LWN.net

Systemd v261 has been released with a long list of changes including a new cloud "Instance Metadata Service" (IMDS) subsystem, "boot secret" functionality for use on systems that lack a physical TPM, as well as support for the kernel's Live Update Orchestration (LUO) / Kexec Handover (KHO) systems when they are present and enabled. See the release notes for the full list of changes.

BPF programs can be used to extend many aspects the Linux kernel, but BPF programs must run to completion in the same context that they began. Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi is working on changing that by allowing BPF programs to be expressed as coroutines. He spoke about his work at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit . While still experimental, the change promises to make long-running BPF tasks significantly easier to write.

The Arch User Repository (AUR) has been subjected to a sustained attack recently. The attacker, or attackers, have spun up a series of new accounts then used them to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates that would install malware on users' systems. It is unclear how many users were compromised in the attack, but the maintainers were playing Whac-A-Mole for several days to respond to each newly compromised package. The project has turned off the AUR's new-user registration , for no…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dracut), Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, nss, ocserv, ongres-scram, ongres-stringprep, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-GD, perl-HTTP-Daemon, perl-Net-Statsd, restic, singularity-ce, util-linux, and vorbis-tools), Mageia (gstreamer1.0-*, libupnp, luajit, opensc, and ruby-rack), SUSE (curl, dnsmasq, ffmpeg-4, frr, google-osconfig-agent, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, krb5, kubernetes-old, ldns, liburiparser1, openvswitch,…

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.1 , 7.0.13 , 6.18.36 , 6.12.94 , 6.6.143 , 6.1.176 , 5.15.210 , and 5.10.259 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes. Users are advised to upgrade.

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced the release of its recommendations for using LLM-backed generative AI systems for FOSS contributions . The recommendations were created by the SFC and volunteers from the free-software community. The recommendations reflect the extremely difficult dilemmas that these systems pose for FOSS contributors. SFC and its volunteers understand that FOSS developers are approaching LLM-gen-AI from a variety of perspectives. The recommendations offer pr…

The 7.2 merge window started with the 7.1 kernel release on June 14. As of this writing, just over 7,000 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for the next kernel release. Many of the core subsystems have been pulled at this point, meaning that most of the changes that can be expected in 7.2 have now come into focus.

Version 4.6 of the Mastodon fediverse platform has been released. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon's work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we've put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal: Helping new users discover more of the Fediver…

How can cloud providers efficiently supply durable virtual block devices? Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides a way for servers in a cluster to share chunks of memory, but there still needs to be a protocol that operates on top of RDMA to provide the guarantees expected of a block device. The kernel's RDMA transport library (RTRS) provides a way to send messages via RDMA. I presented about two new components built on top of RTRS at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management a…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dracut, podman, postfix, rsync, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (atril, firefox-esr, and nginx), Mageia (libcap, perl, and python-pillow), Oracle (firefox, gstreamer-plugins-base and gstreamer-plugins-good, httpd:2.4, kernel, libpng12, libpng15, libxml2, libxslt, opencryptoki, openssl, postfix, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (bind, libidn, mozilla, and openssl), SUSE (alloy, doc…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : State of Fedora; mTHP creation; overlayfs; buffer-heads cleanup; 7.1 statistics. Briefs : curl summer of bliss; 7.1 kernel; AUR compromise; Fedora election; FairScan 2.0; Firefox 152.0; Homebrew 6.0.0; KDE Plasma 6.7; LWN topic list; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The results are in for Fedora's F44 election cycle for seats on the Fedora Council , Fedora Engineering Steering Committee , Fedora Mindshare Committee , and EPEL Steering Committee . Miro Hrončok and Aleksandra Fedorova have won seats on the council. Neal Gompa, Fabio Valentini, Michel Lind, Maxwell G, and Simon de Vlieger have been elected to FESCo. Samyak Jain, Akashdeep Dhar, Luis Bazan, and Mat Holmes have all been elected to the Mindshare Committee. The four candidates for the EPEL commit…

The Python Software Foundation blog has a post with a summary of the security-related content at PyCon US 2026 with links to slides from important sessions. The recordings will be published to the PyCon US channel on YouTube, and the post will be updated with links to those videos as they are made available.

Jan Kara has been working on cleaning up how buffer heads are used by some kernel filesystems. In a short filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit , he gave an update on that work and where it is headed. Topics included generic infrastructure to track buffer heads for metadata, a buffer-head cleanup for the Amiga filesystem, and some planned locking fixes.

Version 2.0 of the FairScan document-scanning app for Android has been released. The headline feature for this release is the addition of optical-character-recognition (OCR) support using Tesseract to produce PDFs with searchable text from scans. FairScan developer Pierre-Yves Nicolas has written a detailed blog about adding the feature and explaining why it had not been added previously. That looks nice, so why didn't FairScan have it before? That's because FairScan wasn't ready for it: I woul…