Category Archives: Linux

Defeating KASLR by Doing Nothing at All (Project Zero)

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The Project Zero blog explains
that, on 64-bit Arm systems, the kernel’s direct map is always placed at
the same virtual location, regardless of whether kernel address-space
layout randomization (KASLR) is enabled.

While it remains true that KASLR should not be trusted to prevent
exploitation, particularly in local contexts, it is regrettable
that the attitude around Linux KASLR is so fatalistic that putting
in the engineering effort to preserve its remaining integrity is
not considered to be worthwhile. The joint effect of these two
issues dramatically simplified what might otherwise have been a
more complicated and likely less reliable exploit.

Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0

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Christmas is coming, the GNOME is getting fat… please put a penny in the old red hat?Ubuntu Summit System76’s POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company’s substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent.…

Python steering council accepts lazy imports

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Barry Warsaw, writing for the Python steering council, has announced
that PEP 810 (“Explicit lazy
imports”) has been approved, unanimously, by the four who could vote. Since
Pablo Galindo Salgado was one of the PEP authors, he did not vote. The PEP provides a way to defer importing modules until the names
defined in a module are
needed by other parts of the program. We covered the PEP and the discussion around it
a few weeks back. The council also had “recommendations about some of
the PEP’s details, a few suggestions for filling a couple of small
gaps“, including:

Use lazy as the keyword. We debated many of the given alternatives
(and some we came up with ourselves), and ultimately agreed with the PEP’s
choice of the lazy keyword. The closest challenger was
defer, but once we tried to use that in all the places where the
term is visible, we ultimately didn’t think it was as good an overall
fit. The same was true with all the other alternative keywords we could
come up with, so… lazy it is!

What about from foo lazy import bar? Nope! We like that in both module imports and from-imports that the lazy keyword is the first thing on the line. It helps to visually recognize lazy imports of both varieties.

AXC3000 Starter Kit Highlights Altera Agilex 3 FPGA with HyperRAM and MIPI Support

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Arrow has introduced the AXC3000 Starter Kit, a compact FPGA development platform featuring the first production device from the Altera Agilex 3 family. Following the Agilex 5 AXE5000 devkit, this board provides a smaller form factor and focuses on low- to mid-range applications that demand efficient compute performance in compact designs. The Altera Agilex 3 […]

[$] An explicit thread-safety proposal for Python

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Python already has several ways to run programs concurrently —
including asynchronous functions, threads, subinterpreters, and multiprocessing
— but all of those options have drawbacks of one kind or another.

PEP 703 (“Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython”)
removed a major barrier to running Python
threads in parallel, but also exposed Python programmers to the same tricky
synchronization problems found in other languages supporting multithreaded
programs. A new draft proposal
by Mark Shannon,

PEP 805 (“Safe Parallel Python”), suggests a way for the CPython runtime
to cut down on concurrency bugs, making it more practical for Python programmers
to use versions of the language without the global interpreter lock (GIL).

11 Best Free and Open Source OpenAPI Linter Tools

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OpenAPI is an industry standard to describe HTTP APIs. When using OpenAPI in your project, you can leverage other tools to help you generate documentation, code, tests, mock results, or even deploy your API. This article picks some useful tools to help you validate OpenAPI in your project.

The post 11 Best Free and Open Source OpenAPI Linter Tools appeared first on Linux Today.

[$] Namespace reference counting and listns()

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The kernel’s namespaces feature is, among
other things, a key part of the implementation of containers. Like much in
the kernel, though, the namespace API evolved over time; there was no
design at the outset. As a result, this API has some rough edges and
missing features. Christian Brauner is working to straighten out the
namespace situation somewhat with this
daunting 72-part patch series that, among other things, adds a new
system call to allow user space to query the namespaces present on the
system.

Calibre 8.13 Open-Source E-Book Manager Improves Library Export on Linux

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Calibre 8.13 is a small update that only improves library export on Linux distros that mount /tmp in RAM by no longer using the /tmp directory when dealing with a large Full-Text Search (FTS) database, and improves virtual libraries by allowing users to define their search expressions more comfortably in a multi-line edit box.

The post Calibre 8.13 Open-Source E-Book Manager Improves Library Export on Linux appeared first on Linux Today.