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A few years ago, the only way to compile Rust code was using the rustc compiler with LLVM as a backend. Since then, several projects, including Mutabah's Rust Compiler (mrustc), GCC's Rust support (gccrs), rust_codegen_gcc , and Cranelift have made enormous progress on diversifying Rust's compiler implementations. The most recent such project, Eurydice , has a more ambitious goal: converting Rust code to clean C code. This is especially useful in high-assurance software, where existing verifica…

Daniel Stenberg, the recipient of last year's Award for Excellence in Open Source from the European Open Source Academy, presented that award to this year's recipient : Greg Kroah-Hartman. It's impossible to overstate the importance of the work Greg has done on Linux. In software, innovation grabs headlines, but stability saves lives and livelihoods. Every Android phone, every web server, every critical system running Linux depends on Greg's meticulous work. He ensures that when hospitals, bank…

The 6.18.8 , 6.12.68 , and 6.6.122 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (curl, gimp:2.8, glibc, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, osbuild-composer, php:8.3, python-urllib3, python3.11, and python3.12), Debian (chromium), Mageia (ceph, gpsd, libxml2, openjdk, openssl, and xen), SUSE (abseil-cpp, assertj-core, coredns, freerdp, java-11-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, libxml2, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python, python-filelock, and python311-sse-starlette), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-hwe, linux-kvm,…

Jeff Mahoney , who holds a vice-president position at SUSE, has posted a detailed proposal for improving the governance of the openSUSE project. It's meant to be a way to move from governance by volume or persistence toward governance by legitimacy, transparency, and process - so that disagreements can be resolved fairly and the project can keep moving forward. Introducing structure and predictability means it easier for newcomers to the project to participate without needing to understand deca…

The extensible scheduler class (sched_ext) allows the installation of a custom CPU scheduler built as a set of BPF programs. Its merging for the 6.12 kernel release moved the kernel away from the "one scheduler fits all" approach that had been taken until then; now any system can have its own scheduler optimized for its workloads. Within any given machine, though, it's still "one scheduler fits all"; only one scheduler can be loaded for the system as a whole. The sched_ext sub-scheduler patch s…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, openssl, and python3.9), Debian (gimp, libmatio, pyasn1, and python-django), Fedora (perl-HarfBuzz-Shaper, python-tinycss2, and weasyprint), Mageia (glib2.0), Oracle (curl, fence-agents, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, glibc, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, mariadb, osbuild-composer, perl, php:8.2, python-urllib3, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, and python3.12-urllib3), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bind, buildah, busybox, contain…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : PostmarketOS; LKRG 1.0; Fedora elections; EROFS, NTFS, and XFS; Fedora and GPG 2.5; BPF kfuncs. Briefs : curl bounties; GPG security; Guix 1.5.0; ReactOS turns 30; glibc 2.43; Rust 1.93; Xfwl4; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

We have received the sad news that Didier Spaier, maintainer of the blind-friendly Slackware-based Slint distribution, has recently passed away . Philippe Delavalade, who posted the announcement to the Slint mailing list, said: Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the installer; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as possible for visually impaired people. You all know that all these…

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that it will not be holding the 2026 spring board election. Instead, it will be creating a working group to " review and improve OSI's board member selection process " and provide recommendations by September 2026: The public election process was designed to gather community priorities and improve board member selection, while final appointments remained with the board. Over time, that nuance has become a source of understandable confusion for comm…

Phones running Linux are ubiquitous these days and it has been that way since Android started working toward dominance in the smartphone market. Unfortunately, Android has slowly increased its freedom-unfriendliness and has become something of a privacy nightmare. In a talk entitled "We need an open-source phone OS" at Open Source Summit Japan 2025 , Luca Weiss described the smartphone landscape and gave an overview of postmarketOS as an alternative Linux operating system for mobile handsets.

PC Gamer has run an amusing review of the scx_horoscope scheduler for Linux, which uses astrology to optimize scheduling decisions. The scheduler is full of bizarre features, like its ability to perform real planetary calculations based on accurate geocentric planetary positions, lunar phase scheduling (the full moon gives a 1.4x boost to tasking, apparently) and "zodiac-based task classification". That latter feature is easily one of my favourite bits. Specific planetary bodies "rule" over spe…

Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is not easy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership and voting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that have elections for representative bodies. The Fedora Council , the project's top-level governance body, is wrestling with that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interest group (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for the sole purpose of allowing them to vote in…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (openssl), Fedora (assimp, chromium, curl, freerdp, gimp, and harfbuzz), Mageia (glibc, haproxy, iperf, and python-pyasn1), Red Hat (image-builder, openssl, and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (avahi, cups, gio-branding-upstream, google-osconfig-agent, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel-firmware, libmatio-devel, libopenjp2-7, nodejs22, php8, python-python-multipart, python311-urllib3_…

There is a new GnuPG update for a " critical security bug " in recent GnuPG releases. A crafted CMS (S/MIME) EnvelopedData message carrying an oversized wrapped session key can cause a stack buffer overflow in gpg-agent during the PKDECRYPT--kem=CMS handling. This can easily be used for a DoS but, worse, the memory corruption can very likley also be used to mount a remote code execution attack. The bug was introduced while changing an internal API to the FIPS required KEM API. Only versions 2.5…