Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions of sites, has announced that it will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February 10, 2027: This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. We will not revoke valid certificates as a part of this process. This is the second stage of Let's Encrypt's plan, announced in 2025, to move to 45-day certificate lifetimes as required by the the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. In 2028, Let's Encrypt will switch to 45-day certificates.
TomΓ‘Ε‘ Ε edoviΔ is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team, which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals, including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes aimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how the project organizes, tracks, and amends goals. The Rust for Linux project has inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an inside view of the process might be helpful.
The kernel's swap layer has undergone some significant changes over the course of the last year and a number of longstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has not yet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swap cache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highly inefficient resource use. There are two competing solutions for this problem, neither of which has, as yet, reached readiness for merging; a lengthy discussion on possible paths forward shows ongoing disagreement over the best path forward.
Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustc pattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he has noticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult to automatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling. The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessing internal information from the Rust compiler.
The extensible scheduler class, which enables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burst of innovation in this area; the LAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulers to emerge. Though it was originally designed for gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grown to serve other types of workloads as well. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Changwoo Min and Gavin Guo presented an overview of this scheduler and how it has evolved over time.
Simon Long has announced a long-awaited release of Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), for x86-64 systems. We managed to find the time to update the Desktop for the Buster and Bullseye releases of Debian, but then we all just got too busy with other things, and, while we left the Bullseye version on the website for anyone who wanted it, we simply didn't have time to release any newer versions. But people kept on asking for it β we get two or three emails every week asking when the PC Desktop will be updated, and we haven't had an answer, because we honestly didn't know when we might get a chance to do it. We've continually tried to allocate time to be able to work on this, but it hasn't been easy. [...] Earlier this year, we (or rather Serge) finally got the latest version of the Desktop running on top of a Debian Trixie image. It's now based on 64-bit Debian (the amd64 architecture) rather than the older 32-bit version, as Debian itself has stopped supporting 32-bit for PC
Python's random and secrets modules both include utilities for obtaining random values, but only one of them is suitable for generating passwords and security tokens. For much of Python's history, random was used for passwords and tokens anyway, despite documentation that called it unsuitable for cryptography. In 2015, Python's core team debated whether to fix that misuse by making random secure by default. Instead, in 2016, Python 3.6 added a second module: secrets. The random module is still misused at times, so it is instructive to look into how the random-number modules should be used.
Chromium, the open-source upstream project for Google's Chrome web browser, is the browser of choice for many Linux users. It has also gained a reputation as being difficult for Linux distributions to package and build: Chromium has a complex build system, the project bundles many of its dependencies, and it has frequent releases. All of that, plus user complaints, has led the maintainers of the Gentoo Chromium package to give up on trying to maintain the package.
Version 10.6 of OpenSSH has been released. The announcement notes that the OpenSSH team has been receiving a large number of AI-assisted security bug reports. "We very much welcome these reports, especially when combined with human triage, analysis, test-cases and particularly when accompanied by proposed fixes". As a result, the project expects to be making more frequent releases to get updates to users more quickly rather than batching the bug fixes until the next planned release. Notable changes in this release include enabling the hybrid post-quantum ssh-mldsa44-ed25519 signature algorithm, addition of a -p option for sftp's lmkdir/mkdir commands, as well as disabling the LZ77 dictionary coder in ssh and sshd to mitigate side-channel leaks (which will result in reduced effectiveness of the Compression option). The scp -R option, which allows copies between two remote hosts, is being deprecated due to security risks; the option will be ignored in the future. See the announcement for
The Rust Foundation has posted the recordings from RustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada. Photos of the event are also available. LWN covered four talks from RustConf this year.
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