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The 7.2-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: " So two weeks have passed, and the merge window is closed. Things look reasonably normal for this release (knock wood). "

The 7.1.2 , 7.0.14 , and 6.18.37 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively small number of important fixes.

The Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit , which still goes by the historical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As has become traditional, the presenters at that event have since written summaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made available to LWN for publication. The third day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including GPU affinity, profile-guided scheduling, paravirtualization scheduling, quality of service, and more.

Writeback is the process of ensuring that dirty pages or folios in the page cache are flushed to the disk, so that changes to those files are made persistent. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit , Jeff Layton wanted to discuss whether the writeback operation should be initiated earlier than it is today. The consensus seemed to be that it should be done earlier, but the path toward making that happen was less clear.

Lennart Poettering has posted a list of Mastodon posts about the changes in the systemd v261 release. The Mastodon format makes the reading harder, but there is a lot of useful information there.

The Git v2.55.0-rc2 testing release appeared on June 23, suggesting that the final Git 2.55 release can be expected in the near future. While this Git update lacks radical new features, it does include a number of improvements that regular Git users will appreciate, including commands to easily edit the commit history, more formatting options, fsmonitor support for Linux, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, coreutils, evince, libpng, libreoffice, libtasn1, libxml2, libxslt, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, postgresql:12, python-urllib3, python3.12-urllib3, python3.14, python3.14-urllib3, skopeo, tigervnc, tomcat, and vim), Debian (chromium, dnsdist, giflib, libdbi-perl, libssh2, libtext-csv-xs-perl, pdns, pdns-recursor, python-urllib3, and sogo), Fedora (goose, httpd, librabbitmq, perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2, perl-DBI, perl-IO-Compress, perl-Socke…

The Linux Foundation, in a letter co-signed by a large range of organizations and companies, has announced the launch of "Akrites", a project to fast-track vulnerability fixes into projects. As Akrites works upstream to fix projects at the source, we commit to support downstream efforts to secure critical infrastructure before it can be exploited. When patches are released to the public, adversaries are able to utilize AI to rapidly reverse engineer the underlying vulnerabilities, develop explo…

MinIO is a popular object-storage server that offered compatibility with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API. In December 2025, the company behind the project (also named MinIO) announced that the project was in maintenance mode and would not accept new changes; it was archived completely in February 2026. MinIO users have been hunting for alternatives since then, but the array of choices can be baffling. While many other projects aim to fill the space, their strengths and areas of focus…

Version 6.0.0 of the Podman container-management tool has been released. Notable new features include the ability to set multiple static IP addresses for containers, improvements in network isolation that make Podman more compatible with Docker, changes to the way Quadlet commands function, many new options for many existing podman commands, and a rewrite of Podman's configuration file handling . There are many breaking changes; see the release notes for a full list of all new features, changes…

There is a lot of work going into eliminating exploitable bugs from the kernel and preventing the addition of new ones. Even if this work is maximally successful, though, there is no chance that the kernel will be free of these bugs anytime soon. Thus, there is also ongoing interest in hardening the kernel to make the existing bugs more difficult to exploit. The upcoming 7.2 kernel release will include a change to how dynamically allocated structures are placed in memory to make them harder to …

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libpng, libsolv, libtasn1, libxml2, libxslt, python3.14, tigervnc, and vim), Debian (cloud-init, postgresql-13, and yelp), Mageia (nats-server), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind9.18, cockpit, compat-openssl11, dnsmasq, dovecot, evince, expat, flatpak, freerdp, gimp, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd, jmc, jq, kernel, libsndfile, libsoup, libtiff, mod_http2, mysql:8.0, nginx, nginx:1.24, openexr, php:8.2, poppler, pyOpenSSL, python-mar…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Free-threaded Python; AUR attacks; Fedora 2FA; 7.2 merge window; BPF arenas; BPF coroutines; BPF JIT; RMR and BRMR; OSPM. Briefs : Tor deprecations; GIMP 0.54.1 flatpak; Mastodon 4.6; Systemd v261; Xfce on Wayland; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Compromised accounts are one of the most common ways that attackers can sneak malware into the open-source supply chain. One way to reduce account compromise is for projects to require two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), but that is easier said than done. However, Fedora is currently discussing putting 2FA requirements in place soon, following an an alleged account compromise that led to an AI agent causing a number of problems for the project. After some discu…

BPF arenas are areas of memory (potentially shared with user space) where programs have free reign to build their own data structures, unburdened by the verifier's bounds checks. Many of those data structures are potentially usable in multiple programs. Emil Tsalapatis brought his work on libarena, a library containing generic utilities for use in BPF arenas, to the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit . Although the library is already available as part of the kerne…