Probably the biggest change for Python over the last five years or so is the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language, which removes the global interpreter lock (GIL) and allows multiple threads to run in parallel in the interpreter. At PyCon US 2026, held in Long Beach, California in mid-May, longtime CPython core developer (and current steering council member) Thomas Wouters gave a talk about the feature. He looked at the motivation behind the GIL-removal efforts, some history, the current status of the free-threaded interpreter, and provided a prediction on where it all leads.
Brian Tarricone has announced the first preview release of xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. After close to six months of work, I feel like it's ready to get some wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing features. Think of this as an alpha release. [...] The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there's a difference. In reality, of course, it won't be quite that seamless, and there's still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least.
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 first day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including idle-state selection, user-space schedulers with sched_ext, lock-holder preemption, and much more.
Systemd v261 has been released with a long list of changes including a new cloud "Instance Metadata Service" (IMDS) subsystem, "boot secret" functionality for use on systems that lack a physical TPM, as well as support for the kernel's Live Update Orchestration (LUO) / Kexec Handover (KHO) systems when they are present and enabled. See the release notes for the full list of changes.
BPF programs can be used to extend many aspects the Linux kernel, but BPF programs must run to completion in the same context that they began. Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi is working on changing that by allowing BPF programs to be expressed as coroutines. He spoke about his work at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. While still experimental, the change promises to make long-running BPF tasks significantly easier to write.
The Arch User Repository (AUR) has been subjected to a sustained attack recently. The attacker, or attackers, have spun up a series of new accounts then used them to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates that would install malware on users' systems. It is unclear how many users were compromised in the attack, but the maintainers were playing Whac-A-Mole for several days to respond to each newly compromised package. The project has turned off the AUR's new-user registration, for now, but it is unclear what its long-term response will be or if the AUR can be secured without major changes to its existing collaboration model.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.1, 7.0.13, 6.18.36, 6.12.94, 6.6.143, 6.1.176, 5.15.210, and 5.10.259 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes. Users are advised to upgrade.
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced the release of its recommendations for using LLM-backed generative AI systems for FOSS contributions. The recommendations were created by the SFC and volunteers from the free-software community. The recommendations reflect the extremely difficult dilemmas that these systems pose for FOSS contributors. SFC and its volunteers understand that FOSS developers are approaching LLM-gen-AI from a variety of perspectives. The recommendations offer practical assistance to minimize the damage caused by using proprietary systems, whether FOSS contributors reject LLM-gen-AI or choose (voluntarily or by employer mandate) to use them. These recommendations are best practices (but not definitions or requirements) that SFC and its volunteers formulated after careful study of the growing LLM-gen-AI use among FOSS contributors. SFC will follow these recommendations with a series of supporting materials, including documents, online tutorials, public Q&A
The 7.2 merge window started with the 7.1 kernel release on June 14. As of this writing, just over 7,000 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for the next kernel release. Many of the core subsystems have been pulled at this point, meaning that most of the changes that can be expected in 7.2 have now come into focus.
Version 4.6 of the Mastodon fediverse platform has been released. The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon's work ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we've put a lot of thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal: Helping new users discover more of the Fediverse. Other new features include support for subscribing to posts via email, the ability to generate a "year in review" post, accessibility improvements, and more.
How can cloud providers efficiently supply durable virtual block devices? Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides a way for servers in a cluster to share chunks of memory, but there still needs to be a protocol that operates on top of RDMA to provide the guarantees expected of a block device. The kernel's RDMA transport library (RTRS) provides a way to send messages via RDMA. I presented about two new components built on top of RTRS at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit: Reliable Multicast over RTRS (RMR) and Block device over RMR (BRMR). These modules, which I am working on with Jia Li, could be a way for cloud providers to expose durable block devices with as little overhead as possible. To accomplish that, however, we need some discussion and feedback from the community before sending the modules upstream.
Linux News