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The New Stack looks at EU OS, an attempt to create a desktop system for the European public sector. EU OS is not a brand-new Linux distribution in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a proof-of-concept built atop Fedora's immutable KDE Plasma spin (Kinoite). EU OS takes a layered approach to customization. The project's vision is to provide a standard, adaptable Linux base that...

The final session in the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit was a brief, last-minute addition run by Kalesh Singh. The kernel's readahead mechanism is generally good for performance; it ensures that data is present by the time an application gets around to asking for it. Sometimes, though, readahead can go a little too far.

Adding tracepoints to some kernel subsystems has been controversial—or disallowed—due to concerns about the user-space ABI that they might create. The virtual filesystem (VFS) layer has long been one of the subsystems that has not allowed any tracepoints, but that may be changing. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Ted Ts'o led a discussion about whether the ABI...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (graphicsmagick and libapache2-mod-auth-openidc), Fedora (giflib, mod_auth_openidc, mysql8.0, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, perl-String-Compare-ConstantTime, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, trunk, and workrave), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and rust), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libreoffice, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (gvisor-tap-vsock), SUSE (containerd, docker, docker-stable, forgejo, GraphicsMagick, libmozjs-115-0, perl-32bit, poppler, subfinder, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (erlang and ruby2.3, ruby2.5).

Version 25.04 ("Plucky Puffin") of the Ubuntu Linux distribution has been released. This release includes Linux 6.14, GNOME 48, APT 3.0, and introduces a Arm64 desktop ISO to install Ubuntu Desktop on Arm64 systems. This is an interim release, with support through January 2026. See the release notes for a detailed list of new features and changes.

Version 14.5 of the Tor Browser has been released. Notable features in this release include the addition of Connection Assist for the Android version of the Tor Browser, and language support for Belarusian, Bulgarian, and Portuguese for all versions of the browser. Should Tor Browser fail to establish a direct connection to the Tor network, Connection Assist will offer to find and try bridges...

The kernel's memory controller works within the control-group mechanism to enforce memory-usage limits on groups of processes. This component has often had performance problems, so there is continual interest in optimizing it. Shakeel Butt led a session during the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit to look at the current state of the memory controller and what can...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and libapache2-mod-auth-openidc), Oracle (expat, freetype, glibc, grub2, gvisor-tap-vsock, and kernel), Red Hat (grub2 and webkit2gtk3), and SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, cosign, gitoxide, govulncheck-vulndb, GraphicsMagick, haproxy, hauler, mozjs52, oci-cli, pam, perl-Data-Entropy, poppler, python-lxml-doc, python311-aiohttp, rekor, rubygem-rexml, and webkit2gtk3).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: APT 3.0; Fedora 42; Lots more LSFMM+BPF coverage. Briefs: CVE funding; Yelp vulnerability; Fedora 42; Manjaro 25.0; GCC 15; Pinta 3.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Debian's Advanced Package Tool (APT) is the suite of utilities that handle package management on Debian and Debian-derived operating systems. APT recently received a major upgrade to 3.0 just in time for inclusion in Debian 13 ("trixie"), which is planned for release sometime in 2025. The version bump is warranted; the latest APT has user-interface improvements, switches to Sequoia to verify package signatures, and includes...

GNOME contributor Michael Catanzaro has written a blog post about a noteworthy vulnerability in GNOME's help browser, Yelp. I don't normally blog about particular CVEs, but Yelp CVE-2025-3155 is noteworthy because it is quite severe, public for several weeks now, and not yet fixed upstream. In short, help files can read your filesystem and execute arbitrary JavaScript code, allowing an attacker to exfiltrate any...

Allowing directories to be modified in parallel was the topic of Jeff Layton's filesystem-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF). There are certain use cases, including for the NFS and Lustre filesystems, as mentioned in a patch set referenced in the topic proposal, where contention in creating multiple files in a directory is causing noticeable performance problems....

The BPF verifier is not magic; it cannot solve the halting problem. Therefore, it has to err on the side of assuming that a program will run too long if it cannot prove that the program will not. The ultimate check on the size of a BPF program is the one-million-instruction limit — the verifier will refuse to process more than one-million instructions, no...

Sergiu Gatlan reports that the US government has extended funding for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, following yesterday's reports that funding would run out as of April 16. "The CVE Program is invaluable to cyber community and a priority of CISA," the U.S. cybersecurity agency told BleepingComputer. "Last night, CISA executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no...

As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long before the allocation of large, physically contiguous memory ranges becomes difficult or impossible. The contiguous memory allocator (CMA) is a kernel subsystem that attempts to address this problem, but it has never worked as well as some would like. Two sessions in the memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, and kernel-rt), Fedora (chromium, dnf, dotnet9.0, golang, lemonldap-ng, mariadb10.11, perl-Crypt-URandom-Token, perl-DBIx-Class-EncodedColumn, php-tcpdf, podman-tui, and trunk), Red Hat (java-17-openjdk and kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, cosign, etcd, expat, flannel, kernel, libsqlite3-0, libvarnishapi3, mozjs52, Multi-Linux Manager 4.3: Server, Multi-Linux Manager 5.0: Server, Proxy and Retail Server, pgadmin4, rekor, rsync, rubygem-bundler, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (7zip, Docker, and...

In the first filesystem-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), virtual filesystem (VFS) layer co-maintainer Christian Brauner had a few different topics he wanted to talk about. Issues on the agenda included iterating through anonymous mount namespaces, a needed feature for ID-mapped mounts, the perennial unprivileged mounts topic, potentially using hazard pointers for file reference counting, and...

Security Week is one of several outlets reporting that the funding for the CVE program at MITRE disappears as of April 16. Maintained by MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that operates federal R&D centers, the CVE program is funded through multiple channels, including the U.S. government, industry partnerships, and international organizations. Earlier this month, in anticipation of the US government funding cuts, MITRE initiated layoffs...

Version 25.0 ("Zetar") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is now available. This release includes Linux kernel 6.12, GNOME 48, KDE 6.3, Xfce 4.18, and more.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 42, with "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. There is also a last-minute warning about the live media for the release: We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can't do much about it. It doesn't damage anything,...

Fedora Linux 42 has been released with many incremental improvements and updates. In this development cycle, the KDE Plasma Desktop has finally gotten a promotion from a spin to an edition, the new web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer makes its debut, and the Wayland-ification of Fedora continues apace. In all it is a solid release with lots of polish.

It is common, on NUMA systems, to try to allocate all memory on the local node, since it will be the fastest. That is not the only possible policy, though; another is weighted interleaving, which seeks to distribute allocations across memory controllers to maximize the bandwidth utilization on each. Configuring such policies can be challenging, though. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), Slackware (perl), SUSE (haproxy, kernel, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (cimg, perl, protobuf, and webkit2gtk).

Version 3.0 of the Pinta image editor has been released. The most notable change in this release is that Pinta has been ported to GTK 4.0 and libadwaita. It also includes a number of improvements, new effects, and bug fixes.