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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Free-threaded Python; AUR attacks; Fedora 2FA; 7.2 merge window; BPF arenas; BPF coroutines; BPF JIT; RMR and BRMR; OSPM. Briefs: Tor deprecations; GIMP 0.54.1 flatpak; Mastodon 4.6; Systemd v261; Xfce on Wayland; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Canonical has brought Livepatch to Arm64 devices for the first time, allowing Ubuntu systems on Arm hardware to apply critical kernel security patches without a full reboot. Livepatch is one of Ubuntu’s best hidden security features – it’s not enabled by default, requires Ubuntu Pro – as it allows kernel security updates to be applied in memory while your system is running. Normally, a restart is needed. Perfect if you’re a bit lazy running a task or workload you don’t want interrupted. Livepatch is now available on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 26 running on Arm64 devices for the first time […]
KaOS Linux 2026.06 distribution is now available for download as the first ISO snapshot using Dinit as the default init system instead of systemd. Here's what's new!
Podman 6.0 drops CNI, cgroups v1, iptables, slirp4netns, Windows 10, and Intel Mac support while adding new machine and Quadlet features.
The many memory management "MM" related improvements were recently merged to Git for the Linux 7.2 kernel. As typical most kernel cycles, some of the low-level improvements can yield nice efficiency wins and better performance in different areas...
Compromised accounts are one of the most common ways that attackers can sneak malware into the open-source supply chain. One way to reduce account compromise is for projects to require two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), but that is easier said than done. However, Fedora is currently discussing putting 2FA requirements in place soon, following an an alleged account compromise that led to an AI agent causing a number of problems for the project. After some discussion, Fedora will begin by requiring packagers in the "provenpackager" group to enable 2FA within the next three months or so.
BPF arenas are areas of memory (potentially shared with user space) where programs have free reign to build their own data structures, unburdened by the verifier's bounds checks. Many of those data structures are potentially usable in multiple programs. Emil Tsalapatis brought his work on libarena, a library containing generic utilities for use in BPF arenas, to the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Although the library is already available as part of the kernel, it is still in its early stages and he has more work planned.
Open-hardware manufacturer Pine64 has launched a $50 smart speaker that runs open-source software on a RISC-V chip. PineVoice (previously known as PineVox) is built around a Bouffalo Lab BL606P RISC-V SoC with integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and Zigbee radio interfaces. It’s equipped with dual microphone array and speaker with support for ‘local wake word detection’, and top-mounted buttons allow you to mute (with LED indicator), start/stop and adjust volume. The factory-shipped firmware is built on Alibaba’s open-source YoC platform and runs the Wyoming Satellite protocol, which turns the device into a local microphone and speaker for a self-hosted Home Assistant […]
The Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by the historical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As has become traditional, the presenters at that event have since written summaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made available to LWN for publication. The second day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including device frequency scaling, using time-slice duration for CPU selection, scheduling domains on multi-cluster Arm systems, the LAVD scheduler, and more.
While the new NTFS file-system driver merged for Linux 7.1 and has seen more improvements for Linux 7.2, for now at least the NTFS3 kernel driver continues to be maintained with new fixes and improvements. NTFS3 is the driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel a few years ago back during the pandemic by Paragon Software...
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libpq, memcached, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:13, postgresql:16, python-urllib3, python3.14-urllib3, redis:6, skopeo, and vim), Debian (beets, gst-plugins-bad1.0, imagemagick, libmatio, python-urllib3, and u-boot), Fedora (chromium, coturn, frr, grout, materialx, perl-Crypt-DSA, and yt-dlp), Mageia (opensc, perl-Archive-Tar, and podofo), Oracle (fence-agents, libpq, mysql:8.4, and postgresql:16), Red Hat (firefox, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, libreoffice, nginx:1.24, thunderbird, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-core, apache2, bind, bitcoin-qt6, containerized-data-importer, curl, distribution, docker-stable, dovecot24, dracut, editorconfig-core-c, exiv2, firefox, freeipmi, freerdp, ghc-aws, ghc-crypton-asn1-encoding, ghc-crypton-asn1-parse, ghc-crypton-asn1-types, ghc-crypton-pem, glib-networking, go1.25, go1.26,
Fish 4.8 command-line shell is out now with fixes for history search, completions, vi mode, and cd behavior.
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) have landed for Linux 7.2...
Ventoy 1.1.13 updates its Secure Boot shim file to address the UEFI CA 2023 issue, alongside VentoyPlugson changes.
Not every distro is suited for every job.
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