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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of four stable kernels on March 28: 6.13.9, 6.12.21, 6.6.85, and 6.1.132. Users are advised to upgrade.

KDE contributor David Edmundson has published a blog post about improving KDE Plasma's login experience by replacing SDDM with a new Plasma Login Manager. It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list. Oliver...

In a keynote on the final day of SCALE 22x, Denver Gingerich said that he wanted to talk "a little bit about a router and also the big picture around that router". Gingerich is the director of compliance at the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which is the organization behind the OpenWrt One router that LWN looked at back in November. The router is, of...

As of this writing, 6,653 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel repository for the 6.15 release. This merge window is thus well underway. A number of significant changes have been merged so far; read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.15 merge window.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (mercurial and opensaml), Fedora (augeas, mingw-libxslt, and nodejs-nodemon), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (grafana, kernel, kernel-rt, opentelemetry-collector, and podman), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, python3, and python36), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8,...

Ubuntu 23.10 and 24.04 LTS introduced a feature using AppArmor to restrict access to user namespaces. Qualys has reported three ways to bypass AppArmor's restrictions and enable local users to gain full administrative capabilities within a user namespace. Ubuntu has followed up with a post that explains the namespace-restriction feature in detail, and says these bypasses do not constitute security vulnerabilities. While a superficial...

Arthur Cohen has posted a massive series of patches in four parts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) upstreaming all of the recent work on the GCC Rust front end. These changes include the Polonius borrow checker, the foreign-function interface, inline assembly support, if-let statement handling, multiple built-in derive macros, for loops, and more.

The 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit included a tense session on the use of Rust code in the kernel's filesystem layer. The Rust topic returned in 2025 in a session run by Andreas Hindborg, with a scope that also covered the storage and memory-management layers. A lot of progress has been made, and the discussion was less adversarial this year, but...

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (exim), Debian (exim4, ghostscript, and libcap2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, argocd-cli, azure-cli-core, buildah, chromedriver, docker-stable, ed25519-java, kernel, kubernetes1.29-apiserver, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.32-apiserver, libmbedcrypto7, microcode_ctl, php7, podman, proftpd, tomcat10, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (containerd, exim4, mariadb, opensaml, and org-mode).

Akamai has sent out a press release saying that it is now hosting the kernel.org repositories. The Linux kernel is massive — approximately 28 million lines of code. Since 2005, more than 13,500 developers from more than 1,300 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel. Additionally, there are many kernel versions, and developers update the code constantly, distributing that code to developers who...

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Open source in government; OSI election; Memory-management medley; Address-space isolation; CMA; 6.14 Development stats; State of the page. Briefs: Asahi Linux progress; Reproducible Debian; rpi-image-gen; Neovim 0.11; OpenH264; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 0.11 of the Neovim text editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include simpler Language Server Protocol (LSP) client setup, improved tree-sitter performance, better emoji support, and enhancements for Neovim's embedded terminal emulator. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

The folio transition is one of the most fundamental kernel changes ever made; it can be thought of as being similar to replacing the foundation of a building while it remains open for business. So it is not surprising that, for some years, the annual Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit has included a session on the state of this transition. The 2025...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (nginx and ruby-rack), Fedora (expat and libxslt), Mageia (bluez, dcmtk, ffmpeg, and radare2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, kernel-rt, libreoffice, and podman), SUSE (buildah, forgejo, gitleaks, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, helm, libxslt, php8, python-gunicorn, and python-Jinja2), and Ubuntu (freerdp2 and varnish).

Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy article about the announcement that the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK for Flatpak applications and runtimes. Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtime version 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with the release scheduled for April, unless application developers replace it with the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime is unaffected, and...

By the time that Linus Torvalds released the 6.14 kernel, 11,003 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline, making this one of the smallest releases we have seen in some time. Indeed, one must go back to the 4.0 release, which happened almost exactly ten years ago, to find a release with fewer changesets than 6.14. Even so, "small" is relative, and 6.14...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-rack), Fedora (chromium, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, OpenIPMI, and python-jinja2), Mageia (kernel, kernel-linus, and wpa_supplicant, hostapd), Red Hat (fence-agents, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, libxslt, and pcs), SUSE (cadvisor, docker, freetype2, nodejs-electron, php8, rsync, u-boot, warewulf4, webkit2gtk3, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (elfutils, python3.5, python3.8, ruby-rack, smartdns, and zvbi).

Linus has released the 6.14 kernel, a bit later than expected: So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed...

The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxslt, mercurial, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (chromium, dotnet8.0, ffmpeg, jupyterlab, and kitty), Mageia (expat and libxslt), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (apptainer, chromium, kernel, libarchive, mercurial, python311, radare2, xorg-x11-server, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (golang-github-cli-go-gh-v2 and nltk).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.13.8, 6.12.20, and 6.6.84 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three...

As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult. Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot be avoided. The kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible, but it has never been...

Julien Malka has called for the NixOS project to use build-reproducibility to detect when a program has a maintainer-generated tarball that results in a different artifact than building from source. There are good reasons for projects to release maintainer-generated tarballs, but since the materials included in them are usually documentation, extra build scripts, and so on, it makes sense to check that they don't...