Those of us who have spent our lives playing with computers naturally see
the appeal of deploying them though the home for both data acquisition and
automation. But many of us who have watched the evolution of the
technology industry are increasingly unwilling to entrust critical
household functions to cloud-based servers run by companies that may not
have our best interests at heart. The Apache-licensed
Home Assistant project offers a
welcome alternative: locally controlled automation with free software.
This two-part series covers roughly a year of Home Assistant use, starting
with a set of overall observations about the project.
Lance Albertson writes that the
Oregon State University Open Source Lab has been funded for the next
year, following his announcement in April
that the future of OSL was in jeopardy. OSL is now focusing on
becoming self-sustainable long term.
The recent support was amazing for our immediate team needs. But
for the OSL to thrive long-term, we need a sustainable financial
foundation. This is crucial, as the university expects units like ours
to become self-sufficient beyond this current year.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the
6.14.6,
6.12.28,
6.6.90,
6.1.138, and
5.15.182 stable kernel versions.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (fossil, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, and request-tracker4), Fedora (thunderbird), Mageia (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, apparmor, cargo-c, chromium, go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kanidm, libsoup, mozjs102, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, python-Django, sccache, tealdeer, tomcat, transfig, wasm-bindgen, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (libreoffice and python-h11).
The GNOME Foundation has announced
the hiring of Steven Deobald as its new executive director.
Steven has been a GNOME user since 2002 and has been involved in
numerous free software initiatives throughout his career. His
professional background spans technical leadership, cooperative
business development, and nonprofit work. Having worked with projects
like XTDB and Endatabas, he brings valuable
experience in open source product development. Based in Halifax,
Canada, Steven is well-positioned to collaborate with our global
community across time zones.
The
famfs
filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data
sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was
developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and
memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a
follow-up to
the famfs session at last year's
summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel's
direct-access (DAX)
mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem
by using other kernel features.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, mariadb-10.5, and openssh), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (mariadb), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, glib2, ImageMagick, libsoup, libsoup2, libva, openvpn, sqlite3, and weblate), and Ubuntu (libsoup3, php-horde-css-parser, and python-django).
Lukas Fittl
writes in detail
on the pganalyze blog about the asynchronous I/O capability coming with the
PostgreSQL 18 release.
Asynchronous I/O delivers the most noticeable gains in cloud
environments where storage is network-attached, such as Amazon EBS
volumes. In these setups, individual disk reads often take multiple
milliseconds, introducing substantial latency compared to local
SSDs.
With traditional synchronous I/O, each of these reads blocks query
execution until the data arrives, leading to idle CPU time and
degraded throughput. By contrast, asynchronous I/O allows Postgres
to issue multiple read requests in parallel and continue processing
while waiting for results. This reduces query latency and enables
much more efficient use of available I/O bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
- Front: Debian and essential packages; Custom BPF OOM killers; Speculation barriers for BPF programs; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
- Briefs: Deepin on openSUSE; AUTOSEL; Mission Center 1.0.0; OASIS ODF; Redis license; USENIX ATC; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Version
2025.5 of the Home Assistant home automation system has been released.
With this release, the project is celebrating two million active
installations. Changes include improvements to the backup system, Z-Wave
Long Range support, a number of new integrations, and more.