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The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the "experimental" tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust-for-Linux team. (Stay tuned for details in our Maintainers Summit coverage.)

The Free Software Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2024 (even though 2025 is almost over) Free Software Awards. Andy Wingo won the award for the advancement of free software, Alx Sa is the outstanding new free-software contributor, and Govdirectory takes the award for projects of social benefit.

One of the things that has historically stood between Linux and the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" is its lack of support for video games. Many users who would have happily abandoned Windows have, reluctantly, stayed for the video games or had to deal with dual booting. In the past few years, though, Linux support for games—including those that only have Windows versions—has improved dramatically, if one is willing to put the pieces together. Bazzite , an image-based Fedora derivative, is a…

Version 146.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. One feature of particular interest to Linux users is that Firefox now natively supports fractional scaled displays on Wayland. Firefox Labs has also been made available to all users even if they opt out of telemetry or participating in studies. " This means more experimental features are now available to more people. " This release also adds support for Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) for WebRTC. ML-KEM is " b…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Fedora (abrt and mingw-libpng), Mageia (apache and libpng), Oracle (abrt, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, sssd, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (gimp, gnutls, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, and postgresql13), and Ubuntu (gnupg2, python-apt, radar…

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the standards body responsible for the TLS encryption standard — which your browser is using right now to allow you to read LWN.net. As part of its work to keep TLS secure, the IETF has been entertaining proposals to adopt "post-quantum" cryptography (that is, cryptography that is not known to be easily broken by a quantum computer) for TLS version 1.3. Discussion of the proposal has exposed a large disagreement between participants who worried abou…

Jon Seager, VP of engineering for Canonical, has announced a plan to develop a universal Public Key Infrastructure tool called upki: Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled " Linux's missing CRL infrastructure ". The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux. One of the motivators for the disc…

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, krita, lasso, and libpng1.6), Fedora (abrt, cef, chromium, tinygltf, webkitgtk, and xkbcomp), Oracle (buildah, delve and golang, expat, python-kdcproxy, qt6-qtquick3d, qt6-qtsvg, sssd, thunderbird, and valkey), Red Hat (webkit2gtk3), and SUSE (git-bug, go1, and libpng12-0).

As has been recently announced , nominations are open for the 2025 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) elections. I am one of the TAB members whose term is coming to an end, but I have decided that, after 18 years on the board, I will not be seeking re-election; instead, I will step aside and make room for a fresh voice. My time on the TAB has been rewarding, and I will be sad to leave; the TAB has an important role to play in the functioning of the kernel community.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.11 , 6.12.61 , 6.6.119 , 6.1.159 , 5.15.197 , and 5.10.247 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users of these kernels should upgrade.

Emma Smith and Kirill Podoprigora, two of Python's core developers, have opened a discussion about including Rust code in CPython, the reference implementation of the Python programming language. Initially, Rust would only be used for optional extension modules, but they would like to see Rust become a required dependency over time. The initial plan was to make Rust required by 2028, but Smith and Podoprigora indefinitely postponed that goal in response to concerns raised in the discussion.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gimp:2.8, go-toolset:rhel8, ipa, kea, kernel, kernel-rt, pcs, qt6-qtquick3d, qt6-qtsvg, systemd, and valkey), Debian (chromium and unbound), Fedora (alexvsbus, CuraEngine, fcgi, libcoap, python-kdcproxy, texlive-base, timg, and xpdf), Mageia (digikam, darktable, libraw, gnutls, python-django, unbound, webkit2, and xkbcomp), Oracle (bind, firefox, gimp:2.8, haproxy, ipa, java-25-openjdk, kea, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, libtiff, ope…

Version 3.23.0 of Alpine Linux has been released. Notable changes in this release include an upgrade to version 3.0 of the Alpine Package Keeper (apk), and replacing the linux-edge package with linux-stable : For years, linux-lts and linux-edge grew apart and developed their own kernel configs, different architectures, etc. Now linux-edge gets replaced with linux-stable which has the identical configuration as linux-lts, but follows the stable releases instead of the long-term releases (see htt…

As of this writing, 4,124 non-merge commits have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 6.19 kernel development cycle. That is a relatively small fraction of what can be expected this time around, but it contains quite a bit of significant work, with changes to many core kernel subsystems. Read on for a summary of the first part of the 6.19 merge window.

Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or so— async , free threading without the global interpreter lock (GIL), and independent subinterpreters —but users must work out their own solution for an immutable dictionary that can be safely shared by con…