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Version 25.0 ("Zetar") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is now available. This release includes Linux kernel 6.12, GNOME 48, KDE 6.3, Xfce 4.18, and more.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 42, with "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. There is also a last-minute warning about the live media for the release: We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can't do much about it. It doesn't damage anything,...

Fedora Linux 42 has been released with many incremental improvements and updates. In this development cycle, the KDE Plasma Desktop has finally gotten a promotion from a spin to an edition, the new web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer makes its debut, and the Wayland-ification of Fedora continues apace. In all it is a solid release with lots of polish.

It is common, on NUMA systems, to try to allocate all memory on the local node, since it will be the fastest. That is not the only possible policy, though; another is weighted interleaving, which seeks to distribute allocations across memory controllers to maximize the bandwidth utilization on each. Configuring such policies can be challenging, though. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), Slackware (perl), SUSE (haproxy, kernel, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (cimg, perl, protobuf, and webkit2gtk).

Version 3.0 of the Pinta image editor has been released. The most notable change in this release is that Pinta has been ported to GTK 4.0 and libadwaita. It also includes a number of improvements, new effects, and bug fixes.

BPF is, famously, not part of the kernel's promises of user-space stability. New kernels can and do break existing BPF programs; the BPF developers try to fix unintentional regressions as they happen, but the whole thing can be something of a bumpy ride for users trying to deploy BPF programs across multiple kernel versions. Shung-Hsi Yu and Daniel Xu had two different approaches to...

Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer for the kernel's memory-management subsystem, tends to be quiet during the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, preferring to let the developers work things out on their own. That changes, though, when he leads the traditional development-process session in the memory-management track. At the 2025 gathering, this discussion covered a number of ways in which the process could...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (glib2.0, jinja2, kernel, mediawiki, perl, subversion, twitter-bootstrap3, twitter-bootstrap4, and wpa), Fedora (c-ares, chromium, condor, corosync, cri-tools1.29, exim, firefox, matrix-synapse, nextcloud, openvpn, perl-Data-Entropy, suricata, upx, varnish, webkitgtk, yarnpkg, and zabbix), Mageia (giflib, gnupg2, graphicsmagick, and poppler), Oracle (delve and golang, go-toolset:ol8, grub2, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (chromium, fontforge-20230101, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, liblzma5-32bit, pgadmin4, python311-Django, and...

Linus has released 6.15-rc2 for testing. "Nothing particularly stands out to me, but it's early in the release yet, so let's see how it goes."

Knowing how frequently accessed a page of memory is (its "hotness") is a key input to many memory-management heuristics. Jonathan Cameron, in a memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, pointed out that the number of sources of that kind of data is growing over time. He wanted to explore the questions of what commonality exists between data from...

Eduard Zingerman presented a daring proposal that "makes sense if you think about it a bit" at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He wants to inline performance-sensitive kernel functions into the BPF programs that call them. His prototype does not yet address all of the design problems inherent in that idea, but it did spark a lengthy discussion about the...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang and go-toolset:rhel8), Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (openvpn, thunderbird, uboot-tools, and zabbix), SUSE (expat, fontforge, govulncheck-vulndb, and kernel), and Ubuntu (haproxy and libsoup2.4, libsoup3).

Building on the discussion in the two previous sessions on untorn (or atomic) writes, for buffered I/O and for XFS using direct I/O, Ojaswin Mujoo remotely led a session on support for the feature on ext4. That took place in the combined storage and filesystem track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Part of the support for the feature...

Over on the Red Hat Developer site, David Malcolm has an article about improvements in GCC 15, specifically focusing on the diagnostic information that the compiler emits. This includes ASCII art with a "⚠️" warning emoji to display the execution path when it detects a problem (like an infinite loop in one of his examples), better C++ template errors, machine-readable diagnostics using Static Analysis...

Compute Express Link (CXL) memory is not like the ordinary RAM that one might install into a computer; it can come and go at any time and is often not present when the kernel is booting. That complicates the management of this memory. During the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Gregory Price ran a session on the...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of eight stable kernels: 6.14.2, 6.13.11, 6.12.23, 6.6.87, 6.1.134, 5.15.180, 5.10.236, and 5.4.292. These all contain a large assortment of important kernel fixes throughout the tree.

The Data Access MONitor (DAMON) subsystem provides access to detailed memory-management statistics, along with a set of tools for implementing policies based on those statistics. An update on DAMON by its primary author, SeongJae Park, has been a fixture of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit for some years. The 2025 Summit was no exception; Park led two sessions on recent and...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (tomcat and webkit2gtk3), Debian (chromium), Fedora (ghostscript), Mageia (atop, docker-containerd, and xz), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, apparmor, etcd, expat, firefox, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, and libpoppler-cpp2), and Ubuntu (dino-im, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, opensc, and poppler).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Debian project leader election; 6.15 Merge window; Lots of LSFMM coverage; Joplin. Briefs: Firefox hardening; OpenSSH 10.0; Supply chain security; FreeDOS 1.4; OpenSSL 3.5.0; Rust 1.86.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Tom Schuster, Frederik Braun, and Christoph Kerschbaumer have published an article on the Firefox Security team's Attack & Defense blog that explains recent work to harden Firefox's frontend code. We have rewritten over 600 JavaScript event handlers to mitigate XSS and other injection attacks in the main Firefox user interface. This mitigation will ship in Firefox 138. However, blocking the execution of scripts in...

In a combined storage and filesystem track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Garry continued the theme of "untorn" (or atomic) writes that started in the previous session. It was also an update on where things have gone for untorn writes since his session at last year's summit. Beyond that, he looked at some of the plans...

Four candidates have stepped up to run in the 2025 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. Andreas Tille, who is in his first term as DPL, is running again. Sruthi Chandran, Gianfranco Costamagna, and Julian Andres Klode are the other candidates running for a chance to serve a term as DPL. The campaigning phase ended on April 5, and Debian members began voting on April 6. Voting...

The 6.15 merge window saw the inclusion of a new type of lock for BPF programs: a resilient queued spinlock that Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi has been working on for some time. Eventually, he hopes to convert all of the spinlocks currently used in the BPF subsystem to his new lock. He gave a remote presentation about the design of the lock at the 2025...