Continuing with our series of the most important events, events and news of 2021, in this new article we will touch on the most relevant topics around the subject of free software and Linux.
And to start this publication we will start with all versions of the Linux kernel that were presented in which the most recent was the version 5.15 in which his most interesting novelties were the new writable NTFS driver, ksmbd module with SMB server implementation, DAMON subsystem to monitor memory access, lock primitives for real-time mode, fs-verity support in Btrfs, process_mrelease system call for low memory response systems, remote certification of the dm- module ima.
La Linux kernel version 5.14 introduced new system calls quotactl_fd () and memfd_secret (), removal of ide and raw drivers, new I / O priority driver for cgroup, SCHED_CORE task scheduling mode, infrastructure for creating loaders for verified BPF programs.
Linux 5.13 arrived with initial support for Apple M1 chips, cgroup driver "misc", end of support for / dev / kmem, support for new Intel and AMD GPUs, the ability to directly call kernel functions from BPF programs, kernel stack randomization for each called system, the ability to build in Clang with CFI (Control Flow Integrity) protection, Landlock LSM module for additional throttling, sound device virtual virtio-based, multi-shot mode in io_uring.
Linux 5.12 introduced support for zoned block devices in Btrfs, the ability to map user IDs to file systems, clean up outdated ARM architectures, NFS write mode, LOOKUP_CACHED mechanism to determine file paths from cache, support for atomic instructions in BPF, KFENCE debugging system to catch errors when working with memory, NAPI polling mode in the network stack that works in a separate kernel thread, ACRN hypervisor, the ability to change the preference model in task scheduler on the fly, and compatibility with LTO optimizations when building in Clang.
And for its part the version of Linux 5.11 integrated support for Intel SGX enclaves, new system call interception mechanism, virtual auxiliary bus, prohibition of module assembly without MODULE_LICENSE (), fast filtering of system calls in seccomp, discontinuation of maintenance of the ia64 architecture, transfer of WiMAX technology to the »staging« branch , the ability to encapsulate SCTP in UDP.
On the part of the distributions, In this year 2021 the new version of Debian 11, tests were also performed on RHEL 9 and CentOS Stream 9 formations, Devuan 4,0, Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 21.10, openSUSE 15.3, RHEL 8.4 and RHEL 8.5, Fedora 34 and 35 and SUSE 15.3.
In this section it is also worth mentioning the completion of the release of updates for CentOS 8.x, with which in this year new alternative projects of CentOS 8 were born, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux and VzLinux.
On the other hand, Fedora Kinoite, was positioned as a counterpart of Fedora Silverblue with the KDE desktop and also in this year the name of the project "Fedora" was changed to "Fedora Linux" (which not many of us have just accustom).
On the copyright side, we can still remember the notorious case of copyright infringement in the GNOME screensaver, as well as the attempt toe a third party to register PostgreSQL in Europe and the United States and more recent news the note of the problem for the use of OBS code in TikTok Live Studio and also of the DMCA exceptions that allow replaceable router firmware.
In addition, talking about this category we can also highlight the actions they took on GitHub in favor of launching a service for protect developers from DMCA bans unreasonable (since since Microsoft took control of the platform, reporting them for alleged infringements has grown a lot). GitHub also tightened the rules regarding the release of security research results following a dispute over the removal of a prototype exploit for Microsoft Exchange.
In the part of licenses, Elasticsearch went to a non-free SSPL license, while the GCC and Glibc projects canceled the mandatory transfer of code property rights to the STR Foundation and also the news of the problem of licenses for NMAP incompatible with Fedora, after Nmap changed the license and also the elimination of restrictions on the use of the JDK for commercial purposes.
