Linux NewsLinux kernel Developers Considering a Kill Switch
With the rise of Linux vulnerabilities, the kernel developers are now considering adding a component that could help temporarily mitigate against them… in the form of a kill switch.
Yet another Dirty Frag type vulnerability: Fragnesia
Sam James has sent an announcement to the OSS Security mailing list about another local-privilege-escalation (LPE) exploit in the same class as Dirty Frag, called "Fragnesia". From the disclosure: This is a separate bug in the ESP/XFRM from dirtyfrag which has received its own patch. However, it is in the same surface and the mitigation is the same as for dirtyfrag. It abuses a logic bug in the Linux XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem to achieve arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files, without requiring any race condition. James noted that there is a patch in the works, but it has not yet been pulled into Linus Torvalds's tree nor into any of the stable kernels. A proof of concept is also available.
[$] Managing pages outside of the direct map
When Brendan Jackman proposed a session for the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, his topic was "a pagetable library for the kernel". During the actual memory-management-track session, though, he stated that the idea had "fizzled" and he was going to cover related topics instead. What resulted was a session on ways to efficiently manage pages that are not present in the kernel's direct map.
[$] Revisiting mshare
Linux can share memory between processes, but each process (almost always) has its own set of page tables. In situations where vast numbers of processes are sharing a memory region, the combined size of the page tables can exceed that of the shared memory itself. There has, thus, long been an interest in enabling unrelated processes to share page tables referring to shared memory. Anthony Yznaga is the latest developer to try to push this idea (known as "mshare") forward; he described the status of that work in a memory-management-track discussion at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF).
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, freerdp, git-lfs, glib2, jq, kernel-rt, krb5, libpng, libtiff, openexr, and thunderbird), Debian (exim4), Mageia (apache, perl-Gazelle, php, and sed), Slackware (expat), SUSE (assimp-devel, go1.26, libQt6Svg6, python-jupyterlab, raylib, thunderbird, tor, and trivy), and Ubuntu (exim4).
KDE Lands Over €1 Million Investment for Open Source Desktop Work
KDE has secured over €1 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund to enhance Plasma, KDE Linux, testing, security, and core infrastructure.
Sovereign Tech Fund invests in KDE
The KDE project has announced that it has been awarded over €1 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund to improve its desktop-environment software. "The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services."
Linux Driver Posted For Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface "ISSEI"
Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI)...
Fragnesia Made Public As Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability...
KDE gets €1.2m funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund
KDE has announced it’s getting a €1.28 million grant from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to help improve the Plasma desktop, KDE Linux and the communication frameworks used by both. The German government-backed fund, which sees its work as “strategic investments in the digital infrastructure of our economy and society”, will disburse €1,285,200 ($1,512,680) to KDE across 2026 and 2027. Like all grants the fund provides, the money is earmarked for a specific set of pre-approved projects. KDE developers can’t redirect cash toward the latest feature request gathering upvotes on r/KDE. Work the money will fund includes improving the Plasma […]
KDE Receives Over €1M from Sovereign Tech Fund for Software Development
The KDE Project will receive over €1 million EUR (~ $1,5 million USD) from The Sovereign Tech Fund to continue and improve software development for KDE Plasma, KDE Linux, and KDE apps.
GCC 16 Produces Faster Binaries Than GCC 15, Competitive Race With LLVM Clang 22
GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM/Clang open-source compiler, which is the focus of today's benchmarking showdown.
OpenZFS 2.4.2 Released with Linux Kernel 7.0 Compatibility
OpenZFS 2.4.2 brings Linux kernel 7.0 compatibility, plus fixes for dRAID, rebuilds, block cloning, snapshots, and mount handling.
Log Detective in Packit
Log Detective analysis is coming to Packit. Starting this month, Log Detective will provide an analysis of failed Koji builds in the Packit service. Packit will keep on doing what it’s good at, integrating upstream projects with downstream distributions.Only now, it will have Log Detective to explain package build failures. In Copr, the user can […]
Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware...