in a better state than before — but not perfect — Canonical's engineers say they feel confident enough in the experience to make the Ubuntu Wayland session default for NVIDIA graphics card users in Ubuntu 24.10.

Jeremy Allison — Sam (Slashdot reader #8,157) is a Distinguished Engineer at Rocky Linux creator CIQ. This week he published a blog post responding to promises of Linux distros "carefully selecting only the most polished and pristine open source patches from the raw upstream open source Linux kernel in order to create the secure distribution kernel you depend on in your business."

But do carefully curated software patches (applied to a known "frozen" Linux kernel) really bring greater security? "After a lot of hard work and data analysis by my CIQ kernel engineering colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple, we finally have an answer to this question. It's no." The data shows that "frozen" vendor Linux kernels, created by branching off a release point and then using a team of engineers to select specific patches to back-port to that branch, are buggier than the upstream "stable" Linux kernel created by Greg Kroah-Hartman. How can this be? If you want the full details the link to the white paper is here. But the results of the analysis couldn't be clearer.

- A "frozen" vendor kernel is an insecure kernel. A vendor kernel released later in the release schedule is doubly so.

- The number of known bugs in a "frozen" vendor kernel grows over time. The growth in the number of bugs even accelerates over time.

- There are too many open bugs in these kernels for it to be feasible to analyze or even classify them....

[T]hinking that you're making a more secure choice by using a "frozen" vendor kernel isn't a luxury we can still afford to believe. As Greg Kroah-Hartman explicitly said in his talk "Demystifying the Linux Kernel Security Process": "If you are not using the latest stable / longterm kernel, your system is insecure."
CIQ describes its report as "a count of all the known bugs from an upstream kernel that were introduced, but never fixed in RHEL 8." For the most recent RHEL 8 kernels, at the time of writing, these counts are: RHEL 8.6 : 5034 RHEL 8.7 : 4767 RHEL 8.8 : 4594

In RHEL 8.8 we have a total of 4594 known bugs with fixes that exist upstream, but for which known fixes have not been back-ported to RHEL 8.8. The situation is worse for RHEL 8.6 and RHEL 8.7 as they cut off back-porting earlier than RHEL 8.8 but of course that did not prevent new bugs from being discovered and fixed upstream....

This whitepaper is not meant as a criticism of the engineers working at any Linux vendors who are dedicated to producing high quality work in their products on behalf of their customers. This problem is extremely difficult to solve. We know this is an open secret amongst many in the industry and would like to put concrete numbers describing the problem to encourage discussion. Our hope is for Linux vendors and the community as a whole to rally behind the kernel.org stable kernels as the best long term supported solution. As engineers, we would prefer this to allow us to spend more time fixing customer specific bugs and submitting feature improvements upstream, rather than the endless grind of backporting upstream changes into vendor kernels, a practice which can introduce more bugs than it fixes.
ZDNet calls it "an open secret in the Linux community." It's not enough to use a long-term support release. You must use the most up-to-date release to be as secure as possible. Unfortunately, almost no one does that. Nevertheless, as Google Linux kernel engineer Kees Cook explained, "So what is a vendor to do? The answer is simple: if painful: Continuously update to the latest kernel release, either major or stable." Why? As Kroah-Hartman explained, "Any bug has the potential of being a security issue at the kernel level...."

Although [CIQ's] programmers examined RHEL 8.8 specifically, this is a general problem. They would have found the same results if they had examined SUSE, Ubuntu, or Debian Linux. Rolling-release Linux distros such as Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed constantly release the latest updates, but they're not used in businesses.
Jeremy Allison's post points out that "the Linux kernel used by Android devices is based on the upstream kernel and also has a stable internal kernel ABI, so this isn't an insurmountable problem..."

"6.9 is now out," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux kernel mailing list, "and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)."

Phoronix writes that Linux 6.9 "has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version." And Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux: Highlights of Linux kernel 6.9 include Rust support on AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, support for the Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism for improved low-level event delivery, support for AMD SNP (Secure Nested Paging) guests, and a new dm-vdo (virtual data optimizer) target in device mapper for inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, and thin provisioning.

Linux kernel 6.9 also supports the Named Address Spaces feature in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) that allows the compiler to better optimize per-CPU data access, adds initial support for FUSE passthrough to allow the kernel to serve files from a user-space FUSE server directly, adds support for the Energy Model to be updated dynamically at run time, and introduces a new LPA2 mode for ARM 64-bit processors...

Linux kernel 6.9 will be a short-lived branch supported for only a couple of months. It will be succeeded by Linux kernel 6.10, whose merge window has now been officially opened by Linus Torvalds. Linux kernel 6.10 is expected to be released in mid or late September 2024.
"Rust language has been updated to version 1.76.0 in Linux 6.9," according to the article. And Linus Torvalds shared one more details on the Linux kernel mailing list.

"I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too."