Corbet

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.

Willy Tarreau and William Lallemand have posted an extensive white paper examining the landscape of the available SSL implementations.

OpenSSL 3.0 performs significantly worse than alternative SSL libraries, forcing organizations to provision more hardware just to maintain existing throughput. This raises important questions about performance, energy efficiency, and operational costs.

Examining alternatives—BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, and AWS-LC—reveals a landscape of trade-offs. Each offers different approaches to API compatibility, performance optimization, and QUIC support. For developers navigating the modern SSL ecosystem, understanding these trade-offs is crucial for optimizing performance, maintaining compatibility, and future-proofing their infrastructure.

On the 50th anniversary of the USENIX organization, its flagship Annual Technical Conference (ATC) is coming to an end.

For the past two decades, as more USENIX conferences have joined the USENIX calendar by focusing on specific topics that grew out of ATC itself, attendance at ATC has steadily decreased to the point where there is no longer a critical mass of researchers and practitioners joining us. Thus, after many years of experiments to adapt this conference to the ever-changing tech landscape and community, the USENIX Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to sunset USENIX ATC.

Many important technologies first saw the light of day at this event.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium and kappanhang), Red Hat (osbuild-composer and thunderbird), SUSE (chromedriver), and Ubuntu (c-ares, corosync, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-24, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

AUTOSEL is a tool that is used to find kernel patches that should be considered for backporting into the stable releases. Sasha Levin has announced a new and completely rewritten version of AUTOSEL for those who would like to play with it.

Unlike the previous version that relied on word statistics and older neural network techniques, AUTOSEL leverages modern large language models and embedding technology to provide significantly more accurate recommendations.

The disclosure of the Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities created a lot of pain for kernel developers (and many others). That pain was especially acutely felt in the BPF community. While an attacker might have to painfully search the kernel code base for exploitable code, an attacker using BPF can simply write and load their own speculation gadgets, which is a much more efficient way of operating. The BPF community reacted by, among other things, disallowing the loading of programs that may include speculation gadgets. Luis Gerhorst would like to change that situation with this patch series that takes a more direct approach to the problem.

Linus has released 6.15-rc5 for testing. "So it all feels like things are just continuing to go well this release. Let's hope I didn't jinx it by saying so."

The 6.14.5, 6.12.26, 6.6.89, 6.1.136, 5.15.181, 5.10.237, and 5.4.293 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.