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This year's Linaro Connect in Lisbon, Portugal featured a number of talks about the use of open-source components in safety-critical systems. Kate Stewart gave a keynote on the topic on the first day of the conference. In it, she highlighted several projects that have been working to pursue safety certification and spoke about the importance of being able to trace software's origins to safety....

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (varnish), Debian (asterisk and roundcube), Fedora (systemd), Mageia (golang), Red Hat (ghostscript, perl-CPAN, python36:3.6, and rsync), SUSE (govulncheck-vulndb, libsoup-2_4-1, and postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql17), and Ubuntu (mariadb, open-vm-tools, php-twig, and python-tornado).

Version 3.22.0 of the Alpine Linux distribution has been released. Notable changes in this release include the removal of the X11 session for KDE Plasma, a switch to systemd-efistub, and experimental support for user services with the OpenRC init system. See the release notes for a detailed list of changes.

Kees Cook's "hardening fixes" pull request for the 6.16 merge window looked like a straightforward exercise; it only contained four commits. So just about everybody was surprised when it resulted in Cook being temporarily blocked from his kernel.org account among fears of malicious activity. When the dust settled, though, the red alert was canceled. It turns out, surprisingly, that Git is a tool with...

Software patents and workarounds for them are, once again, causing headaches for open-source projects and users. This time around, Fedora users have been vulnerable to a serious flaw in the OpenH264 library for months—not for want of a fix, but because of the Rube Goldberg machine methodology of distributing the library to Fedora users. The software is open source under a two-clause BSD license;...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (espeak-ng, kitty, kmail-account-wizard, krb5, libreoffice, libvpx, net-tools, python-flask-cors, symfony, tcpdf, thunderbird, and twitter-bootstrap3), Fedora (chromium, dropbear, firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, python-tornado, systemd, and thunderbird), Mageia (coreutils, deluge, glib2.0, and redis), Oracle (firefox, kernel, and systemd), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, varnish, varnish:6, and zlib), SUSE (bind, curl, dnsdist, docker, ffmpeg-7, firefox, glibc, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, govulncheck-vulndb, icinga2, iputils, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-ibm, kea,...

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as "OSPM") took place on March 18-20, 2025. Topics discussed on the third (and final) day include proxy execution, energy-aware scheduling, the deadline scheduler, and an evaluation of the kernel's EEVDF scheduler.

Mozilla has decided to throw in the towel on Pocket, a social-bookmarking service that it acquired in 2017. This has left many users scrambling for a replacement for Pocket before its shutdown in July. One possible option is wallabag, a self-hostable, MIT-licensed project for saving web content for later reading. It can import saved data from services like Pocket, share content on the web,...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, ghostscript, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libsoup3, mingw-freetype, perl, ruby, sqlite, thunderbird, unbound, valkey, and xz), Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, libavif, linux-6.1, modsecurity-apache, mydumper, systemd, and thunderbird), Fedora (coreutils, dnsdist, docker-buildx, maturin, mingw-python-flask, mingw-python-flit-core, ruff, rust-hashlink, rust-rusqlite, and thunderbird), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (augeas, brltty, brotli, ca-certificates-mozilla, dnsdist, glibc, grub2, kernel, libsoup, libsoup2, libxml2, open-vm-tools, perl, postgresql13,...

As of this writing, 5,546 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel repository for the 6.16 release. This is a bit less than half of the total commits for 6.15, so the merge window is well on its way. Read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.16 merge window.

As the end of the 1990s approached, a lot of kernel-development effort was going into improving support for 32-bit systems with shockingly large amounts of memory installed. This being the 1990s, having more than 1GB of memory in such a system was deemed to be shocking. Many of the compromises made to support such inconceivably large systems have remained in the kernel to this...

The SUSE Security Team has published a detailed report about security vulnerabilities it discovered in the Kea DHCP server suite from the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). Since SUSE is also going to ship Kea DHCP in its products, we performed a routine review of its code base. Even before checking the network security of Kea, we stumbled over a range of local security issues,...

The 6.14.9 and 6.12.31 stable kernels have been released. Each contains an unusually large number of important fixes all over the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and kernel-rt), Debian (firefox-esr, libvpx, net-tools, php-twig, python-tornado, setuptools, varnish, webpy, yelp, and yelp-xsl), Fedora (xen), Mageia (cimg and ghostscript), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, kernel, libsoup, thunderbird, and unbound), Red Hat (firefox, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, pcs, and varnish:6), Slackware (curl and mozilla), SUSE (apparmor, containerd, dnsdist, go1.23-openssl, go1.24, gstreamer-plugins-bad, ImageMagick, jetty-minimal, python-tornado, python313-setuptools, s390-tools, thunderbird, tomcat10, ucode-intel, and...

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Glibc security; How we lost the Internet; Encrypted DNS; 6.15 Development statistics; Filesystem stress-testing; BPF verifier; Network access from BPF; OSPM 2025. Briefs: AlmaLinux 10.0; FESCo decision overturned; NixOS 25.05; Pocket, Launchpad retired; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The GNU C Library (glibc) is the core C library for most Linux distributions, so it is a crucial part of the open-source ecosystem—and an attractive target for any attackers looking to carry out supply-chain attacks. With that being the case, securing the project's infrastructure using industry best practices and improving the security of its development practices are a frequent topic among glibc developers....

Mahé Tardy led two sessions about some of the challenges that he, Kornilios Kourtis, and John Fastabend have run into in their work on Tetragon (Apache-licensed BPF-based security monitoring software) at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The session prompted discussion about the feasibility of letting BPF programs send data over the network, as well as potential new kfuncs to let...

Canonical's Launchpad software-collaboration platform that is used for Ubuntu development will be shutting down its hosted mailing lists at the end of October. The announcement recommends Discourse or Launchpad Answers as alternatives. Ubuntu's mailing lists are unaffected by the change.

The increasing sophistication of attackers has organizations realizing that perimeter-based security models are inadequate. Many are planning to transition their internal networks to a zero-trust architecture. This requires every communication on the network to be encrypted, authenticated, and authorized. This can be achieved in applications and services by using modern communication protocols. However, the world still depends on Domain Name System (DNS) services where...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free and kernel), Arch Linux (bind and varnish), Debian (glibc and syslog-ng), Fedora (microcode_ctl, mozilla-ublock-origin, nodejs20, and nodejs22), Mageia (firefox, nss, rootcerts, open-vm-tools, sqlite3, and thunderbird), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, kernel, libsoup, nodejs:22, php, php:8.2, php:8.3, python-tornado, redis, and redis:7), Red Hat (libsoup, pcs, and python-tornado), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (bind, dnsdist, elemental-operator, govulncheck-vulndb, gstreamer-plugins-bad, jetty-annotations, jq, libnss_slurm2, libyelp0, mariadb,...

Version 10 of the AlmaLinux OS distribution has been released. The goal of AlmaLinux OS is to support our community, and AlmaLinux OS 10 is the best example of that yet. With an unwavering eye on maintaining compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we have made small improvements to AlmaLinux OS 10 that target specific sections of our userbase. See the release notes...

Srinivas Narayana led a remote session about extending Agni to prove the correctness of the BPF verifier's handling of different execution paths as part of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The problem of ensuring the correctness of path exploration is much more difficult than the problem of ensuring the correctness of arithmetic operations (which was the subject of the previous...

Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of...

Version 25.05 of the NixOS distribution has been released. Changes include support for the COSMIC desktop environment (reviewed here in August), GNOME 48, a 6.12 kernel, and many new modules; see the release notes for details. (Thanks to Pavel Roskin).

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libsoup, and python-tornado), Debian (libavif and pgbouncer), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (firefox, govulncheck-vulndb, and python310-setuptools), and Ubuntu (flask, intel-microcode, openjdk-17-crac, tika, and Tomcat).

The 6.14 kernel development cycle only brought in 11,003 non-merge changesets, making it the slowest cycle since 4.0, which was released in 2015. The 6.15 kernel, instead, brought in 14,612 changesets, making it the busiest release since 6.7, released at the beginning of 2024. The kernel development process, in other words, is back up to full speed. The 6.15 release happened on May 25, so...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, ghostscript, grafana, kernel, and osbuild-composer), Debian (intel-microcode, kernel, libphp-adodb, and openssl), Fedora (dotnet8.0, ghostscript, iputils, nbdkit, open-vm-tools, thunderbird, and vyper), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, glibc, iputils, microcode, nodejs, and zsync), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, avahi, buildah, compat-openssl11, expat, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, git, grafana, gvisor-tap-vsock, libsoup, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nodejs:20, osbuild-composer, podman, skopeo, thunderbird, vim, webkit2gtk3, xdg-utils,...

Linus has released the 6.15 kernel, as expected. So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now. Significant changes in 6.15 include smarter timer-ID assignment to make checkpoint/restore operations more reliable, the ability to read status information from a pidfd after...

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as "OSPM") took place on March 18-20, 2025. Topics discussed on the second day include improvements to device suspend and resume, the status and future of sched_ext, the scx_lavd scheduler, improving the efficiency of load balancing, and hierarchical constant bandwidth server scheduling.

The BPF verifier is an increasingly complex and security-critical piece of code. When the kinds of people who are apt to work on BPF see a situation like that, they naturally question whether it's possible to use formal verification to ensure that the implementation of the code in question is correct. Santosh Nagarakatte led the first of two extra-long sessions in the BPF track...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet9.0, dropbear, ghostscript, nbdkit, openssh, python-watchfiles, rpm-ostree, yelp, yelp-xsl, and zsync), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (aaa_glibc and mozilla), SUSE (chromedriver, open-vm-tools, postgresql14, python-cryptography, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-hwe-5.4, python, and sqlite3).

Mozilla has announced that it is shutting down Pocket, a bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla in 2017, this coming July. "Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."

Our recent article on Home Assistant observed that the project emphasizes installations using its own Linux distribution or within containers. The project has now made that emphasis rather stronger with this announcement of the deprecation of the "core" and "supervised" installation modes, which allowed Home Assistant to be installed as an ordinary application on a Linux system. These are advanced installation methods, with only...

The Fedora Council has ruled on the Fedora Engineering Steering Council's (FESCo) decision last year to revoke Peter Robinson's provenpackager status. In a statement published to the fedora-devel-announce mailing list, the council has announced that it has overturned FESCo's decision: FESCo didn't have a specific policy for dealing with a request to remove Proven Packager rights. In addition, the FESCo process was handled entirely...

Testing filesystems is a frequent topic at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF); the 2025 edition was no exception. Boris Burkov led a filesystem-track session to discuss stress-testing filesystems—and running those tests for lengthy periods. He reviewed what he has been doing when testing filesystems and wanted to gather ideas for what could be done to catch more bugs before...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.14.8, 6.12.30, 6.6.92, 6.1.140, and 5.15.184 stable kernels. As usual, each contains a long list of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Fedora (mozilla-ublock-origin and sudo-rs), Oracle (.NET 8.0, compat-openssl10, grafana, osbuild-composer, redis:6, ruby:2.5, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (dante, firefox-esr, gnuplot, govulncheck-vulndb, grype, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python-tornado6, python314, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and xen), and Ubuntu (bind9, libfcgi-perl, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4, postgresql-17, and Tomcat).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Home Assistant; Setuptools; Debian AI GR; DMA-mapping API; BPF CI; OSPM 2025 Briefs: Go audit; Oniux; Asahi progress; Rust in FreeBSD; RHEL 10; Rust 1.87.0; RIP John L. Young; Quote; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Shawn Webb has published a status report on work to provide basic support in FreeBSD for userland components written in Rust. We introduced a new BSD makefile, located at share/mk/bsd.rust.mk, that enables building a Rust application during buildworld. As of this writing, we only support building and installing Rust applications. Supporting library crates is planned (we would like to be able to build/install library...

In late March, version 78.0.1 of Setuptools — an important Python packaging tool — was released. It was scarcely half an hour before the first bug report came in, and it quickly became clear that the change was far more disruptive than anticipated. Within only about five hours 78.0.2 was published to roll back the change, and multiple discussions were started about how to...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, avahi, buildah, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, expat, firefox, gimp, git, grafana, libsoup, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, php, redis, redis:7, skopeo, thunderbird, vim, webkit2gtk3, xterm, and yelp), Arch Linux (dropbear, freetype2, go, nodejs, nodejs-lts-iron, nodejs-lts-jod, python-django, webkit2gtk, webkit2gtk-4.1, webkitgtk-6.0, and wpewebkit), Debian (mongo-c-driver), Fedora (openssh, perl-Mojolicious, thunderbird, yelp, and yelp-xsl), Red Hat (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk with Extended...

Ihor Solodrai has been working on the BPF subsystem's continuous-integration (CI) testing for the last six months. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he remotely shared an update on his work, and solicited feedback on how the tests could be further improved. Much of the work he's done has been specific to the BPF subsystem, but some is more generic...

Despite careful planning and months of warning, Debian developer Mo Zhou has acknowledged that the project needs more time to grapple with the questions around AI models and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). For now, he has withdrawn his proposed General Resolution (GR) that would have required the original training data for AI models to be released in order to be considered DFSG-compliant—though...

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. A blog post accompanying the release provides details on some of the more notable features, such as encrypted DNS, a developer preview of RHEL 10 for RISC-V, and image mode for RHEL using bootc. Image mode for RHEL lets you deploy your OS as a bootc image to your hardware, virtual machine...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and wireless-regdb), Fedora (iputils, open-vm-tools, sfnt2woff-zopfli, and woff), Red Hat (postgresql:12), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, brltty, helm, python-maturin, and rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-fips).

Roland Shoemaker has published a blog post about a recent security audit of the cryptography packages shipped as part of the Go standard library. The audit, performed by the Trail of Bits security firm, uncovered one low-severity vulnerability in the legacy Go+BoringCrypto integration, as well as a handful of informational findings. During the review, there were a number of questions about our cgo-based Go+BoringCrypto...

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (known as "OSPM") Summit took place on March 18-20, 2025. It was organized by Juri Lelli, Frauke Jäger, Tommaso Cucinotta, and Lorenzo Pieralisi, and was hosted by Linutronix at Alte Fabrik, Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany. The event was sponsored by Linutronix, Arm, and the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dropbear, firefox-esr, intel-microcode, net-tools, openafs, thunderbird, and xrdp), Fedora (chromium, micropython, syslog-ng, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (dropbear and openssh), Oracle (.NET 9.0, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, git-lfs, grafana, kernel, and osbuild and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (cargo-c, gimp, iputils-20240905, kernel, libraw, microcode_ctl, openssh, pnpm, python311-cramjam, python311-httptools, python311-jwcrypto, python311-loguru, python311-mechanize, python311-nltk, python311-oauthlib, python311-py7zr,...

The 6.15-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So while I wish we hadn't had some of the excitement of last week, on the whole it all still looks pretty solid, and unless something strange happens I'll do the final 6.15 release next weekend."

The 6.14.7, 6.12.29, 6.6.91, 6.1.139, and 5.15.183 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.