News: 0001582192

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Signed Programs & Other BPF Changes Merged For Linux 6.18

([Linux Kernel] 4 Hours Ago Linux 6.18 BPF)


The [1]BPF changes have been merged for the in-development [2]Linux 6.18 kernel.

The notable changes for BPF in Linux 6.18 is [3]support for signed programs and deferred task execution . With the optional signed BPF program support it can be used for ensuring the program comes from a trusted source as part of system integrity measures. Signed BPF programs is also a step toward allowing unprivileged users to load such signed BPF programs from validated sources. The signed BPF programs has been a long time coming.

Also new with Linux 6.18 for BPF is deferred task execution to allow deferred execution in the context of a specific task using the task_work infrastructure.

The BPF verifier has also replaced path-sensitive with path-insensitive live stack analysis, support for the "may_goto" instruction to s390 and arm64 JIT, support for atomic operations in arena in RISC-V JIT, and various other changes.

More details on the merged Linux 6.18 BPF changes via [4]the pull request .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/BPF

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.18

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-BPF-Signed-Deferred

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250928154606.5773-1-alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com/


phoronix

World Domination, One CPU Cycle At A Time

Forget about searching for alien signals or prime numbers. The real
distributed computing application is "Domination@World", a program to advocate
Linux and Apache to every website in the world that uses Windows and IIS.

The goal of the project is to probe every IP number to determine what kind of
platform each Net-connected machine is running. "That's a tall order... we
need lots of computers running our Domination@World clients to help probe
every nook and cranny of the Net," explained Mr. Zell Litt, the project head.

After the probing is complete, the second phase calls for the data to be
cross-referenced with the InterNIC whois database. "This way we'll have the
names, addresses, and phone numbers for every Windows-using system
administrator on the planet," Zell gloated. "That's when the fun begins."

The "fun" part involves LART (Linux Advocacy & Re-education Training), a plan
for extreme advocacy. As part of LART, each Linux User Group will receive a
list of the Windows-using weenies in their region. The LUG will then be able
to employ various advocacy techniques, ranging from a soft-sell approach
(sending the target a free Linux CD in the mail) all the way to "LARTcon 5"
(cracking into their system and forcibly installing Linux).