LWN.net
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Shutting the Door on the XCPE Botnet (Threat Intelligence)
The Google Threat Intelligence blog describes, in great detail , the XCPE botnet, which has just been taken down. Last week, Google and industry partners dismantled the XCPE backdoor which enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes into a botnet. We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and…
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[$] Managing the kernel CVE flood
We recently looked at how the kernel community is dealing with the firehose of vulnerability reports, but said little about how users of the kernel are responding. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference , Amazon employees Dylan Johnson and Justinien Bouron discussed the problem from the point of view of engineers trying to keep AWS running and secure in the…
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Tor Browser 16.0 released
Version 16.0 of the Tor Browser has been released. This is the first stable version based on Firefox ESR 153. Notable changes in this release include support for Linux on 64-bit Arm, redesigned settings, and a "generic window titles" feature to help prevent other applications from snooping on one's browser activity. Tor Browser for Android has had a number…
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Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, mariadb:10.5, podman, python-jwt, python27:2.7, python38:3.8 and python38-devel:3.8, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, ruby:2.5, ruby:2.7, thunderbird, util-linux, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Debian (chromium, eog, imagemagick, python-aiohttp…
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Kernel prepatch 7.4-rc1
The 7.4-rc1 kernel prepatch is out, and the merge window is closed for this development cycle. This is a *BIG* merge window. I think the reason is the by now obvious one, but I'm actually taking it as a good sign: I'm *much* happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than it showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc…
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Final release for the 7.2 stable series
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.15 kernel, with a handful of updates. Note, this is the LAST 7.2.y kernel release. After this one the 7.2.y kernel tree is end-of-life. Please move to 7.3.y at this time. And yes, you aren't imagining things, this one went "end-of-life" a bit sooner than normal. But based on the release cycle at the…
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A massive pile of security updates for Saturday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 11.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, aspell, bind, bind9.18, container-tools:1.0, container-tools:rhel8, curl, dogtag-pki, ignition, java-21-openjdk, python-pillow, tomcat, and virt:rhel, virt-devel:rhel), Debian (antiword, cyrus-sasl2, dovecot, dpdk, nss, python-git, and thunderbird), Fedora (7zip…
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How We Could Have Backdoored Bash (Hacktron blog)
The Hacktron blog documents how the group was able to compromise the GNU Savannah forge and could have pushed malware into any of the projects hosted there. Using Hacktron, we found that an email address like `touch${IFS}/tmp/savane-rce-proof`@attacker.example gave any registered user code execution on its backend. From there, we made our account a…
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[$] Removing binder.c
The final talk at Kangrejos 2026 was about the removal of the C implementation of Android's Binder driver , the primary interprocess communication mechanism used on Android devices. Carlos Llamas announced that he had deleted the C code to general applause, and then shared some insights about what went into replacing the C implementation. Alice Ryhl, who…
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Haas: Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault
PostgreSQL developer Robert Haas writes about the struggles the project has encountered in putting together its next release. In the end, I don't think that the delay in shipping PostgreSQL 19 is particularly concerning. It is not a long delay in the grand scheme of things, and it emerges directly from the project's concern for quality. The long-term…
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Remote code execution on Linux systems with multipath TCP
On October 27, LLM provider Anthropic reported on a remotely exploitable use-after-free bug affecting systems with multipath TCP listeners open. The bug works by triggering a response to a retransmitted SYN packet at the same moment that the TCP connection is established in another thread, causing the first thread to access the connection's options…
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[$] System-call wrappers for glibc
In a followup to his session at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Carlos O'Donell returned to the topic of system-call wrappers for the GNU C library (glibc) at this year's event. This time around, he was joined by Florian Weimer, who is another glibc maintainer. The idea was to give an update on what has happened over the last year with regard to…
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Eight more stable kernel updates
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.3.1 , 7.2.14 , 6.18.60 , 6.12.115 , 6.6.161 , 6.1.191 , 5.15.224 , and 5.10.273 stable kernels. As usual, he advises all users to update—advice that seems especially wise given the increased number of security-relevant bug fixes that the kernel is seeing these days.
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Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (aspell, cjose, curl, gcc-toolset-15-gcc, httpd:2.4, ignition, java-21-openjdk, libX11, libXi, libXrender, libXtst, mariadb:10.11, nodejs:24, python-pillow, python3.12-urllib3, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (imagemagick, libdatetime-timezone-perl, python-git, tor, tzdata, vlc, and wordpress), Fedora…
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[$] Containers as a recognized kernel object
The foundation of the design for containers in the kernel is that there isn't one; there is no container abstraction that the kernel recognizes. Instead, the kernel provides a long list of components — namespaces, control groups, sandboxing mechanisms, and more — along with a note that says, in effect, "some assembly required". There have been attempts (…
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Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, emacs, expat, gcc-toolset-15-gcc, java-17-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, libX11, libXi, libXrender, libXtst, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, pki-deps:10.6, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and yggdrasil), Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, and openjdk-25), Fedora (firefox, librabbitmq, libreswan…
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 29, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Python JIT; Kernel clean up; Rust panics; Future Rust features; Northstar browser; 7.4 merge window; Smaller kernel stacks. Briefs : KeePassXC 2.8.0; Redox ring buffers; Rust in systemd; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
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A report from the LPC sched_ext microconference
The Linux Plumbers Conference blog has a report from the sched_ext microconference held in Prague. Three main topics dominated the discussions Priority inversion and how to handle it in sched_ext : lock holder and lock waiter preemption, time slice extension, and making proxy execution work together with BPF schedulers. Paravirtualized scheduling : letting…
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[$] The campaign to push Northstar into Linux distributions
There is not a broad selection of mature, open-source web-browser engines for Linux users. Most of the browsers available for Linux are based on one of just three projects: Chromium's Blink , Firefox's Gecko , or WebKit . A new entrant would generally be seen as a welcome alternative, but the recent campaign to push one of the LLM-written Nordstjernen…
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Redox OS ring buffers project summary
The Redox OS project, which is a Unix-like microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, has published a report on the work that it has done in the last year to implement io_uring-like I/O . Last year, the Redox team received a grant to develop io_uring-like Ring Buffer support at the system task level, as a first step towards ring buffer…
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Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (emacs, thunderbird, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Debian (bind9, openjdk-21, pdns, php-mongodb, and thunderbird), Fedora (brotli, chromium, clevis, eog, flatpak, ghostscript, kernel, libinstpatch, libreswan, mingw-freetype, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base…
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Robinson: Raspberry Pi 5 on Fedora
Peter Robinson has written a blog post about the current state of Fedora support for Raspberry Pi 5 devices. According to Robinson, the upcoming Fedora 45 release will work—with caveats—on all variants of the Raspberry Pi Model 5B; the Compute Module 5 and Pi 500+ are still works in progress. For Fedora 44 release you need to have a temporary workaround…
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[$] Guidelines for panics in kernel code
Alexandre Courbot spends most of his time working on the kernel doing code reviews. Recently, he's been wondering about what the standards should be for when Rust code is allowed to panic, and how it should do error handling more generally. Unlike many of the other talks at Kangrejos 2026, his talk was not presenting some existing work, but rather hoping to…
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Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, brotli, buildah, container-tools:4.0, container-tools:rhel8, firefox, flatpak, freeipmi, gcc, golang, grafana, httpd, kernel, kernel-rt, libreswan, libX11, lrzsz, nodejs:14, nodejs:18, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, podman, python-urllib3, python3.9, python38:3.8 and python38-devel:3.8, skopeo…
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[$] Python's experimental JIT to be removed
Python's experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler , which was added to CPython in 2024 for the 3.13 release , is on its way out. In June, the Python steering council announced that it was pausing work on the JIT in CPython's main branch until there was an accepted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that addressed concerns about maintenance, compatibility…
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Two stable kernels for Monday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.13 and 6.18.59 stable kernels. Each contains a number of fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
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Systemd adds support for components written in Rust
Christian Brauner has announced that he has merged support for writing leaf components of systemd in Rust. Rust will be used only for new leaf components, existing code is not being ported to Rust and nothing that other components depend on is written in Rust. Brauner said that the project would like to move forward with Rust support in core systemd, " but…
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Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ca-certificates, cockpit-machines, container-tools:4.0, expat, flute, libbase, libfonts, libformula, liblayout, libloader, libreoffice, librepository, libserializer, pentaho-libxml, pentaho-reporting-flow-engine, and sac, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana-pcp, hplip, kernel, nodejs:14, nodejs:18…
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[$] The first part of the 7.4 merge window
Since the merge window for 7.4 opened, there have been 6,753 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline repository. Many more are expected, especially given the possibility that this merge window will be extended to three weeks. Still, even this initial set brought in a number of new features, in addition to the continued general cleanups and security…
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[$] Seeking smaller kernel stacks
Memory has always been a scarce resource in computing systems, but the problem seems to have worsened recently. In particular, the worldwide shortage of memory chips has led to a renewed focus by systems developers on reducing memory usage. During the memory-management microconference at the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference , Will Deacon discussed one…