The HeliumOS project has announced the release of HeliumOS 10. It is relatively new image-based ("atomic") desktop distribution based on packages from CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux, with a goal of providing 10 years of support. HeliumOS 10 uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, Zsh as its default shell, and Btrfs as its default filesystem.

Priority inversion comes about when a low-priority task holds a resource that is also needed by a high-priority task, preventing the latter from running. This problem is made much worse if the low-priority task is unable to gain access to the CPU and, as a result, cannot complete its work and free the resources it holds. Proxy execution is a potential solution to this problem, but it is a complex solution that has been under development for several years; LWN first looked at it in 2020. The 6.17 kernel is likely to contain an important step forward for this long-running project.

Version 2.42 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include the addition of a number of new math functions, support for arbitrary baud rates in the termios.h interface, support for SFrame-based stack tracing (described in this article), support for memory guard pages, and a handful of security fixes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, git-lfs, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, icu, ipa, iputils, krb5, libvpx, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, perl, python-tornado, qt6-qtbase, sqlite, unbound, valkey, wireshark, and yggdrasil), Debian (libfastjson and php8.2), Fedora (glibc), Oracle (firefox, icu, perl, and unbound), Red Hat (389-ds-base, glib2, icu, libtpms, redis:6, redis:7, and yelp), SUSE (boost, forgejo-longterm, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, nginx, and salt), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, poppler, and sqlite3).

Replacement deal not ready, so old one gets 6 more months and budget bump

The UK government is extending two major cloud purchasing agreements due to delayed replacement arrangements under frameworks that could be worth an additional £1.65 billion.…

Till Kamppeter, co-founder and lead of the OpenPrinting project, has put out a call for sponsors after being laid off by Canonical:

I want to continue doing OpenPrinting for a living, and need a way to do so. I am currently working with the Linux Foundation to make OpenPrinting an [organization] which can receive sponsor funding. So now I am looking for sponsors.

Even greater would be, if independent of this somebody could hire me to continue OpenPrinting...

But they were supervised by American 'digital escorts'

Microsoft has been left with egg on its face after an independent investigation revealed a concerning pattern of using workers based in China to maintain and support US government customers on its Azure cloud.…

Europe is acting like the victim of a bully

world war fee  The US president and EU chief agreed to a deal over the weekend, averting a trade war between the world's two largest economies, but the agreement has a number of European leaders calling foul. …

The 6.16 development cycle was another busy one, with 14,639 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline — just 18 commits short of the total for 6.15. The 6.16 release happened on July 27, as expected. Also as expected, LWN has put together its traditional look at where the code for this release came from.

Fedora's quality team is looking to reduce the scope of test coverage and change the project's release criteria to drop some features from the list of release blockers. This is, in part, an exercise in getting rid of criteria, such as booting from optical media, that are less relevant. It is also a necessity, since the Red Hat team focusing on Fedora quality assurance (QA) is only half the size it was a year ago.