Category Archives: Linux

NXP’s FRDM i.MX 91 Board Provides Low-Power Solution for Linux-Based IoT Systems

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Following the release of the FRDM i.MX 93 board, NXP has launched the FRDM i.MX 91 development board, a compact platform based on the i.MX 91 applications processor. It is intended for early-stage development and evaluation of industrial and IoT systems that require basic Linux support, integrated connectivity, and hardware-level security. The board features a […]

[$] OSI election ends with unsatisfying results

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The Open Source Initiative
(OSI) has announced
the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and
McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another
term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some
participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps
from the beginning and has culminated with the exclusion of three
candidates for failing to meet a requirement added after the election
was over to sign the OSI board agreement before results were tallied
or announced.

[$] The guaranteed contiguous memory allocator

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As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large,
physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult.
Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such
allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot
be avoided. The kernel’s contiguous memory
allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible,
but it has never been a perfect solution. Suren Baghdasaryan is is trying
to improve that situation with the guaranteed
contiguous memory allocator patch set, which includes work from Minchan
Kim as well.

Data Migration: Magento 1 to 2 Planned Out

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In this tutorial, we will show you the process of data migration from Magento 1 to 2 in a handful of steps. This aims to avoid using the end-of-life Magento 1 and the new, more reliable Magento 2 software. The risks of using the EOL Magento 1 are the following: security loopholes, outdated features, PCI compliance, and limited support.

Julien Malka proposes method for detecting XZ-like backdoors

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Julien Malka has

called for the NixOS project to use build-reproducibility to detect when a program has a maintainer-generated tarball that results in a different artifact than building from source. There are good reasons for projects to release maintainer-generated tarballs, but since the materials included in them are usually documentation, extra build scripts, and so on, it makes sense to check that they don’t influence the final build output. While this would not have stopped

last year’s XZ backdoor, it would have made it harder to hide.

People are often convinced that OSS is more trustworthy than closed-source software because the code can be audited by practitioners and security professionals in order to detect vulnerabilities or backdoors. In this instance, this procedure has been made difficult by the fact that part of the code activating the backdoor was not included in the sources available within the git repository but was instead present in the maintainer-provided tarball. While this was used to hide the backdoor out of sight of most investigating eyes, this is also an opportunity for us to improve our software supply chain security processes.

[$] Multiple memory classes for address-space isolation

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Brendan Jackman has been working to try to get ahead of the next hardware CPU
vulnerability
before it gets discovered. In January, he posted the second version of

a patch set that introduces

address-space isolation (ASI) as a way of
preventing future CPU vulnerabilities from leaking important
information. The core concept is to ensure that data that is not currently
needed is not present in memory, so that speculative execution cannot leak it.
The work is nowhere near ready to be incorporated into the mainline
kernel — not least of all because it has a large performance impact in its
current form — but it is likely to once again be a topic of discussion at the
2025

Linux Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit.

Linux Security Hardening Cache Randomization Was Inadvertently Using The Same Seed

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Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle a few early pull requests have already been sent in to Linus Torvalds in advance of the anticipated v6.14 release on Sunday. Among those early changes for Linux 6.15 are the SLAB allocator updates that include a fix for cache randomization with kvmalloc inadvertently being inadequate due to accidentally using the same randomization seed…