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The 6.6.82 stable kernel has been released. "All i386 users of the 6.6 kernel series must upgrade (as they skipped the last release.) All other arches can skip this one as it should not affect them."

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of four more stable kernels: 6.13.6, 6.12.18, 6.6.81, and 6.1.130. Unlike a normal release, Kroah-Hartman did not call for all users to update their kernels. Specifically, the 6.6.81 kernel is currently broken on i386 systems, and users should wait for 6.6.82.

Matthieu Clemenceau has published a status update on Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) development to the Ubuntu Discourse forum. This includes updates on Ubuntu's adoption of Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools, a move to a single ISO for arm64 devices rather than device-specific images, and reverting the planned O3 optimization flags for Plucky Puffin. Earlier in this cycle, we announced plans to enable the O3...

On January 20, Thomas Weißschuh shared a new patch set implementing an alternate method for checking the integrity of loadable kernel modules. This mechanism, which checks module integrity based on hashes computed at build time instead of using cryptographic signatures, could enable reproducible kernel builds in more contexts. Several distributions have already expressed interest in the patch set if Weißschuh can get it into...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (firefox and man2html), Mageia (erlang, ffmpeg, and vim), Oracle (doxygen, firefox, python-jinja2, squid, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (nodejs:18), SUSE (emacs, go1.23, go1.24, and pcp), and Ubuntu (ansible, firefox, linux-azure, linux-nvidia, and python-django).

The kernel project has usually been willing to make fundamental internal changes if they lead to a better kernel in the end. The project also, though, goes out of its way to avoid breaking interfaces that have been exposed to user space, even if programs come to rely on behavior that was never documented. Sometimes, those two principles come into conflict, leading to a...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox and vim), Red Hat (firefox), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (firefox, firefox-esr, kernel, and podman), and Ubuntu (gpac, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-hwe-5.15, and redis).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Firefox forks; Bend and Vine; FineIBT; Guard pages; Fedora's Flatpak packaging; Zotero. Briefs: LFS 12.3; FerretDB 2.0; Firefox; Fish 4.0; Incus 6.10; Thunderbird 136.0; Xen 4.20; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Google Bug Hunters blog has a detailed description of how a vulnerability in AMD's microcode-patching functionality was discovered and exploited; the authors have also released a set of tools to assist with this kind of research in the future. Secure hash functions are designed in such a way that there is no secret key, and there is no way to use knowledge of...

Version 2.0.0 of FerretDB has been released. FerretDB is an open-source alternative to MongoDB, which switched to a non-open license in 2018, built on top of PostgreSQL. This release utilizes the DocumentDB PostgreSQL extension for better performance, adds vector search, and replication.

Functional programming languages have a long association with graphs. In the 1990s, it was even thought that parallel graph-reduction architectures could make functional programming languages much faster than their imperative counterparts. Alas, that prediction mostly failed to materialize. Even though graphs are still used as a theoretical formalism in order to define and optimize functional languages (such as Haskell's spineless tagless graph-machine), they are...

The Xen Project has announced the release of Xen 4.20. This release adds support for AMD Zen 5 CPUs, improved compliance with the MISRA C standard, work on PCI-passthrough on Arm, and more. Xen 4.20 also removes support for Xeon Phi CPUs, which were discontinued in 2018. See the feature list and release notes for more information.

Version 136.0 of the Thunderbird Desktop mail client has been released. The release includes a quick toggle for adapting messages to dark mode, and a new "Appearance" setting to control message threading and sorting order globally, as well as a number of bug fixes. See the security advisory for a full list of security vulnerabilities addressed in Thunderbird 136.0.

Version 12.3 of Linux From Scratch (LFS) has been released, along with Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 12.3. LFS provides step-by-step instructions on building a customized Linux system entirely from source, and BLFS helps to extend an LFS installation into a more usable system. Notable changes in this release include toolchain updates to GNU Binutils 2.44, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.41, and Linux 6.13.2....

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice), Fedora (exim and fscrypt), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (docker, firefox, and podman), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux, linux-oem-6.11, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, and linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop).

Mozilla's actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn't part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox "family" there are a number of...

Version 136.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include a new vertical tab layout, an automatic attempt to upgrade HTTP connections to HTTPS, support for AMD GPUs on Linux, an Arm64 port for Linux, and more.

Version 6.10 of the Incus container-management system has been released. New features include better Let's Encrypt support, API-wide filtering, IOMMU support in virtual machines, and more. See this announcement for details.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Mageia (x11-server), Red Hat (emacs and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (ffmpeg-7, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (cmark-gfm, erlang, krb5, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-kvm, lucene-solr, postgresql-12, postgresql-14, postgresql-16, raptor2, spip, tomcat7, and wpa).

Mozilla has issued an update to its terms of use (TOU) that were announced on February 26. It has removed a reference in the TOU to Mozilla's Acceptable Use Policy "because it seems to be causing more confusion than clarity", and has revised the TOU "to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data". The new language says: You give...

One of the many new features packed into the 6.13 kernel release was guard pages, a hardening mechanism that makes it possible to inject zero-access pages into a process's address space in an efficient way. That feature only supports anonymous (user-space data) pages, though. To make guard pages more widely useful, Lorenzo Stoakes has put together a patch set enabling the feature for file-backed...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, kernel, linux-6.1, mariadb-10.5, proftpd-dfsg, and xorg-server), Fedora (chromium, cutter-re, iniparser, nodejs22, rizin, webkitgtk, wireshark, xen, and xorg-x11-server), Mageia (binutils and ffmpeg), Oracle (emacs and kernel), Red Hat (emacs and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (azure-cli, bsdtar, gnutls, govulncheck-vulndb, libX11, libxkbfile, libxml2, nodejs-electron, openssh8.4, ovmf, phpMyAdmin, python, python-azure-identity, python311-jupyter-server, tiff, trivy, u-boot, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (opennds and Ruby SAML).

Differences of opinion, as well as outright disputes, between upstream open-source projects and Linux distribution packagers over packaging practices are nothing new. It is rarer, though, for those disputes to boil over to threats of legal action—but a disagreement between the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio project and Fedora packagers reached that point in mid-February. After escalation to a higher authority things have been...