LWN
Security updates for Thursday
Fittl: Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O
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.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 8, 2025
- Front: Debian and essential packages; Custom BPF OOM killers; Speculation barriers for BPF programs; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
- Briefs: Deepin on openSUSE; AUTOSEL; Mission Center 1.0.0; OASIS ODF; Redis license; USENIX ATC; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Home Assistant 2025.5 released
[$] Hash table memory usage and a BPF interpreter bug
Anton Protopopov led a short discussion at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about amount of memory used by hash tables in BPF programs. He thinks that the current memory layout is inefficient, and wants to split the structure that holds table entries into two variants for different kinds of maps. When that proposal proved uncontroversial, he also took the chance to talk about a bug in BPF's call instruction.
[$] Debian's AWKward essential set
The Debian project has the concept of essential packages, which provide the bare minimum functionality considered absolutely necessary (or "essential") for a system to function. Packages tagged as essential, and the packages that are required by the set of essential packages, are always installed as part of a Debian system. However, Debian's packaging rules do not require developers to explicitly declare dependencies on that set of packages (the essential set) but they can simply rely on the fact that those will always be present. That means that changing the essential set, as the project may wish to do occasionally, is more complicated than it should be. This came to light recently when a Debian developer asked what might be required to remove mawk to slim down the project's container images.
Deepin Desktop removed from openSUSE
The SUSE Security Team has announced the removal of the Deepin Desktop from openSUSE due to violations of the project's packaging policy.
The discovery of the bypass of the security whitelistings via the deepin-feature-enable package marks a turning point in our assessment of Deepin. We don't believe that the openSUSE Deepin packager acted with bad intent when he implemented the "license agreement" dialog to bypass our whitelisting restrictions. The dialog itself makes the security concerns we have transparent, so this does not happen in a sneaky way, at least not towards users. It was not discussed with us, however, and it violates openSUSE packaging policies. Beyond the security aspect, this also affects general packaging quality assurance: the D-Bus configuration files and Polkit policies installed by the deepin-feature-enable package are unknown to the package manager and won't be cleaned up upon package removal, for example. Such bypasses are not deemed acceptable by us.
Security updates for Wednesday
The state of SSL stacks
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.