Latest Linux and open source news from around the web

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Linux.org

Updating your Linux Kernel: Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Arch

Most times, an updated kernel can make a system more stable by including updates and fixes to previous kernel builds. For some, you may have software or device drivers that work, or are part of your kernel, only with specific kernels, but usually this is not the case. So, to help improve stability and possibly performance, you should regularly check for updates to your kernel. In this article, I will go over installing a newer kernel, if it exists, for the following distros: ... https://www.linux.org/threads/updating-your-linux-kernel-ubuntu-centos-fedora-and-arch.58121/

LWN.net

[$] A visualizer for BPF program state

The BPF verifier is complicated. It needs to check every possible path that a BPF program's execution could take. The fact that its determination of whether a BPF program is safe is based on the whole lifetime of the program, instead of simple local factors, means that the cause of a verification failure is not always obvious. Ihor Solodrai and Jordan Rome gave a presentation (slides) at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo about the BPF verifier visualizer that they have been building to make diagnosing verification failures easier.

LWN.net

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (roundcube), Fedora (checkpointctl, containernetworking-plugins, mingw-libpng, NetworkManager, php, python3-docs, python3.13, and webkitgtk), Oracle (kernel, keylime, and libssh), and SUSE (apache2, clair, colord, flannel, gnutls, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, grafana, grub2, helm, ImageMagick, libpng16, netty, openssl-3, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, python36, salt, uyuni-tools, and venv-salt-minion).

Phoronix

Linux Preps For "Slow Workload Hints" With Intel Panther Lake

Five years ago Intel began introducing "workload hints" used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities. Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for new workload hint functionality coming for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs...

Phoronix

Linux 6.12 To Linux 6.18 LTS Upgrade Offers Worthwhile Benefits For 5th Gen AMD EPYC

The recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is this year's Long Term Support version. As such it's sure to a see a lot of enterprise and hyperscaler uptake in being the annual LTS kernel version. While Linux 6.12 LTS will be maintained at least through the end of next year, upgrading to Linux 6.18 LTS can be very worthwhile from the performance perspective beyond the extended timeline until it will reach end-of-life. Here are benchmarks showing the performance advantages of upgrading from Linux 6.12 LTS to Linux 6.18 LTS for 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" as well as an early look on the same server for the performance direction Linux 6.19 is bringing the kernel into 2026.