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The 7.2-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. It is still bigger than Linus would like, but he said nonetheless: " I don't currently see any value in delaying the 7.2 release, so I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up. "

The 7.1.8 , 6.18.44 , 6.12.103 , and 6.6.151 stable kernels have been released; each contains a fair number of important fixes.

The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow , /etc/passwd , and other related databases; in general, manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password expiry, which were deprecated in the December 2025 4.19.0 release, have been removed as planned. It is…

The Software Stewardship Lab , a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence . Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnout in Open Source has been well-received. We're working on yearly follow-ups, plus a companion rep…

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years : the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that had been in limbo pending a new release.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102 , 6.6.150 , 6.1.182 , 5.15.215 , 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht , that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability ( CVE-2026-68480 ) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. The 6.12.102 release adds the backported security fix for CVE-2026-68480 to the 6.12 series. As always, us…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-libtiff3, fence-agents, firefox, freerdp, frr, gimp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, ldns, libgcrypt, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, p11-kit, pipewire, resource-agents, sg3_utils, thunderbird, and yelp), Debian (async-http-client, jq, kernel, linux-6.1, linux-6.12, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (abrt, chromium, coreutils, curl, freeipa, gst-devtools, gst-editing-services, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-doc, gstreame…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.7 , 6.18.43 , 6.6.149 , 6.1.181 , 5.15.214 , and 5.10.263 stable kernels. These kernels fix a single security vulnerability ( CVE-2026-68480 ) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. Users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.

The kernel is able to run a few types of executable files, including native binaries in the ELF format and interpreted programs that begin with the #! marker. It also, however, has a mechanism, called binfmt_misc , that can be configured from user space to enable the transparent execution of programs in just about any format. This feature has been relatively static for years, but it seems likely to receive some significant updates in the near future, including the ability to load BPF programs t…

Version 0.10 of the uutils project's Rust Coreutils has been released. This release focused on compatibility with the GNU Core Utilities suite, with Rust Coreutils now passing 645 of 690 tests, up from 625 with version 0.9.0 . Notable changes in this release include addition of the mv --exchange option, an OpenSSL backend for checksum utilities, applying SELinux labels at creation when using mkdir , mkfifo , and mknod , as well as a number of performance and security improvements. The project h…

Security updates have been issued by Debian (7zip, kernel, libde265, and p7zip), Mageia (tomcat), Oracle (fence-agents, frr10, kernel, ldns, libgcrypt, mingw-glib2, nodejs24, osbuild-composer, p11-kit, php8.4, sg3_utils, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libXfont2), and SUSE (containerd, evince, libXfont2, nginx, openssl-3, pcp, php7, php8, python-Django, python-httplib2, python-nltk, rrdtool, vifm, and wireshark).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Process-builder API; Fedora COI; FUSE io_uring buffer sizes; BPF network namespaces; FUSE plans; BPF libraries; directory creation system call. Briefs : AISI hack; JFrog on CVEs; npm worm; AUR adoption; NetBSD 11.0; b4 0.16.0; C-Kermit 11; Rust LLM policy; Servo 0.4.0; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Konstantin Ryabitsev has announced the release of version 0.16.0 of the b4 software-development tool. The biggest change is the addition of bug-tracking support: The new "b4 bugs" command integrates with git-bug to let you track bug reports alongside your git repository. Bugs are stored as git objects inside the repo, so they travel with the code and can be shared via git push/pull without any external service. There are also a lot of improvements to b4 review (which was covered here in March),…

Jordan Rife's work involves writing BPF programs for Cilium that interface with Kubernetes networking. As part of that work, he wants to enable BPF programs with appropriate permissions to iterate through the sockets of a different network namespace. He led a session about the idea at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit where the BPF developers in attendance were quick to suggest a number of related alternatives.

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion about the subsystem at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit . In it, he talked about maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the FUSE community these days it seems.