Virtualization can increase CPU utilization by allowing a large number of virtual CPUs to share a smaller number of physical CPUs. The amount of CPU time that is actually available does not change, though, so heavy activity on too many virtual CPUs can lead to contention and significant performance loss. The steal governor patch series from Shrikanth Hegde is an attempt to address that problem with a mechanism that allows virtual machines to voluntarily reduce the number of virtual CPUs they use when contention is high.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.1, 7.1.11, 6.18.47, 6.12.106, 6.6.154, 6.1.185, 5.15.218, and 5.10.267 stable kernels. Each of these has important updates throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.
Version 26.8 of the Armbian distribution for Arm hardware has been released. Most releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs. The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they simply reached the point where postponing them again would have cost more than doing them. The installer rewrite is the one I expect people to notice first. It now ships as an armbian-config module, which means it is unit-tested, the same way the rest of armbian-config is tested, rather than living as a script that everyone was slightly afraid to touch. It can target SPI and MTD, treats eMMC and NVMe as separate flows instead of pretending they are the same thing, can flash a bootloader on its own
Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released. LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites. The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically. See the release notes for a full list of changes.
For people who would like to experiment with the multi-kernel Linux concept, Cong Wang has announced the release of mklinux v7.0-mk2. mklinux lets one machine run several independent Linux kernels at the same time on bare metal, without a hypervisor. A host kernel owns a pool of CPUs, memory and PCI devices, carves that pool into instances, and boots a spawn kernel into each instance through kexec_file_load(). Every spawn kernel runs natively on its own CPUs, its own physical memory and its own devices. Nothing is emulated and nothing is trapped; the only thing shared is what you choose to share. Note that this is not the old MkLinux, which was a port to PowerPC Macintosh systems.
Remind is a command-line calendar and alarm program, with an optional Tk-based graphical interface, for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. It has its own scripting language that allows users to create reminders that are difficult (if not impossible) to specify in other calendaring programs. It is wholly unsuitable for use in corporate environments that require calendar sharing and exchanging meeting invitations; however, it may be precisely the calendaring tool for users who prefer the command line and fast, flexible tools that can help keep track of messy schedules.
Vanilla OS 3, an immutable desktop Linux distribution, has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Arm64, introduction of a Vanilla OS SDK, a rewrite of the Apx package manager using the new SDK, and much more. LWN covered Vanilla OS 2 in 2024.
Practical quantum computers have been ten years away for the last several decades. Now, however, it's beginning to look as though they will be possible in just a few years. Recent research with obfuscated results demonstrated much lower memory requirements to factor ECDSA keys on a quantum computer, with work by other researchers in the open more than halving memory use compared to the state of the art in 2023. At the same time, computer manufacturers are boasting quantum processors that retain viable superpositions over longer periods. Given how slowly software updates filter out to stable systems, it's worth looking at what configuration changes and protocol updates are needed to be safe from quantum computers now.
Version 31.1 of the Emacs editor has been released. There is a long list of changes including the removal of the Emacs dumper, a new user Lisp directory feature, a "Send to..." menu item in context-menu-mode, and many other changes; see the NEWS file for more information. Mickey Petersen, author of Mastering Emacs, also has a rundown of some of the quality-of-life features appearing in this release.
Linux News