Those of us who have spent our lives playing with computers naturally see
the appeal of deploying them though the home for both data acquisition and
automation. But many of us who have watched the evolution of the
technology industry are increasingly unwilling to entrust critical
household functions to cloud-based servers run by companies that may not
have our best interests at heart. The Apache-licensed
Home Assistant project offers a
welcome alternative: locally controlled automation with free software.
This two-part series covers roughly a year of Home Assistant use, starting
with a set of overall observations about the project.
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.