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The FreeBSD Foundation has a blog post about the progress it has made in 2025 on the Laptop Support & Usability Project for FreeBSD. The foundation committed $750,000 to the project in 2025 and has made progress on graphics drivers, Wi-Fi 4 and 5 support, audio improvements, sleep states, and more. The installer for FreeBSD has gained a couple of new features that benefit laptop users. In 15.0 the installer now supports downloading and installing firmware packages after the FreeBSD base system …

The BPF verifier is complicated. It needs to check every possible path that a BPF program's execution could take. The fact that its determination of whether a BPF program is safe is based on the whole lifetime of the program, instead of simple local factors, means that the cause of a verification failure is not always obvious. Ihor Solodrai and Jordan Rome gave a presentation ( slides ) at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo about the BPF verifier visualizer that they have been building…

Security updates have been issued by Debian (roundcube), Fedora (checkpointctl, containernetworking-plugins, mingw-libpng, NetworkManager, php, python3-docs, python3.13, and webkitgtk), Oracle (kernel, keylime, and libssh), and SUSE (apache2, clair, colord, flannel, gnutls, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, grafana, grub2, helm, ImageMagick, libpng16, netty, openssl-3, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, python36, salt, uyuni-tools, and venv-salt-minion).

Stephen Rothwell, who has maintained the kernel's linux-next integration tree from its inception, has announced his retirement from that role: I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026. Mark Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge. He has helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so hopefully knows what he is getting in to. I hope you will all treat him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received. It has been a long …

Linus Torvalds is famously averse to presenting prepared talks, but the wider community is always interested in what he has to say about the condition of the Linux kernel. So, for some time now, his appearances have been in the form of an informal conversation with Dirk Hohndel. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan, the pair followed that tradition for the 29th time. Topics covered include the state of the development process, what Torvalds actually does, and how machine-learning tools might fi…

Systemd v259 has been released. Notable changes include a new " --empower " option for run0 that provides elevated privileges to a user without switching to root, ability to propagate a user's home directory into a VM with systemd-vmspawn , and more. Support for System V service scripts has been deprecated, and will be removed in v260. See the release notes for other changes, feature removals, and deprecated features.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.2 , 6.17.13 , and 6.12.63 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. He notes that 6.17.13 is the last release of the 6.17.y kernel; users are advised to move to the 6.18.y kernel branch.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, keylime, mysql:8.4, and tomcat), Debian (c-ares and webkit2gtk), Fedora (brotli, cups, golang-github-facebook-time, nebula, NetworkManager, perl-Alien-Brotli, python-django4.2, python-django5, and vips), Red Hat (binutils, buildah, curl, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, multiple packages, php:8.3, podman, python3.12, python39:3.9, ruby:3.3, and skopeo), SUSE (buildah, cups, firefox, glib2, grub2, helm, icinga-php-library, icingaweb2, Ima…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Civil Infrastructure Platform; COSMIC desktop; Calibre adds AI; Maintainer's Summit; ML tools for kernel development; linux-next; Rust in the kernel; kernel development tools; Linux process improvements; 6.19 merge window part 2. Briefs : capsudo; Asahi Linux 6.18; Pop!_OS 24.04; Vojtux; KDE Gear 25.12; Rust 1.92.0; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

After three years of development, Linux hardware provider System76 has declared the COSMIC desktop environment stable. It shipped COSMIC Epoch 1 as part of the long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS release on December 11, just in time for Linux enthusiasts to have something to tinker with over the end-of-year holidays. With the stable release out the door, it seemed like a good time to check back in on COSMIC and see how it has evolved since the first alpha . For a first stable release of a new deskto…

The Asahi Linux project has published its progress report following the release of Linux 6.18. This time around the project reports progress on many fronts, including microphone support for M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, work queued for Linux 6.19 to support USB3 via the USB-C ports, and work to improve the Asahi Linux installation experience. The project is also enabling as additional System Management Controller (SMC) drivers, which means that " the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensor…

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) first launched in that form in April 2016, so it has a tenth-anniversary celebration in its near future. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan , Yoshitake Kobayashi talked about the goals of this project and where it is headed in the future. Supporting a Linux system for even one year is a challenging task; maintaining that support for a decade or more is rather more so, and a changing regulatory environment complicates the task further.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-url-parse), Fedora (assimp, conda-build, mod_md, util-linux, and webkitgtk), Oracle (firefox), SUSE (chromium, librsvg, poppler, python311, qemu, strongswan, webkit2gtk3, wireshark, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fips, and linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-xilinx).

Mozilla has announced a new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo. Prior to becoming CEO, Enzor-DeMeo was general manager of Firefox and led its " vision, strategy, and business performance ". He has published a blog post about taking over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, and his plans for Mozilla and Firefox: As Mozilla moves forward, we will focus on becoming the trusted software company. This is not a slogan. It is a direction that guides how we build and how we grow. It means three things. First: Every …

The final part of the 2025 Maintainers Summit was devoted to the kernel's development process itself. There were two sessions, one on continuity and succession planning, and the traditional discussion, led by Linus Torvalds, on any pain points that the community is experiencing. There was not a lot that developers were unhappy about, and there are now more explicit plans in the works to provide a process should Torvalds abruptly become unable to fill his role.