LWN.net

The results of the Debian general-resolution vote on the use of large language models have been posted; the winner is choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI . Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project. We recognize that such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors when used responsibly, allowing volun…

Konstantin Ryabitsev has written a blog post with hard numbers about the impact of AI crawlers on the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org : Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge. It's i…

Méven Car has written a pair of interesting blog posts ( part 1 , part 2 ). The first post is largely about some of the recent new features and performance work that have gone into the Dolphin file manager 26.08 release, as well as the KIO framework. The second looks at the performance improvements and benchmarks for previous, current, and upcoming releases. Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would ex…

The null block driver ( null_blk ) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal ver…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.2 , 7.1.12 , 6.18.48 , 6.12.107 , 6.6.155 , 6.1.186 , 5.15.219 , and 5.10.268 stable kernels. Each of these contains a single fix for a vulnerability ( CVE-2026-80590 ) that allows marking IPv4 or IPv6 fragments as GSO , which can allow an unprivileged user to cause a kernel panic. This vulnerability has been present since Linux 2.6.27. Users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (assertj-core, golang, httpd, kernel, and libxml2), Debian (chromium and suricata-update), Fedora (rust-h2), Mageia (avahi and python-django), Oracle (kernel and mingw-openssl), SUSE (c-ares-devel, dracut, gh, gstreamer-plugins-bad, java-11-openjdk, liboqs, librest0_7, openssl, openssl-3, pcp, python313-mistune, python36-pip, qt6-svg, rmt-server, rsync, suseconnect-ng, texlive, tor, wicked, and xmlrpc-c), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, …

Virtualization can increase CPU utilization by allowing a large number of virtual CPUs to share a smaller number of physical CPUs. The amount of CPU time that is actually available does not change, though, so heavy activity on too many virtual CPUs can lead to contention and significant performance loss. The steal governor patch series from Shrikanth Hegde is an attempt to address that problem with a mechanism that allows virtual machines to voluntarily reduce the number of virtual CPUs they us…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.1 , 7.1.11 , 6.18.47 , 6.12.106 , 6.6.154 , 6.1.185 , 5.15.218 , and 5.10.267 stable kernels. Each of these has important updates throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (assertj-core, attr, firefox, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, kernel, mingw-openssl, mod_http2, nginx, nginx:1.24, pam, polkit, and sqlite), Debian (bubblewrap, cockpit, emacs, gimp, libdbi-perl, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, wireshark, and xrdp), Fedora (bluez, curl, emacs, golang, knot, libopenmpt, libsoup3, openbao, openssh, rsync, rust-anstyle-hyperlink, rust-anstyle-progress, rust-cargo, rust-cargo-c, rust-cargo-cr…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : AGPL violations; OpenMDW license; quantum computing and encryption; 7.3 merge window; Remind; Quickshell. Briefs : arrayref; RIP Steve French; Armbian 26.8; Vanilla OS 3; Emacs 31.1; KDE Gear 26.08; LibreOffice 26.8; RPM 6.1.0; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

At FOSSY 2026 , several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumven…

Version 26.8 of the Armbian distribution for Arm hardware has been released. Most releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs. The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they s…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, kernel-rt, and sqlite), Debian (freecad, kernel, libvncserver, and openssl), Fedora (apr-util, chromium, nnn, perl-DBI, python-tablib, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, and sympa), Gentoo (DTrace, GNU screen, UnrealIRCd, and Vinyl Cache), Oracle (389-ds-base, attr, firefox, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, mod_http2, nginx, pam, python-pyasn1, python-urwid, python…

Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released. LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites. The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping plac…

For people who would like to experiment with the multi-kernel Linux concept , Cong Wang has announced the release of mklinux v7.0-mk2. mklinux lets one machine run several independent Linux kernels at the same time on bare metal, without a hypervisor. A host kernel owns a pool of CPUs, memory and PCI devices, carves that pool into instances, and boots a spawn kernel into each instance through kexec_file_load(). Every spawn kernel runs natively on its own CPUs, its own physical memory and its ow…