Linux NewsA single stable kernel for Thursday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.71 stable kernel. He writes, "All users of the 6.12 kernel series that had issues with 6.12.69 or 6.12.70 should upgrade, as some regressions are fixed here."
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (brotli, git-lfs, image-builder, kernel, keylime, libsoup3, and pcs), Fedora (chromium, gnutls, osslsigncode, and p11-kit), Mageia (golang, libpng, thunderbird, and xrdp), Red Hat (git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, osbuild-composer, and toolbox), Slackware (gnutls and libpng), SUSE (apptainer, cockpit, cockpit-packages, cockpit-subscriptions, freerdp2, gimp, glib2, go, go1.24, go1.25, gpg2, ImageMagick, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, keylime-config, keylime-ima-policy, lemon, libp11-kit0, libsoup, libsoup-2_4-1, libxml2, libxml2-16, munge, nodejs20, nvidia-modprobe.cuda, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, nvidia-persistenced.cuda, openQA, orthanc, gdcm, orthanc-authorization,, python-brotlipy, python-Django, python-maturin, python-pyasn1, python-urllib3, python-wheel, python313-wheel, qemu, rust-keylime, sqlite3, uriparser, wicked2nm, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (libtasn1-6, libwebsockets, libxmltok, linux, linux-aw
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 12, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Git; GCC and KCFI; modernizing swapping; 6.18 statistics; modern FOSS challenges. Briefs: Kernel ML; tag2upload; LFS sysvinit; postmarketOS FOSDEM; Ardour 9.0; Offpunk 3.0; Dave Farber RIP; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Linux man pages 6.17 released
Version 6.17 of the Linux manual-page collection has been released. Along with a long list of updates to the man pages themselves, it includes some new utility programs of interest. The grepc(1) program is something that originated in this project, as it helped me find code quickly in glibc and the Linux kernel. However, I've found it incredibly useful outside of this project. I'll take some space to announce it, as it's much more than just a tool for writing manual pages, and I expect it to be useful to most --if not all-- C programmers. It is a command-line tool that finds C source code (for example, a function definition) in arbitrary projects. It doesn't use any indexing mechanism (unlike ctags and similar tools). This means that it can be used right after cloning some repository, without having to first generate an index.
[$] Evolving Git for the next decade
Git is ubiquitous; in the last two decades, the version-control system has truly achieved world domination. Almost every developer uses it and the vast majority of open-source projects are hosted in Git repositories. That does not mean, however, that it is perfect. Patrick Steinhardt used his main-track session at FOSDEM 2026 to discuss some of its shortcomings and how they are being addressed to prepare Git for the next decade.
postmarketOS FOSDEM 2026 and hackathon recap
The postmarketOS project has published a recap from FOSDEM 2026, including the FOSS on Mobile devroom, and a summary of its post-FOSDEM hackathon. This includes decisions on governance and the project's AI policy: AI policy: our current AI policy does not state that we forbid the use of generative AI in postmarketOS, so far this document just lists why we think it is a bad idea and misaligned with the project values. We discussed this and will soon change it (via merge request) to clearly state that we don't want generative AI to be used in the project. It was also noted that currently the policy is too long, it would make sense to split it into the actual policy and still keep, but separate the reasoning from it. [...] Power delegation and teams: in over two hours we discussed how to move forward with [postmarketOS change request] PMCR 0008 to organize ourselves better, and how it fits with soon having a legal entity. We figured that we need to rename "The Board" (which is currently f
Stable kernels for Wednesday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has unleashed six new stable kernels: 6.18.10, 6.6.124, 6.12.70, 6.1.163, 5.15.200, and 5.10.250. Each one contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, linux-6.1, munge, and tcpflow), Fedora (accel-ppp, atuin, babl, bustle, endless-sky, envision, ettercap, fapolicy-analyzer, firefox, glycin, gnome-settings-daemon, go-fdo-client, greenboot-rs, greetd, helix, hwdata, keylime-agent-rust, kiwi, libdrm, maturin, mirrorlist-server, ntpd-rs, ogr2osm, open-vm-tools, perl-App-Cme, perl-Net-RDAP, perl-rdapper, polymake, python-requests-ratelimiter, python-tqdm, rust-add-determinism, rust-afterburn, rust-ambient-id, rust-app-store-connect, rust-bat, rust-below, rust-btrd, rust-busd, rust-bytes, rust-cargo-c, rust-cargo-deny, rust-coreos-installer, rust-crypto-auditing-agent, rust-crypto-auditing-client, rust-crypto-auditing-event-broker, rust-crypto-auditing-log-parser, rust-dua-cli, rust-eif_build, rust-git-delta, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool, rust-git2, rust-gst-plugin-dav1d, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-heatseeker, rust-ingredients, rust-jsonwebtoken, rust-lsd, rust-monitord, rust-moni
Dave Farber RIP
From the NANOG list comes the sad news of the passing of Dave Farber. His professional accomplishments and impact are almost endless, but often captured by one moniker: "grandfather of the Internet," acknowledging the foundational contributions made by his many students at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; and Carnegie Mellon University.
GTK hackfest, 2026 edition (GTK Development Blog)
Matthias Clasen has published a short summary of the GTK hackfest held prior to FOSDEM 2026. Topics include discussions on unstable APIs, a decision to bump the C runtime requirement to C11 in the next development cycle, limiting changes in GTK3 to crash and build fixes, as well as the state of accessibility: On the accessibility side, we are somewhat worried about the state of AccessKit. The code upstream is maintained, but we haven't seen movement in the GTK implementation. We still default to the AT-SPI backend on Linux, but AccessKit is used on Windows and macOS (and possibly Android in the future); it would be nice to have consumers of the accessibility stack looking at the code and issues. On the AT-SPI side we are still missing proper feature negotiation in the protocol; interfaces are now versioned on D-Bus, but there's no mechanism to negotiate the supported set of roles or events between toolkits, compositors, and assistive technologies, which makes running newer applications
[$] FOSS in times of war, scarcity, and AI
Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at the NLnet Foundation, used his keynote at FOSDEM to sound warnings for the community for free and open-source (FOSS) software; in particular, he talked about the threats posed by geopolitical politics, dangerous allies, and large language models (LLMs). His talk was a mix of observations and suggestions that pertain to FOSS in general and to Europe in particular as geopolitical tensions have mounted in recent months.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, firefox, fontforge, freerdp, kernel-rt, keylime, libsoup, libsoup3, nodejs22, nodejs24, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, python3.12-wheel, qemu-kvm, resource-agents, thunderbird, and util-linux), Debian (kernel, rlottie, shaarli, and usbmuxd), Fedora (asciinema, atuin, bustle, cef, envision, glycin, greetd, helix, java-21-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, keylime-agent-rust, maturin, mirrorlist-server, ntpd-rs, python3.6, rust-add-determinism, rust-afterburn, rust-ambient-id, rust-app-store-connect, rust-bat, rust-below, rust-btrd, rust-busd, rust-bytes, rust-cargo-c, rust-cargo-deny, rust-coreos-installer, rust-crypto-auditing-agent, rust-crypto-auditing-client, rust-crypto-auditing-event-broker, rust-crypto-auditing-log-parser, rust-dua-cli, rust-eif_build, rust-git-delta, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool, rust-git2, rust-gst-plugin-dav1d, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-heatseeker, rust-ingredients, r
[$] Development statistics for 6.19
Linus Torvalds released the 6.19 kernel on February 8, as expected. This development cycle brought 14,344 non-merge changesets into the mainline, making it the busiest release since 6.16 in July 2025. As usual, we have put together a set of statistics on where these changes come from, along with a quick look at how long new kernel developers stay around.
Offpunk 3.0 released
Version 3.0 of the Offpunk offline-first, command-line web, Gemini, and Gopher browser has been released. Notable changes in this release include integration of the unmerdify library to "remove cruft" from web sites, the xkcdpunk standalone tool for viewing xkcd comics in the terminal, and a cookies command to enable browsing web sites (such as LWN.net) while being logged in. Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn't review line-by-line. Unmerdify (by Vincent Jousse), all the translation infrastructure (by the always-present JMCS), and the community packaging effort are areas for which I barely touched the code. So, before anything else, I want to thank all the people involved for sharing their energy and motivation. I'm very grateful for every contribution the project received. I'm also really happy to see "old names" replying from time to time on the mailing
Debian's tag2upload considered stable
Sean Whitton has announced that Debian's tag2upload service is now out of beta and ready for use by Debian developers and maintainers. During the beta we encountered only a few significant bugs. Now that we've fixed those, our rate of successful uploads is hovering around 95%. Failures are almost always due to packaging inconsistencies that older workflows don't detect, and therefore only need fixing once per package. We don't think you need explicit approval from your co-maintainers anymore. Your upload workflows can be different to your teammates. They can be using dput, dgit or tag2upload. LWN covered tag2upload in July 2024.