news
GNU/Linux Leftovers
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Late Night Linux – Episode 378
Age declaration and verification in GNU/Linux gathers pace, Surveillance Giant Google blesses us with some hoops to jump through to install the software we want on stock Android, the FSFE lost their payment provider, great new KDE Plasma and GNOME features, and more.
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Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization
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MJ Pooladkhay ☛ my first patch to the linux kernel
A while ago, I started dipping my toe into virtualization. It's a topic that many people have heard of or are using on a daily basis but a few know and think about how it works under the hood.
I like to learn by reinventing the wheel, and naturally, to learn virtualization I started by trying to build a Type-2 hypervisor. This approach is similar to how KVM (Linux) or bhyve (FreeBSD) are built.
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OtterSec ☛ From virtio-snd 0-Day to Hypervisor Escape: Exploiting QEMU with an Uncontrolled Heap Overflow
Heap overflows are often exploitable, but far less so when the corrupted bytes are not under your control. In many cases, that kind of bug is written off as a crash and nothing more. However, in this post we show how we turned such an overflow into a reliable QEMU guest-to-host escape by abusing new glibc allocator behavior and QEMU-specific heap spray techniques.
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Graphics Stack
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Collabora ☛ Re-thinking framebuffers in PanVK
PanVK’s new framebuffer abstraction for Mali GPUs removes OpenGL-specific constraints, unlocking more flexible tiled rendering features in Vulkan.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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[Old] Felix ☛ I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications
So, over the years there has been a push to switch from X11 to Wayland. And, at least on a surface level, this makes sense to me: Developers probably have learned a lot about the various requirements of desktops, so having a (mostly) clean cut for this new desktop environment seems promising. I have read claims stating that Wayland is inherently more secure than X11. Wayland isn't "outdated", we can design the desktop with performance and modern use-cases in mind.
I am typing this on a desktop machine running sway, which is a Wayland compositor. There definitely have been the common hurdles like desktop recording / sharing not working. But over time, these issues have been resolved - at least for my machine. Some years ago, I tried out both X11 and Wayland (I think back on Arch Linux). And honestly, the sway installation was far easier than the i3/X11 one. This ease of installation, combined with Wayland supposedly being "the future of Linux Desktops", and it supporting X11 applications via XWayland, made me stick to sway, even with its rough edges.
That was the story of me using Wayland. Now comes the developing part - which has been a fucking nightmare.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Zoë Finja Emilia Kron ☛ How do you trust a new Linux Distribution?
Direct trust is you trusting your best friend. Transitive trust is your best friend assuring you another person is also trustworthy and you listening to their word because you trust them.
So lets take a dive into Web of Trust or how this is represented in the digital world.
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