Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 23, 2025

• Events

  • LWN ☛ Enhancing FineIBT

    At the Linux Security Summit Europe (LSS EU), Scott Constable and Sebastian Österlund gave a talk on an enhancement to a control-flow integrity (CFI) protection that was added to the kernel several years ago. The "FineIBT: Fine-grain Control-flow Enforcement with Indirect Branch Tracking" mechanism was merged for Linux 6.2 in early 2023 to harden the kernel against CFI attacks of various sorts, but needed some fixes and enhancements more recently. The talk looked at the CFI vulnerability problem, FineIBT, and an enhanced version that is hoped to be able to unify all of the disparate hardware and software mitigations to address both regular and speculative CFI vulnerabilities.

    Constable began with introductions. He is a defensive-security researcher for Intel Labs, while Österlund is an offensive-security researcher on the Intel STORM team. Constable offered thanks to various people for their help on the feature, including Peter Zijlstra, who developed the patches and was present for the talk. Beyond that, Constable thanked the ""tremendous"" Linux kernel community, which ""really helped to refine this enhancement throughout a very lively discussion"", resulting in a patch set that was ""a lot better"".

• FSFE

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-10-21 [Older] The FSFE defends Interoperability from Apple at the EU’s highest court [Ed: Now that FSFE gets big bribes from Microsoft it is focused on criticising Apple (Google is also a big sponsor)]

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] DMA litigation against Apple: a quick recap

• Programming/Development

  • LWN ☛ Gccrs after libcore

    Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who is working on just that compiler (known as "gccrs"), provided an update on the status of that project and what is coming next.

    There are a few reasons to want a GCC-based Rust compiler, he began. Many developers are working with GCC now, prefer it, and do not want to have to change to a different toolchain. Having multiple compilers helps to build confidence in the future of a language in general. There is also the list of architectures that GCC supports, but which LLVM does not.

    There is an intermediate option in the form of rustc_codegen_gcc, a project that grafts the GCC code-generation layer onto rustc. But, Patry said, few people seem willing to use rustc_codegen_gcc; he was unsure why. And, in any case, that project does not fully address the problem of architecture support in the Rust standard library, which must be ported separately to each new architecture. So developers are still waiting for gccrs, which is progressing.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ 2025-10-20 [Older] A palindromic polyglot program in x86 machine code, Perl, shell, and make