LWN.net
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Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ghostscript, grafana, hplip, libsoup3, lrzsz, rpcbind, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, cifs-utils, expat, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, jpeg-xl, mutt, and spip), Mageia (gpsd, libx11, and roundcubemail), Oracle (389-ds-base, compat-libtiff3, environment-modules, ghostscript, grafana…
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[$] Vendor hooks in the Android kernel
Since Android's inception, the kernels it has used have diverged significantly from the mainline. While many of those differences have been resolved over time, and the move to the generic kernel image has helped to bring Android closer, current devices still carry a lot of out-of-tree changes. The preferred form for such changes is by way of vendor hooks…
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KDE releases documentary
As part of KDE's 30th anniversary celebration , the project has released The KDE Documentary — A Story of Free Software Underdogs ( YouTube video ): The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the…
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Ubuntu 26.10 released
Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 26.10 ("Stonking Stingray"): Ubuntu 26.10 advances enterprise security features, completes the rollout of the Rust-based uutils coreutils , and strengthens integrations for user authentication using Microsoft Entra ID. [...] Ubuntu 26.10 also ships with GNOME 51, bringing a smoother, more responsive desktop…
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Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (environment-modules, flatpak-builder, kernel, kernel-rt, librabbitmq, libreoffice, libsoup, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, OpenEXR, opentelemetry-collector, pki-core:10.6, postgresql:12, python-tornado, python36:3.6, ruby:3.3, tftp, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (buildstream, firefox-esr, mariadb…
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Seven stable kernels for Thursday with fix for critical vulnerability
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.11 , 6.18.57 , 6.12.113 , 6.6.159 , 6.1.190 , 5.15.223 , and 5.10.272 stable kernels. This series includes, among other things, a fix for a critical vulnerability ( CVE-2026-99999 ). The flaw in skb_checksum_help() would allow an IPv4 packet with bad checksum metadata to " corrupt the network header…
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 15, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : 2026 Maintainers Summit; Rust goals; GCC and LLMs; GCC CFI; systemd; C types in Rust; LTTng; Swap showdown; KDE Linux. Briefs : 64-day certificates; Nix and Lix security; Asterinas 0.19.0; LineageOS 24; KDE 6.8; Python 3.15; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches…
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[$] Collaborating with out-of-tree tracers
LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems a bit trapped in something of a catch-22 . At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying to collaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace , perf ) in the kernel. The feedback he has gotten, both over the years and more recently, does not show a path that…
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Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series
At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit , Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large language model to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he has now posted that series for review . The fairly short series of ten patches basically enhances folio lookup by noticing when folios are hot, and setting a "delay releasing this…
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KDE Plasma 6.8 released
Version 6.8 of the KDE Plasma desktop has been released. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing the project: Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either…
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[$] GCC development with large-language models
After much deliberation, the GCC project recently came up with a policy on the use of large language models for development of the compiler suite. It is somewhat restrictive, but still leaves room for LLMs in the development process. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron , Jeff Law and Kyrill Tkachov discussed how these tools have been useful for them.
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Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind9.18, dovecot, flatpak, gd, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base, kernel, opentelemetry-collector, pcre2, and tftp), Debian (curl and keystone), Fedora (aegisub, arm-none-eabi-binutils-cs, avr-binutils, chromium, curl, firefox, kernel, python-jupytext, and…
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[$] KDE Linux at two
KDE Linux , the KDE Project's second stab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana" at the Akademy conference in 2024 by Harald Sitter. Nate Graham announced the first alpha-quality release during Akademy 2025 . Graham and Sitter paired up at Akademy 2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the…
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Nix and Lix local root-privilege-escalation vulnerabilities
The Lix and Nix projects have jointly disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. " All systems that build untrusted derivations are affected. " Releases with fixes from each project are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement for more…
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[$] Owning C types from Rust code
Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it can correctly model a program's needs. The Rust for Linux project has worked to provide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C code in the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about a patch series implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait for…
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Eisentraut: The reverts will continue until morale improves
PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut has written a blog post reflecting on the " unusually high number of features " that have been taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period began. Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was…
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Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, curl, emacs, environment-modules, flatpak, flatpak-builder, gd, glibc, kernel, libxml2, pcre2, and rsyslog), Debian (chromium, keystone, libgit2, librsvg, nagios4, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (baresip, bcm283x-firmware, curl, flare-im, GitPython, iperf3, kernel, libebml, libmatroska, libre, mkvtoolnix…
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Asterinas 0.19.0 released
Asterinas is a project to build a new operating-system kernel in Rust; it was covered here in 2025. Version 0.19.0 of the Asterinas kernel has been released; changes include a new graphics subsystem capable of running X.org, " minimal but usable " 64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.
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[$] The 2026 Maintainers Summit
The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and…
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LineageOS 24 released
The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0. We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone. On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of…
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Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, curl, dogtag-pki, dovecot, emacs, glibc, kernel, openssl, python3.12, python3.14, and sssd), Debian (chromium, ghostscript, tor, and vips), Fedora (kernel, libical, markdownlint-cli2, openbao, openvpn, php-getid3, python3.10, python3.11, and python3.13), Mageia…
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Kernel prepatch 7.3-rc7
The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus: " As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless something new comes up. " One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of…
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Stable kernels 7.2.10 and 6.18.56
The 7.2.10 and 6.18.56 stable kernels have been released. Each contains another several hundred important fixes.
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Python 3.15 released
Version 3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types, the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, package start-up configuration files , as well as improvements in the experimental JIT compiler . See the " What's new in Python 3.15 " article for an…
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[$] Adding kernel control-flow-integrity checking to GCC
While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron…
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[$] The state of systemd: 2026 edition
At the 2026 All Systems Go! conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek delivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of the systemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by a maintainer round table where Boccassi, Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Daan De Meyer, and project leader…
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Let's Encrypt moving to 64-day certificate lifetimes in 2027
Let's Encrypt , the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions of sites, has announced that it will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February 10, 2027: This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11…
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Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.16, freerdp, glibc, kbd, mod_auth_openidc, openssl, perl-DBI, python3.12, python3.14, and tftp), Debian (rails and twitter-bootstrap3), Fedora (barman, cockpit, hcloud, libmodsecurity, nginx-mod-modsecurity, perl-DBI, sudo, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (libxfont2), Oracle (bind9.18…
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[$] An update on Rust's project goals
Tomáš Šedovič is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team , which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals , including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes aimed at ensuring that the Rust for…
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[$] The [vx]swap showdown
The kernel's swap layer has undergone some significant changes over the course of the last year and a number of longstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has not yet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swap cache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highly inefficient resource use. There are…