The kernel provides a number of ways for processes to communicate with each other, but they never quite seem to fit the bill for many users. There are currently a few proposals for interprocess communication (IPC) enhancements circulating on the mailing lists. The most straightforward one adds a new system call for POSIX message queues that enables the addition of new features. For those wanting an entirely new way to do interprocess communication, there is a proposal to add a new subsystem for that purpose to io_uring. Finally, the bus1 proposal has made a return after ten years.
Brian "bex" Exelbierd has published a blog post exploring follow-up questions raised by the recent debate about the use of the LLM-based review tool Sashiko in the memory-management subsystem. His main finding is that Sashiko reviews are bi-modal with regards to whether they contain reports about code not directly changed by the patch set — most do not, but the ones that do often have several such comments. Hypothesis 1: Reviewers are getting told about bugs they didn't create. Sashiko's review protocol explicitly instructs the LLM to read surrounding code, not just the diff. That's good review practice — but it means the tool might flag pre-existing bugs in code the patch author merely touched, putting those problems in their inbox. Hypothesis 2: The same pre-existing bugs surface repeatedly. If a known issue in a subsystem doesn't get fixed between review runs, every patch touching nearby code could trigger the same finding. That would create a steady drip of duplicate noise across t
OpenSSH 10.3 has been released. Among the many changes in this release are a security fix to address late validation of metacharacters in user names, removal of bug compatibility for SSH implementations that do not support rekeying, and a fix to ensure that scp clears setuid/setgid bits from downloaded files when operating as root in legacy (-O) mode. See the release announcement for a full list of new features, bug fixes, and potentially incompatible changes.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.19.11, 6.18.21, 6.12.80, and 6.6.131 stable kernels, followed by a quick release of 6.6.132 with two patches reverted to address a problem building the rust core in 6.6.131. Each kernel contains important fixes; users are advised to upgrade.
Michael Meeks has posted an angry missive about changes at the Document Foundation. What has really happened is not entirely clear, but it seems to involve, at a minimum, the forced removal of all Collabora staff from the foundation. There has been a set of "thank you" notes to the people involved posted in the foundation's forums. The Document Foundation's decision to restart LibreOffice Online almost certainly plays into this as well. Details are fuzzy at best; we will be working at providing a clearer picture, but that will take some time.
Pandoc is a document-conversion program that can translate among a myriad of formats, including LaTeX, HTML, Office Open XML (docx), plain text, and Markdown. It is also extensible by writing Lua filters that can manipulate the document structure and perform arbitrary computations. Pandoc has appeared in various LWN articles over the years, such as my look at Typst and at the importance of free software to science in 2025, but we have missed providing an overview of the tool. The February release of Pandoc 3.9, which comes with the ability to compile the program to WebAssembly (Wasm), allowing Pandoc to run in web browsers, will likely also be of interest.
Version 0.0.6 of the Rust-based Servo web browser rendering engine has been released. This release boasts a long list of new features, performance enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes. Some of the notable changes include layout performance improvements, a servo:config page for setting any preference, and developer tools enhancements.
Discussion of a memory-management patch set intended to clean up a helper function for handling huge pages spiraled into something else entirely after it was posted on March 19. Memory-management maintainer Andrew Morton proposed making changes to the subsystem's review process, to require patch authors to respond to feedback from Sashiko, the recently released LLM-based kernel patch review system. Other sub-maintainers, particularly Lorenzo Stoakes, objected. The resulting discussion about how and when to adopt Sashiko is potentially relevant to many other parts of the kernel.
In early March, Dylan M. Taylor submitted a pull request to add a field to store a user's birth date in systemd's JSON user records. This was done to allow applications to store the date to facilitate compliance with age-attestation and -verification laws. It was to be expected that some members of the community would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats. Such behavior is not just problematic; it is also deeply misguided given the actual nature of the changes.
There is a blog post on sockpuppet.org arguing that we are not prepared for the upcoming flood of high-quality, LLM-generated vulnerability reports and exploits. Now consider the poor open source developers who, for the last 18 months, have complained about a torrent of slop vulnerability reports. I'd had mixed sympathies, but the complaints were at least empirically correct. That could change real fast. The new models find real stuff. Forget the slop; will projects be able to keep up with a steady feed of verified, reproducible, reliably-exploitable sev:hi vulnerabilities? That's what's coming down the pipe. Everything is up in the air. The industry is sold on memory-safe software, but the shift is slow going. We've bought time with sandboxing and attack surface restriction. How well will these countermeasures hold up? A 4 layer system of sandboxes, kernels, hypervisors, and IPC schemes are, to an agent, an iterated version of the same problem. Agents will generate full-chain exploits
SystemRescue 13.00 has been released. The SystemRescue distribution is a live boot system-rescue toolkit, based on Arch Linux, for repairing systems in the event of a crash. This release includes the 6.18.20 LTS kernel, updates bcachefs tools and kernel module to 1.37.3, and many upgraded packages. See the step-by-step guide for instructions on performing common operations such as recovering files, creating disk clones, and resetting lost passwords.
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