LWN.net

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Privacy battles; page-cache-timing protections; null filesystems; Fedora Sandbox; safer kmalloc(); BPF in io_uring. Briefs : AppArmor vulnerabilities; snapd vulnerability; Sashiko; DPL election; Fedora Asahi 43; GIMP 3.2; Marknote 1.5; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and she gave the Saturday morning keynote at SCALE 23x in Pasadena about some of the work she and others have done to help protect online rights, especially digital privacy. The talk recounted some of the history of the court cases that the organization has brought over the years to try to dial back privacy invasions. One underlying theme was the role that attendees can play in protecting our rights, hearkening bac…

Version 4.24.0 of the Samba SMB filesystem implementation has been released. There are a number of significant changes, including audit support for authentication information, remote password management, a number of Kerberos improvements, asynchronous-I/O rate limiting, and more.

GNOME 50 has been released. Notable changes in this release include enhancements to the Orca screen-reader application, interface and performance improvements for GNOME's file manager (Files), a " massive set of stability and performance updates " for its display-handling technologies, and much more. See also the " What's new for developers " article that covers changes of interest to GNOME and GNOME application developers.

Qualys has discovered a local-privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 and later: This flaw (CVE-2026-3888) allows an unprivileged local attacker to escalate privileges to full root access through the interaction of two standard system components: snap-confine and systemd-tmpfiles. More details are available in the security advisory . Canonical has published updated packages as well as instructions for verifying if a system is vulnerable and how to upgrade if so.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 is now available : This release incorporates all the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 43 . Notably, package management is significantly upgraded with RPM 6.0 and the new DNF5 backend for PackageKit for Plasma Discover and GNOME Software ahead of Fedora Linux 44. It also continues to provide extensive device support. This includes newly added support for the Mac Pro, microphones in M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, and 120Hz refresh rate for the built-in displays for MacBoo…

The kernel's asynchronous io_uring interface maintains two shared ring buffers: a submission queue for sending requests to the kernel, and a completion queue containing the results of those requests. Even with shared memory removing much of the overhead of communicating with user space, there is still some overhead whenever the kernel must switch to user space to give it the opportunity to process completion requests and queue up any subsequent work items. A patch set from Pavel Begunkov minimi…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, compat-openssl11, container-tools:rhel8, grub2, and libvpx), Debian (ansible, gst-plugins-base1.0, and nodejs), Fedora (chromium, forgejo, and systemd), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, grub2, kernel, libpng, libvpx, nginx, opencryptoki, python3.12, and vim), Red Hat (firefox, python-wheel, python3.12-wheel, and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, chromium, clamav, container-suseconnect, curl, freerdp, gvfs, kea, kubernetes, ruby4.0-rub…

Roman Gushchin has announced the existence of an LLM-driven patch-review system named Sashiko . It automatically creates reviews for all patches sent to the linux-kernel mailing list (and some others). In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream issues using "Fixes:" tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers. Sashiko is built on Chr…

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is reporting that payment provider Nexi has terminated its contract without prior notice, which means that a number of FSFE supporters' recurring payments have been halted: Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. ("Nexi") requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi's request, or to understa…

Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta has issued a " modest proposal " for a technology-innovation-lifecycle process that would provide more formal structure for adopting technologies in Fedora. The idea is to spur innovation in the project without having an adverse impact on stability or the release process. Spaleta's proposal is somewhat light on details, particularly as far as specific examples of which projects would benefit; however, the reception so far is mostly positive and some think…

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mingw-openexr, vim, and yarnpkg), Oracle (freerdp), Red Hat (389-ds-base, container-tools:rhel8, libpng, libpng15, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, opencryptoki, python3, python3.11, python3.12, and python3.9), SUSE (ruby4.0-rubygem-activestorage, ruby4.0-rubygem-activesupport, ruby4.0-rubygem-glogalid, ruby4.0-rubygem-grpc, ruby4.0-rubygem-jquery-rails, ruby4.0-rubygem-loofah, and rubygem4.0-rubygem-fluentd), and Ubuntu (curl, linux, linux-aws, linux-…

Version 1.5 of Marknote , a Markdown-based note-management application, has been released. Notable features in this release include Source Mode for working directly with Markdown instead of the WYSIWYG interface, internal wiki-style links for notes, as well as simpler management of notes and notebooks.

Kurt Roeckx has announced that Debian has moved to the campaigning period for the 2026 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. This year there is only one candidate, Sruthi Chandran, so Debian voters will have a choice between Chandran as DPL or "None of the above". The campaign period will run through April 3, and the voting period will run from April 4 to April 17. Chandran has not yet posted a platform for the 2026 election, but her 2024 platform is available on the Debian wiki.

After a year's worth of development since GIMP 3.0 was released , the team behind the open-source image editor has released GIMP 3.2 . It comes as part of the plan to release GIMP more frequently, rather than wait six or seven years between releases. The release comes with lots of new features (as can be seen in more detail in the release notes ), including 20 new brushes for the MyPaint Brush tool, an "overwrite" paint mode, new and upgraded file formats, UI improvements in a variety of places…