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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.171 , 5.15.205 , and 5.10.255 stable kernels, quickly followed by 6.1.172 and 5.15.206 kernels. This is another round of stable kernels to provide fixes for one of the CVEs ( CVE-2026-43284 ) assigned following the Dirty Frag and Copy Fail 2 security disclosures. There is not, yet, a stable kernel with a fix for CVE-2026-43500 , though a patch to fix the second half is in the works.

An unusual, some might say hostile, approach to disclosing an alleged remote-code-execution (RCE) flaw in the Forgejo software-collaboration platform has sparked a multifaceted conversation. A so-called " carrot disclosure " in April has raised questions about the researcher's methods of unveiling a security problem, Forgejo's security policies, and the project's overall security posture.

It seems that we are in for an extended period of the disclosure of vulnerabilities before fixes become available. One possible way of coping with this flood might be the killswitch proposal from Sasha Levin. In short, killswitch can immediately disable access to specific functionality in a running kernel, essentially blasting a vulnerable path (and its associated functionality) out of existence until a fix can be installed. " For most users, the cost of 'this socket family stops working for th…

The kernel's DAMON subsystem provides user-space monitoring and management of system memory. DAMON is developing rapidly, so an update on its progress has become a regular feature of the annual Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit . This tradition continued at the 2026 gathering with an update from DAMON creator SeongJae Park covering a long list of new capabilities — tiering, data attributes monitoring, transparent huge pages, and more — being added to this subsystem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libsoup and mingw-libtiff), Debian (apache2, chromium, lcms2, libreoffice, and prosody), Fedora (openssl and perl-Starman), Oracle (git-lfs, libsoup, and perl-XML-Parser), Slackware (libgpg, mozilla, and php), SUSE (389-ds, cairo, cf-cli, chromedriver, cri-tools, freeipmi, gnutls, grafana, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, jetty-minimal, libmariadbd-devel, librsvg, mesa, mozjs52, mutt, nix, opencryptoki, python-Django, python-django, python-pytest…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.5 , 6.18.28 , 6.12.87 , and 6.6.138 stable kernels. These kernels contain a partial fix for the Dirty Frag and Copy Fail 2 security flaws. Kroah-Hartman has confirmed that a second patch is required, but it is still in development and has not yet been merged.

Hyunwoo Kim has announced the Dirty Frag security flaw, a local-privilege-escalation (LPE) vulnerability similar to the recently disclosed Copy Fail flaw: Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for these vulnerabilities. After consultation with the linux-distros@vs.openwall.org maintainers, and at the maintainers' request, I am publicly releasing this Dirty Frag document. As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege…

On April 21, Andrew Morton let it be known that he intends to begin stepping away from the maintainership of kernel's memory-management subsystem — a responsibility he has carried since before memory management was even seen as its own subsystem. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, one of the first sessions in the memory-management track was devoted to how the maintainership would be managed going forward. There are a lot of questions still to be answered.

Arjen Hiemstra has published an article on the status of the Union project: a single system to support all of KDE's technologies used for styling applications. The work on Union's Breeze implementation has progressed to the point where it is very hard to distinguish whether or not you are running the Union version. We have also tested with a bunch of applications and made sure that any differences were fixed. So we are at a stage where we need to get Union into the hands of more people, both to…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dovecot, fence-agents, freeipmi, git-lfs, image-builder, kernel, libsoup, osbuild-composer, and python-tornado), Debian (apache2, libdatetime-timezone-perl, lrzip, tzdata, and wireshark), Fedora (dovecot, forgejo-runner, gh, gnutls, krb5, nano, pdns, pyOpenSSL, squid, vim, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, krb5-appl, libexif, libtiff, nano, nginx, ntfs-3g, opam, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, perl-Starlet, perl-Starman, tcp…

The 7.0.4 , 6.18.27 , and 6.12.86 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : LLMs and security; restartable sequences and TCMalloc; Fedora and GNOME bug reports; Prolly trees; Arm on s390. Briefs : NHS open source; Alpine outage; GCC 16.1; Incus 7.0 LTS; NetHack 5.0.0; PHP license; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Predictions that LLM tools would cause a surge in reports of security vulnerabilities have, unquestionably, borne out. As expected, maintainers are having to wade through more security reports than ever before; in addition, LLM tools are disrupting traditional-coordinated disclosure practices as well. The method of Copy Fail 's disclosure, in particular, left vendors, projects, and users scrambling. In addition, maintainers are seeing parallel discovery of the same security flaws within the emb…

Version 7.0 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the inclusion of a low-level backup API, the addition of basic S3 operations directly in Incus to replace the now-unmaintained MinIO project, as well as the removal of support for cgroups v1 and xtables (iptables/ip6tables/ebtables). This is a long-term-support (LTS) release, with support through June 2031. The first 2 years will feature bug and security fixes as w…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, dovecot, image-builder, python-tornado, resource-agents, and systemd), Debian (openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and pyjwt), Fedora (pdns, pyOpenSSL, and squid), Slackware (hunspell), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bubblewrap, cmctl, coredns, curl, dpkg, firefox, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, libpng12, PackageKit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (docker.io-app, nghttp2, python-django, and python-mako).