Linux Action News 194

Linux's résumé got a nice boost this week; why Google is paying for more kernel development, and how CloudLinux might be pulling ahead of the CentOS pack.

Plus, our thoughts on Steam possibly coming to ChromeOS and the game-changing feature coming to ZFS.

• Rust in the Linux kernel just got a big boost from Google — The main goal of the push to bring Rust to Linux is to wipe out an entire class of memory-related security bugs in the kernel. This is important because, as Microsoft has recently highlighted, 70% of all bugs it fixes are memory-related. Historically, key Linux drivers that make up the kernel have been written in C, which is not memory-safe.
• Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel — While this is the first memory safety effort we’ve announced under our new Prossimo project name, our memory safety work began in 2020. You can read about our efforts to bring memory safety to curl and the Apache HTTP server, and to add improvements to the Rustls TLS library.
• ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon — OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev.
• June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit - YouTube
• openzfs Pull Request: RAIDZ Expansion feature by ahrens
• ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance
• Systemd 249-rc1 Released — The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features.
• Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images — The journey from RC1 to full release is likely to take a month or so, judging by past releases, so we can expect systemd 249 sometime in July.
• CloudLinux releases UChecker security tool for Linux servers — This newly open-sourced program, part of the company's TuxCare security services, scans Linux servers for out-of-date libraries both on disk and in memory.
• kernelcare.com — Live patching for Linux kernels & shared libraries, vulnerability scanners reporting & patch management assistance.
• cloudlinux/kcare-uchecker — A simple tool to detect outdated shared libraries
• Steam on ChromeOS: Not a Rumor Anymore — There are now some QA testers being hired to work on the “ChromeOS Steam Launch Team” to triage games, find defects and test performance in specific configurations.
• 🎉 nano-5.8 is released — "Why is it necessary to be special?"