Aoife Moloney has, on behalf of the Fedora Council, posted an announcement that the Fedora Council is "proposing we pause the Community Initiatives process as an official project process" because it has decided the current process is ineffective. It is also closing discussion regarding the AI developer desktop initiative covered by LWN in May. The Fedora Objectives/Initiatives framework was never intended as a mandatory prerequisite to do the work in Fedora. It supposed to help by focusing the community on a certain work when needed, not to decide what is allowed. The AI developer desktop initiative proposal highlighted that the Community Initiatives process has failed to serve as a good framework in Fedora where new ideas can surface, receive respectful feedback, and gain Council support for work that fits the project's present and/or future. This is something that the Council must address. As a first step, we would like to halt the community initiative process immediately. Existing i
The kernel community (like many other free-software projects) has recently seen a large influx of patches developed with the assistance of large language models (LLMs). Those patches tend to come from developers who were previously unknown to the community. At the moment, though, the memory-management developers are evaluating two large patch sets, developed with LLM assistance, that were submitted by established and well-respected developers. The rather different reception accorded to that work may give insights into how LLM-generated contributions will be handled going forward.
When a BPF program is used to filter or redirect packets in the networking subsystem, the program will often want to associate data with each packet as it moves through the kernel. The kernel's local BPF storage API, which associates extra data with some kernel objects, provides a way to do that. (See also the BPF map types that end in STORAGE.) Amery Hung and Jakub Sitnicki led two sessions at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about how to make accesses to local storage data more efficient. Hung spoke about general performance problems related to locking, while Sitnicki examined the use of local storage in the networking subsystem in particular.
Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems rely on certificates issued by Microsoft to verify the software used to boot a system is trusted by the user. One of those certificates expired recently, but that will not cause systems that are able to boot to stop doing so. There are situations where the expiration may cause problems, however, and the window for relying on existing signed binaries is shorter than it might appear. Users and administrators will want to stay on top of these changes. Over the last year, part of my job at Microsoft has been to work on this problem. LWN wrote about the certificate expiration in July 2025, and this article follows up with where we are now.
Dee Harris has published a summary of the recent "fireside chat" featuring Creative Commons founders Hal Abelson, Lawrence (Larry) Lessig, Molly Van Houweling, and Glenn Otis Brown. The chat was to mark the 25th anniversary of Creative Commons and included a look back at its history as well as a look at the landscape today: Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down. The video of the chat is available on YouTube.
Lisp-like languages have historically led the world in metaprogramming and flexibility. While many modern languages have adopted the idea of macros, Lisp-like languages such as Racket have continued pushing the envelope, attempting to make macros as easy as possible to incorporate into everyday programs. On the other hand, Lisp's minimal, parenthesis-based syntax can be hard to adapt to — to the point that Lisp is sometimes said to stand for "Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses". Rhombus is a new programming language that aims to have the best of both worlds, marrying Racket's metaprogramming capabilities to a simple Python-like syntax and reasonable standard-library defaults.
Git maintainer Junio Hamano has announced Git 2.55.0, which has non-merge commits from 100 people; 33 of those are first-time contributors to the project. LWN recently covered some of the noteworthy changes in 2.55, including new features for the experimental "git history" command, addition of the Git fsmonitor daemon for Linux systems, and more.
Linus Torvalds released 7.2-rc1 and closed the 7.2 merge window on June 28; by that time, 13,412 non-merge commits had found their way into the mainline. That makes this the busiest merge window since the 6.7 development cycle in 2024 (15,418 commits, including 2,800 for the entire bcachefs development history). Just under half of those commits arrived after LWN's summary of the first half of the merge window was written. As usual, the commits in the latter part of the merge window were more heavily focused on fixes, but there were still a lot of new features and significant changes merged as well.
The xsnow application, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and other pleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obvious channel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainer seems to have included a political protest in the program: an Easter egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia ("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should be removed from the Debian xsnow package, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbid such a feature outright.
The Kubernetes project has published a blog post explaining its AI policy: The main problem is that AI has made generating code fast but there has been very little improvement in maintaining code bases. In this post, we will highlight the ways the Kubernetes community is adapting to the world of AI assisted coding. The first step of this journey was to develop an AI policy. This seems mundane and bureaucratic but there were many PRs that derailed into discussions around AI usage. The AI policy helps steer the conversation around the project's stance on AI and provides a clear signal to contributors on how to use these tools responsibly. Of note, the project requires disclosure when AI tools have been used to assist in the creation of a contribution but forbids the use of listing AI as a co-author or including "assisted-by" or "co-developed" trailers to attribute work to an LLM tool.
Mageia 10 has been released with the 6.18 Linux kernel, DNF 5.4.0, RPM 4.20.1, and an increase in hardware requirements for x86 32-bit systems; users now need a CPU with SSE2 features. See the release notes for a full list of updates, and the errata page for known problems.
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