LWN.net

The Project Zero blog explains that, on 64-bit Arm systems, the kernel's direct map is always placed at the same virtual location, regardless of whether kernel address-space layout randomization (KASLR) is enabled. While it remains true that KASLR should not be trusted to prevent exploitation, particularly in local contexts, it is regrettable that the attitude around Linux KASLR is so fatalistic that putting in the engineering effort to preserve its remaining integrity is not considered to be w…

Barry Warsaw, writing for the Python steering council, has announced that PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") has been approved, unanimously, by the four who could vote. Since Pablo Galindo Salgado was one of the PEP authors, he did not vote. The PEP provides a way to defer importing modules until the names defined in a module are needed by other parts of the program. We covered the PEP and the discussion around it a few weeks back. The council also had " recommendations about some of the PEP's d…

Python already has several ways to run programs concurrently — including asynchronous functions, threads, subinterpreters, and multiprocessing — but all of those options have drawbacks of one kind or another. PEP 703 ("Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython") removed a major barrier to running Python threads in parallel, but also exposed Python programmers to the same tricky synchronization problems found in other languages supporting multithreaded programs. A new draft proposal…

Version 6.0 ("Excalibur") of the systemd-averse Devuan distribution has been released. It is based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), and includes some of the significant changes from that release, including the merged /usr hierarchy. See the release notes for details.

The kernel's namespaces feature is, among other things, a key part of the implementation of containers. Like much in the kernel, though, the namespace API evolved over time; there was no design at the outset. As a result, this API has some rough edges and missing features. Christian Brauner is working to straighten out the namespace situation somewhat with this daunting 72-part patch series that, among other things, adds a new system call to allow user space to query the namespaces present on t…

Joel Severin has announced the availability of his port of the Linux kernel to WebAssembly; one can go to this page and watch it boot in a browser. Wasm is similar to every other arch in Linux, but also different. One important difference is that there is no way to suspend execution of a task. There is a way around this though: Linux supports up to 8k CPUs (or possibly more...). We can just spin up a new CPU dedicated to each user task (process/thread) and never preempt it

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (ruby-rack, strongswan, ublock-origin, and wordpress), Fedora (firefox, kea, openapi-python-client, openbao, python-uv-build, qt5-qtbase, ruby, ruff, rust-astral-tokio-tar, rust-attribute-derive, rust-attribute-derive-macro, rust-backon, rust-collection_literals, rust-get-size-derive2, rust-get-size2, rust-interpolator, rust-manyhow, rust-manyhow-macros, rust-proc-macro-utils, rust-quote-use, rust-quote…

Linus has released 6.18-rc4 for testing. " Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal, both in number of changes and where the changes are. "

The relatively small 6.17.7 , 6.12.57 , and 6.6.116 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Julian Andres Klode has announced that the Debian APT package-management tool will acquire " hard Rust dependencies sometime after May 2026. " If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port. "

The idea of automatic syntax-aware merging in version-control systems goes back to 2005 or earlier , but initial implementations were often language-specific and slow. Mergiraf is a merge-conflict resolver that uses a generic algorithm plus a small amount of language-specific knowledge to solve conflicts that Git's default strategy cannot. The project's contributors have been working on the tool for just under a year, but it already supports 33 languages , including C, Python, Rust, and even Sy…

Michael Hudson-Doyle, a member of Ubuntu's Foundations team, has announced the introduction of an "architecture variant" for Ubuntu 25.10: By making changes to dpkg , apt and Launchpad, we are able to build multiple versions of a package, each for a different level of the x86-64 architecture, meaning we can have packages that specifically target x86-64-v3 , for example. As a result, we're very excited to share that in Ubuntu 25.10, some packages are available, on an opt-in basis, in their optim…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, libtiff, redis, and redis:6), Debian (chromium, mediawiki, pypy3, and squid), Fedora (openbao), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, chromium, chrony, expat, haproxy, himmelblau, ImageMagick, iputils, kernel, libssh, libxslt, openssl-3, podman, strongswan, xorg…

Version 1.91.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include promoting aarch64-pc-windows-msvc to a tier-1 platform, a new lint to catch dangling raw pointers from local variables, and a fair number of newly stabilized APIs.

The kernel's file-I/O subsystems have been highly optimized over the years in the hope of providing the best performance for a wide variety of workloads. There is, however, one workload type that suffers with current kernels: applications that perform many short reads, in multiple processes, from the same file. Kiryl Shutsemau has been working on a patch to try to optimize this case, but the task is turning out to be harder than one might expect.