Noise

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Linus has announced the release of the 3.2
kernel – just after the publication of the LWN Weekly Edition, as
predicted.
Among other things, this kernel adds the proportional rate reduction TCP algorithm, the
extended verification module, the CPU scheduler bandwidth controller, the cross-memory attach IPC mechanism, the Hexagon
DSP architecture, improved recovery of corrupted Btrfs filesystems, and the
I/O-less dirty throttling code. See the Kernelnewbies 3.2
page for lots more information.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 5, 2012 is available.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the
new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into
the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code
makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the
discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird’s request for comments on the Android “logger”
mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is
still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger
than expected.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Debian has updated ffmpeg (multiple
code execution vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated ghostscript
(multiple code execution vulnerabilities dating back to 2008).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Apache Software Foundation has announced
the release of Hadoop 1.0. “A foundation of Cloud computing and at
the epicenter of “big data” solutions, Apache Hadoop enables data-intensive
distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of
data. Hadoop enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively
store, process, manage and analyze the growing volumes of data being
created and collected every day. Apache Hadoop connects thousands of
servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

“Argp” has posted a
lengthy look at the kernel’s memory allocators and how they can be
exploited to attack the system. “The attack vector of corrupting
adjacent objects on the same slab is fully applicable to SLUB and largely
works like in the case of the SLAB allocator. However, in the case of SLUB
there is an added attack vector: exploiting the allocator’s metadata (the
ones responsible for finding the next free object on the slab). As twiz and
sgrakkyu have demonstrated in their book on kernel exploitation, the slab
can be misaligned by corrupting the least significant byte of the metadata
of a free object that hold the pointer to the next free object. This
misalignment of the slab allows us to create an in-slab fake object and by
doing so to a) satisfy safeguard checks as the one I explained in the
previous paragraph when they are used, and b) to hijack the kernel’s
execution flow to our own code.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Welcome to 2012. This is the first LWN Weekly Edition of the year, and
that can only mean one thing: it is time for your editor to go out on a
limb and make a number of predictions for the coming year that, by the end
of the year, will look thoroughly clueless and misguided. Even your editor
can foresee, though, that it is going to be an interesting and highly
political year. Click below (subscribers only) to see what foolishness has
been predicted for 2012.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Mozilla Project has announced
the final release of version 2.0
of its Mozilla Public License. “Version 2.0 is similar in spirit
to the previous versions, but shorter, better, and more compatible with
other Free Software and Open Source Licenses.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Linux Mint Blog is carrying an introduction to “Cinnamon,”
that distribution’s latest desktop initiative. “With Gnome 2 no
longer an option we lost one of the most important upstream components our
Linux Mint desktop was based on. Our entire focus shifted from innovating
on the desktop, to patching existing alternatives such as Gnome Shell. We
used MATE and MGSE to provide an easier transition away from Gnome 2, but
without being able to truly offer an alternative that was better than Gnome
2. Both MATE and Gnome Shell are promising projects but MATE’s ultimate
goal is to replicate Gnome 2 using GTK+ and Gnome Shell doesn’t provide
what we need in a desktop and is going in a direction we do not want to
follow. So for these reasons we’re designing a new desktop called Cinnamon,
which leverages new technology and implements our vision.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Version 1.4 of the Scribus desktop publish system – the first major stable
release in four years – has been announced.
1.4 is based on Qt4 and offers much more extensive undo/redo operations,
lots of new import filters, better color management, and a lot more.
“Now that Scribus 1.4.0 has been released, the Scribus Team will
focus on stabilizing the 1.5 development branch, which will comprise
amazing new features like support for PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-4 and PDF/E, Mesh
Gradients, native PDF import, XAR import, a completely rewritten table
implementation, a rewritten text system, and much more.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

For all of you who like to complain that *Office is too big and bloated:
version 1.6 of the venerable GNU “ed” editor has been released. There’s
not much in the way of new features, but a number of fixes have been made
and it is now possible to use regular expressions containing NUL
characters.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Back in 2006, LWN carried the announcement
that the government of the Spanish state of Extremadura was moving to a
locally-developed distribution called Linex. Now comes the sad news that the project has been ended,
along with the contracts of the developers who were working on it. One of
those developers, José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, has posted his view on what has happened. “The new
people in charge of the Extremadura government don’t like the good press
and name that Linex, and the free software, gave to the previous party in
the government. And they want to change things. I don’t say they’re going
to remove all the free software we have in education (I don’t think that’s
technically possible, and also we can not afford it ), but they maybe will
move from Debian to Ubuntu or to OpenSUSE or Fedora. They are firing all
the people who made the previous situation possible.”
(Thanks to Paul Wise).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Jean-Baptiste Queru reflects
on the ups and downs of the Android Open Source Project in 2011.
“Not releasing the Honeycomb source code was catastrophic for the
AOSP community. I had never before received so many angry emails, so many
threats, to the point where I had to take several weeks off at some point
to get away from it. Even today, there’s a lot of bitterness left on all
sides. From start to finish, Honeycomb probably cost AOSP anywhere from 6
to 12 months.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Cory Doctorow’s 28C3 talk was called “the coming war on general-purpose
computation.” It’s available as
a video; there is also a
transcript on Github. “And it doesn’t take a science fiction
writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the
user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability
for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale
assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto
determines that it’s really… really… important to make sure that
computers can’t execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to
output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether
you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are
nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more
influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and
every one of them will arrive at the same place — ‘can’t you just make us
a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that
scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any
message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets
us?’”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The H reports
from the Chaos Communication Congress; the open-source Osmocom package
appears to be serving its intended purpose and finding vulnerabilities in
the cellphone network. “The researchers explained and then
demonstrated how, using the above technique and easily procurable tools,
attackers are able to emulate a mobile phone to make phone calls and send
text messages. They noted that some users have already received bills
totalling thousands of euros for calls and texts to Caribbean premium rate
services. In many cases, an attacker can, by simulating a GSM mobile, also
query that subscriber’s mailbox providing they know the subscriber’s
location and the key has not been changed.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

There is not much happening in the Linux world, but the security updates
never seem to take a holiday. In particular, we’re seeing the nasty
telnetd hole showing up in some Linux distributions; anybody running a
vulnerable version would be well advised to update immediately – or to move
away from telnet altogether.

CentOS has updated krb5 (C4,
C5: telnetd remote root vulnerability) and
krb5-appl (C6: telnetd remote root vulnerability).

Mandriva has updated ipmitool
(denial of service) and krb5-appl (telnetd
remote root vulnerability).

Oracle has updated UE kernel (EL5, EL6: privilege escalation),
kernel (EL6: privilege escalation),
krb5 (EL4, EL5: telnetd remote root vulnerability), and
krb5-appl (EL6: telnetd remote root
vulnerability).

Red Hat has updated krb5 (RHEL3,RHEL5: telnetd remote root
vulnerability) and krb5-appl (RHEL6:
telnetd remote root vulnerability).

Scientific Linux has updated krb5 (SL4-5: telnetd remote root vulnerability).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Linus has released the 3.2-rc7 prepatch.
“There it is, likely the last -rc in before final 3.2, so please do
check it out in between your holiday festivities.” There were 177
changes since 3.2-rc6 – getting smaller, but still on the large side for a
final prepatch.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The FreeBSD security team has sent out a
holiday card of sorts to its users. “No, the Grinch didn’t steal
the FreeBSD security officer GPG key, and your eyes aren’t deceiving you:
We really did just send out 5 security advisories.” The motivating
factor appears to be this
vulnerability in telnetd; anybody who exposes a telnet port to the net
on FreeBSD is currently open to a remote root exploit. The number of
LWN readers doing so must be tiny (if, indeed, it’s nonzero), but it seems
worthwhile to get the word out there anyway.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Keith Packard announces the
launch of a new calendar server project. “I started hacking at
Radicale to see how far I could get. I changed the storage code to store
one event per file, then added hooks to use git for change
management. Then, I found a full vcalendar/vcard parsing library in python,
vobject, which I used to replace the ad-hoc parsing code. Finally, I added
support for VCARD entries as well, allowing the system to store both
calendar and contact information.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

CentOS has updated
pidgin (C6: denial of service),
dhcp (C6: denial of service),
icu (C6: code execution),
ipmitool (C6: denial of service),
jasper (C6: code execution),
qemu-kvm (C6: privilege escalation),
qemu-kvm again (C6: privilege
escalation),
squid (C6: denial of service),
krb5 (C6: denial of service), and
tomcat (C6: multiple
vulnerabilities).

Debian has updated libsoup2.4
(directory traversal).

Fedora has updated moodle (F15, F16: 13
CVE numbers).

Ubuntu has updated t1lib (code
execution).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Team OpenOffice.org has muddied the office suite waters further with its announcement
(with a
longer version [PDF]) of “White Label Office,” a release candidate
consisting of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 with a number of fixes applied.
“By publishing White Label Office 3.3.1, Team OpenOffice.org is
taking the first step towards a maintenance release for OpenOffice.org
3.3.0. The release candidate is intended to serve as a starting point for
creating the best possible version in collaboration with the users.”

Needless to say, folks in the Apache OpenOffice project are not amused.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 22, 2011 is available.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The 2.6.32.51, 3.0.14, and 3.1.6 stable kernels are out. Each contains
another long list of important fixes; upgrading is recommended.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

CentOS has updated tomcat (C5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Debian has updated lighttpd (denial
of service and man-in-the-middle vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated perl-PAR (F15, F16:
unsafe temporary file handling) and perl-PAR-Packer (F15, F16:
ditto).

Oracle has updated tomcat (EL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Scientific Linux has updated tomcat (SL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The fifth issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law
Review has been published. Topics
covered in this issue include interoperability, patent licensing, patents
in Europe, licensing notices in web platforms, the past and future of
Groklaw, and more.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Whisper Systems, just acquired by Twitter, has announced that it has
released TextSecure – an encrypted messaging client for Android – under
GPLv3; the source is available on Github.
“We’ve always been interested in the ability for individuals and
organizations to communicate freely and securely. In the year and a half
since Whisper Systems launched TextSecure, we’ve received an enormous
amount of thanks, feedback, and encouraging stories from users who have
employed TextSecure towards those ends. We hope that as an open source
project, TextSecure will be able to reach even more people, with an even
larger number of contributors working to make it a great product.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Version 2.5 of the Amarok
music player has been released. The headline features are GPodder.net
podcast synchronization, a reworked USB mass storage module, and
integration with the Amazon.com music store.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The agenda for the 2011 Kernel
Summit did not include Android as a topic, but Android came up anyway.
In a conclusion that surprised many, the group agreed that the bulk of the
Android kernel code should probably be merged into the mainline. The past couple of
years have made it clear that Android will not be going away; it has, in
particular, done a good job of outlasting the resistance to merging its
code. After the Summit things got quiet again on the Android front, but
that does not mean that nothing has been happening.
Click below (subscribers only) for an update on the work to get the Android
kernel code into the mainline.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Mozilla Foundation has announced
that Google will continue to buy its position as the default Firefox search
engine for the next three years. “The specific terms of this
commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality
requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The CentOS 6.2 release is out, surprisingly quickly after the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.2 release that it is based on, and less than two weeks
after the CentOS 6.1 release. “All updates released since upstream 6.2 release are also released to the
CentOS-6.2 mirrors. With this release we are now back to a regular,
managed and tested release path and time scales. However, for the time
being, we are going to retain the CR/ repo in the event its needed in
the future to push ahead-of-release updates.” Some people must have
worked very hard to get this release out so quickly; congratulations are in
order.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Jos Poortvliet writes
about ownCloud and the tools offered in openSUSE 12.1 to make ownCloud
management easier. “The freedom of software and data is very
valuable to the openSUSE Project and we would like to help you escape the
deceptive arms of those who offer you some convenience in exchange for
control over your data. A first step was providing spideroak in openSUSE
11.4 which, unlike most competitors, encrypts your files and thus offers
more protection for your privacy. But your data is still ‘somewhere else’
and we prefer to offer something you would really own. Fortunately there
is a very appealing solution for that called ownCloud.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Apache Software Foundation Blog is carrying an “open
letter to the ODF ecosystem” meant to clarify the Foundation’s plans
for OpenOffice.org. “Our license and open development model is
widely recognised as one of the best ways to ensure open standards, such as
ODF, gain traction and adoption. Apache OpenOffice offers much more
potential for OpenOffice.org than ‘just’ an end-user Microsoft Office
replacement. We offer a vendor neutral space in which to collaborate whilst
enabling third parties to pursue almost any for-profit or not-for-profit
business model.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

GigaOm discovers
the value of free platforms the hard way while playing with a Kindle
Fire. “When trying to browse the Google Android Market website in
the Fire’s web browser, the device instead opens up Amazon’s Kindle Fire
application store. Since the Fire doesn’t officially have access to the
Android Market, I can understand the device highlighting its own app
store. But to specifically hijack a browser URL and redirect it is
disturbing and sets an ugly precedent.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Wired covers
the latest entrant into the wireless lawsuit game: BT. “An example
patent is ‘Service provision system for communications networks,’ which BT
was awarded in the 1990s. It essentially boils down to an app figuring out
whether a phone is connected to the web via Wi-Fi or 3G, and choosing to
stream at a different bandwidth. Google infringes this in Google Music and
the Android Market, BT alleges.” Yes, this is the same BT that once
claimed to have patented the hyperlink.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The 2011 PHP Advent site has an
article by Gwynne Raskind on the challenges facing PHP and how they
are being addressed. “PHP has always been an evolving,
almost-organic language. It has been rewritten from the bottom up at least
four times, with massive internal changes to the engine at least twice
more. Through all these mutations, however, its external interface – the
language itself – has remained quite similar for a long time. Nearly
everything that can be pointed to as different between PHP 3 and PHP 5.4 is
an addition or extension to the language, not a change in existing
behavior. There are exceptions, such as the new object model, but by and
large, a PHP coder looking at PHP 5 code will be able to make complete
sense of PHP 3, and vice versa. All of these versions share one flaw: there
is no single specification of the language!”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Linus has released the 3.2-rc6 prepatch.
He was a bit grumpy about late merge requests, but sees the series calming
down soon. “We’re at -rc6 now, and while I can see myself doing an
-rc7, I probably won’t do an -rc8 unles something bad pops up. There
doesn’t seem to be any real reason to drag out this release any more, and
we’ll probably have the real 3.2 around new years.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Back in March 2011, LWN examined package
signing (or the lack thereof) in the Arch Linux distribution. Things
have advanced considerably since then. Allan McRae has now posted the
fourth in a series of articles about the adoption of signed packages in
Arch. “The Arch repos have been gradually preparing for the package
signature checking in pacman-4.0. Support for uploading PGP signatures with
packages was added in April and was made mandatory from the beginning of
November. As of today, 100% of the packages in the [core] repo and
approximately 71% of [extra] and 45% of [community] are signed.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Ubuntu has sent out an announcement that it will be pushing a security
update that disables the Sun JDK browser plugin on all machines. It seems
that there are several
security issues with this plugin, but, due to a change in licensing by
Oracle, it is no longer possible to create packages with the fixes. The
best solution appears to be to switch to OpenJDK.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Razor-qt is “an advanced,
easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has
been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and intuitive
interface.” The 0.4
release is available; it adds a new application launcher, better
removable media support, new configuration utilities, and more.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Libre Graphics World has posted a
video-heavy look at Blender 2.61 which, it says, is one of the most
important Blender releases ever. “Top reason is, of course, Cycles,
the new hardware accelerated rendering engine. Cycles can use both CUDA
(preferred for NVidia) and OpenCL (naturally, AMD/ATI), but will work on
CPU too. That imposes dramatic changes to workflows, even though Cycles is
not quite complete yet.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Version 4.8.0 of the Qt toolkit has been announced.
Significant changes include a new platform abstraction layer to make
portability easier, threaded OpenGL support, multi-threaded HTTP, and a
reworked (faster) filesystem I/O layer. Some more information can be found
in this
blog post.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 15, 2011 is available.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

According to this
Datamation article by Bruce Byfield, 2011 was “a kidney stone of a
year” for free software. “Not that any great disaster struck in the last twelve months. For many — even most — businesses and community projects, the year was routine, with new products and releases rolling out like any other year.

However, at the same time, opposition to free software continued to build in 2011. Nor was the year a lucky one for anyone taking a new direction. In fact, when you look back at 2011, most of the major events were disappointments, only occasionally softened by unexpected secondary results.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

CentOS has updated icu (C5:
code execution).

Oracle has updated icu (EL5:
code execution) and netpbm (EL4,
EL5: code execution).

Red Hat has updated icu (RHEL5-6: code execution),
ipmitool (RHEL6: denial of service),
and kernel (RHEL5: six CVE numbers).

SUSE has updated kernel (SLES11: seven CVE numbers) and jasper
(SLES10: two buffer overflows).

Ubuntu has updated php (denial of
service and information disclosure).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The KDE project has announced
the release of Plasma Active Two, the second iteration of its mobile device
environment. Changes include a lot of user interface improvements, better
performance, and “recommendations”: “Plasma Active is now able to
learn as you use your device. It uses that information to make
recommendations as to what content, web sites and applications are likely
to be related to what you are doing right now. This technology uses the
power of the ‘semantic desktop’ efforts from KDE Nepomuk to make your
device a more valuable adviser and helper. Future releases will build on
predictive power as well as the breadth of recommendations.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The WordPress 3.3
release (code-named “Sonny”) is available. “Experienced users
will appreciate the new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the
navigation, the new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and the new
Tumblr importer. We’ve also been thinking a ton about what the WordPress
experience is like for people completely new to the software. Version 3.3
has significant improvements there with pointer tips for new features
included in each update, a friendly welcome message for first-time users,
and revamped help tabs throughout the interface. Finally we’ve improved the
dashboard experience on the iPad and other tablets with better touch
support.”

On this topic the LWN site (which is not based on WordPress) is seeing a
flood of attempts to exploit the TimThumb
vulnerability; anybody running a WordPress site who has not closed this
hole should do so immediately.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

On December 9, HP ended a long period of rumors and speculation with the announcement
that it would release the code for its webOS platform under an open-source
license. Very little information beyond that brief press release is
available, so the net has duly responded with lots more speculation. To
some, webOS is about to start a new and better life; to others, this
announcement is the last gasp of a dying product. Never one to let a prime
handwaving opportunity to pass unexploited, your editor has written some
thoughts of his own.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Linaro project has announced the creation of its “community contributor
process.” “Linaro itself is now an organisation of around 120 engineers, but as we
continue to grow the community around us is also growing fast. We’re
grateful to the many people who are participating in our success, and so
we’re introducing the Community Contributor process to recognise those
community members who have sustained contributions over a significant
period of time.” Benefits to being named a “Community Contributor”
include a Linaro email address and “IRC cloak”; all one has to do is to
sign an agreement giving a broad copyright and patent license to Linaro for
all contributions made from that email address.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Creative Commons project has announced the
beginning of the process leading to version 4.0 of its license suite.
They have some specific issues to solve and are looking for input on other
improvements that should be made to the licenses at the same time.
“The treatment of sui generis database rights in the 3.0 licenses
continues to be a show-stopper for many, including governments in
Europe. This fosters an environment in which custom licenses proliferate,
inevitably resulting in silos of incompatibly-licensed content that cannot
be maximally shared and remixed. But there exist still other reasons for
pursuing 4.0 at this time, including the desire to adjust the licenses to
more fully support adoption by intergovernmental organizations and those
looking for a more internationally-oriented license suite.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Facebook has announced
the release of the HipHop Virtual Machine. “So, early last year, we
put together a small team to experiment with dynamic translation of PHP
code into native machine code. What resulted is a new PHP execution engine
based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual
Machine (hhvm). We’re excited to report that Facebook is now using hhvm as
a faster replacement for hphpi, with plans to eventually use hhvm for all
PHP execution.” They claim some significant speed improvements; the
announcement has a fair amount of detail about how it works. The source is
available from
Github.