Latest Linux and open source news from around the web

Blue Light Blocking Glasses Sponsored · View on Amazon → Ubiquiti UniFi U6+ Sponsored · View on Amazon →
Linux Journal

AI Uncovers a 15-Year-Old Linux Kernel Root Vulnerability Hidden Since 2011

by George Whittaker Artificial intelligence has helped uncover one of the most significant Linux kernel security flaws in recent years. Security researchers at Nebula Security announced the discovery of GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499), a critical local privilege escalation vulnerability that remained hidden in the Linux kernel for approximately 15 years before being identified by the company's AI-powered vulnerability research platform, VEGA. The vulnerability affects Linux kernels dating back to version 2.6.39 (2011) and allows an unprivileged local user to obtain full root privileges on vulnerable systems. Its discovery not only highlights the importance of timely kernel updates but also demonstrates how AI is beginning to transform vulnerability research. What Is GhostLock? GhostLock is a use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability located in the Linux kernel's futex (fast userspace mutex) implementation. Futexes are synchronization primitives that allow user-space applications to efficiently coo

Phoronix

BOSGAME VTA-439: A Great, Linux-Friendly Mini PC Powered By AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470

For those that were intrigued by the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform with a very capable mini PC but looking for something more affordable and not needing quite as much horsepower or AI focus, BOSGAME recently launched their VTA-439 mini PC. The BOSGAME VTA-439 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 with Radeon 890M graphics for those wanting still quite a capable mini PC that retails for around $1,049 USD while sporting 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD storage.

LWN.net

Call for topics for the 2026 Maintainers Summit

The Maintainers Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of kernel developers and maintainers to discuss development-process issues; see LWN's 2025 Maintainers Summit coverage for an example. The call for topics for the 2026 gathering (Prague, October 8) has gone out. One of the best ways to obtain an invitation to the Summit is with a good topic proposal. For best consideration, topics should be submitted before July 24.

LWN.net

[$] Sending packets directly from BPF

Tetragon, the BPF-based security monitoring tool, uses BPF to monitor different aspects of a running kernel and enforce user-specified policies. It sends its data to a user-space process, which forwards the data to a central monitoring service elsewhere in the network, however. This presents a point of vulnerability: if an attacker can kill Tetragon's user-space agent, it won't be able to properly report on the situation. Song Liu, Mahรฉ Tardy, and Liam Wiseheart spoke about their work removing the need for the user-space agent at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

LWN.net

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds:1.4, buildah, freeipmi, freerdp, gegl, gimp, golang, kernel, libreoffice, maven:3.9, openexr, perl-DBI, plexus-utils, podman, tomcat, tomcat9, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (imagemagick, p7zip, and redis), Fedora (breezy, calibre, and golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb), Mageia (ffmpeg, gzip, haproxy, libheif, libtiff, libxml2, packages, perl-List-SomeUtils-XS, and perl-Socket), SUSE (alsa, chromedriver, curl, dhcpcd, docker-compose, glibc, haproxy, ImageMagick, jq, kernel, kubernetes, libpng15, libredwg-devel, libslirp, nghttp2, php8, python-Pillow, python313-Django, python313-weasyprint, qemu, rust-keylime, sccache, and systemd), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils, libexif, libreoffice, libssh2, openssh, and pipewire).