Zack's Kernel News
Community Notebook: Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Premium Real-Time Mode Support
Vernon Mauery submitted his IBM Real-Time “SMI Free” mode driver for inclusion in the official kernel. The driver would provide a SysFS interface to switch the entire system into and out of IBM Premium Real-Time Mode (PRTM) on x86 hardware that supports it. This functionality would allow user code to disable System Management Interrupts (SMIs), thus allowing the code to decouple itself from the operating system’s normal security and resource allocation controls and interact directly with the hardware in otherwise impossible ways. This feature can do lots of fun things. It can provide an environment for real-time applications to run without fear of being interrupted; it can allow debuggers to do neat stuff; and it can allow really spectacular security breaches on the system.
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News
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CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
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Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
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Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
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Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
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Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
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ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
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Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
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LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
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Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
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