LWN.net

The Debian project is considering a general resolution on the use of large language models in the creation of the distribution. There are three alternatives to consider: a total ban on LLM usage, rejecting LLMs " as far as practical ", or explicitly allowing LLM usage subject to a set of conditions. The discussion period has just begun; the beginning of the voting period does not yet appear to have been set. Those who want to look over the discussion ahead of the inevitable LWN article can find…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-openssl11, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, and sssd), Debian (exim4), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, mbedtls, mupdf, netatalk, python-django5, skopeo, sssd, and wget1), Mageia (libevent and transmission), Oracle (.NET 8.0, 389-ds-base, aardvark-dns, acl, buildah, cifs-utils, dovecot, dracut, galera and mariadb11.8, glibc, hplip, kernel, libxml2, nginx, openexr, podman, postgresql18, rsync, thunderbird, and vim), and S…

Version 2.44 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include a new /etc/tunables.conf file for the system-wide setting of tunable parameters, a new tunable to control the use of transparent huge pages for read-only executable segments, a number of math-function improvements, a handful of security fixes, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.98 stable Linux kernel with a single fix for a file descriptor leak in ext4. Users of the ext4 filesystem should upgrade.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.5 , 6.18.40 , 6.12.97 , 6.6.145 , 6.1.178 , 5.15.212 , and 5.10.261 stable Linux kernels. This batch of kernels includes a hefty set of updates, possibly the the largest ever. 7.1.5-rc1 , for example, included more than 2,000 patches, 6.18.40-rc1 included 1,611 patches, and so forth. Users are advised to upgrade.

Registration is now open for the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, to be held October 5 to 7 in Prague, Czechia. Tickets to this event tend to sell out quickly, so interested attendees probably should not procrastinate.

Fedora contributor Simon de Vlieger has published a blog post with a walkthrough of how the project turns source code and packages into the final release that users install on their systems. It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments. The walkthrough describes how the Fedora 'sausage' is created as of Fedora 45, things change all the time; I hope to have time to update this document every cycle or every…

Daniel Borkmann led a session at the 2026 Linux Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about the progress that has been made with netkit, the subsystem that allows virtual machines (VMs) running on Linux to perform networking efficiently. When that did not fill the full time, he went on to discuss his idea for using BPF to live-patch user-space applications. While netkit is making progress, and can now support zero-copy receipt of packets into a VM in a network namespace, the idea of usi…

The Open Home Foundation , which governs the Home Assistant home-automation project, has announced the "public preview" of its Device Database : Providing a public, open way to browse the anonymous, aggregated device data we collect was always part of the plan, and this preview is our first step toward it. You can already use it to search and filter devices to see aggregated community insights, starting with a deliberately focused set of specifics, such as whether a device requires an internet …

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc, java-21-openjdk, kernel, and libpq), Debian (imagemagick, spice-vdagent, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (cryptlib, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, python-black, python-lsp-black, and python-pytokens), Mageia (apache, cifs-utils, dnsmasq, lrzip, and socat), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, cups, edk2, fence-agents, firefox, freeipmi, freerdp, git-lfs, glib2, gnutls, golang, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-pl…

One of the ideas raised at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) was the creation of an operations structure for the swap subsystem. Like many parts of the kernel, the swap layer evolved over time, with pieces being added as needed; the end result of this evolution is rarely what one would expect had the subsystem been designed today. The interface between the swap layer and the devices it uses is just one example. It appears that one result of the sw…

The Codeberg forge has adopted a pair of new policies, promising not to use hosted projects to train LLMs and, more controversially, banning the hosting of LLM-generated software. The site's blog describes and justifies these policies. Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of a prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. …

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (acl, dogtag-pki, dovecot, glibc, go-toolset:rhel8, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd:2.4, javapackages-tools:201801, libtiff, mariadb-connector-c, perl-HTTP-Daemon, pki-deps:10.6, and sssd), Debian (bind9, chromium, firefox-esr, and pdns-recursor), Fedora (chromium, collectl, fractal, kernel, libssh, llvm, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecur…