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Rust-Written Replacement To GNU Coreutils Progressing, Some Binaries Now Faster

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Along with the broader industry trend of transitioning security-sensitive code to memory-safe languages like Rust, there has been an effort to  write a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils. For nearly a year that Rust Coreutils has been able to run a basic Debian system while more recently they have been increasing their level of GNU Coreutils compatibility and in some cases now even outperforming the upstream project.

LVFS Aims to Facilitate Open-Source Firmware for EOL Devices

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The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux could soon be making it easier to transition older, end-of-life devices off official firmware packages and onto the likes of open-source Coreboot for capable aging PC hardware. This not only would make the system run on more free software but would extend the life of the hardware with firmware updates where the vendor has ceased their support.

Intel Updates Unaccepted Memory Support for Faster TDX VM Booting

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Way back in August Intel posted a set of Linux kernel patches for supporting "unaccepted memory" by the Linux kernel in preparation for next-generation Xeon processors and speeding up the boot time for guest virtual machines making use of Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) security feature. Unaccepted memory support hasn't yet made it to the mainline kernel but now a second iteration of the patches have been posted.

Open Source Community Shifts Left With OpenSSF, Google SLSA

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Security is becoming an increasingly key piece of the open source puzzle amid industry-wide pushes to shift left and integrate security during early stages of application development. The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), which encompasses Google’s Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA), is one example of how the open source community is working to improve software security through an ecosystem approach, vying for proactive handling of security by default.

Open Source Security Foundation Receives $10 Million Boost from Linux Foundation

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The Linux Foundation has raised $10 million in new investments to expand and support its Open Source Security Foundation project. “This industrywide commitment is answering the call from the White House to raise the baseline for our collective cybersecurity well-being, as well as ‘paying it forward’ to open source communities to help them create secure software from which we all benefit,” Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement.  “With the tremendous growth and pervasiveness of open source software, building cybersecurity practices and programs that scale is our biggest task at hand.”

"pkill_on_warn" Proposed For Killing Linux Processes That Cause A Kernel Warning

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Security researcher and Linux kernel contributor Alexander Popov has proposed a new kernel option called "pkill_on_warn" that would kill all threads in a process if that process provoked a kernel warning. This wouldn't change the default kernel behavior but if/when the patch is merged, booting the kernel with pkill_on_warn=1 would enable this new behavior to kill processes causing kernel warnings.