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There are many places in the kernel where performance can be improved by using per-CPU data. But, as it turns out, the kernel's allocator for per-CPU data has some performance problems of its own. Harry Yoo led a session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit to explore ways to address those problems and accelerate the allocation and initialization of per-CPU data.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libpng and nginx), Debian (erlang, netatalk, and nginx), Fedora (mod_md and SDL2_image), Mageia (perl-libwww-perl, perl-HTTP-Message, perl-WWW-Mechanize-Cached, perl-File-XDG, perl-Path-Tiny, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql15, and rclone), SUSE (agama, alloy, cacti, cloud-init, dnsmasq, emacs, firefox, glibc, go1.25, go1.26, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, ibus-rime, librime, imagemagick, kernel, libsndfile, nginx, ongres-scram, ongres-stringprep, plexus-testing,, openexr, openssh, PackageKit, perl-Text-CSV_XS, php-composer2, php8, postgresql16, postgresql18, python-lxml, python-python-multipart, python3, python311-urllib3, rmt-server, rsync, tiff, tree-sitter, util-linux, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-bluefield, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-orac
In April, David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, announced that he had archived the project and it would no longer be maintained due to lack of sponsorship. On May 18, he announced that a number of sponsors have stepped forward to ensure its continued development: Over the last few weeks, a coalition of sponsors has come together to fund ongoing development. Their support means the project is no longer reliant on a single sponsor, giving pgBackRest the stability it needs for the long term. [...] I'm looking forward to getting back to work. There are features and optimizations in the pipeline that I'm excited to share in upcoming releases. Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible, and thank you to the community for your patience and support during this transition. Thanks to Paul Wise for the tip.
The kernel's swap subsystem is charged with managing anonymous pages in secondary storage when those pages are (hopefully) not being used and the memory they occupy is needed elsewhere. This long-unloved subsystem has seen a resurgence of developer interest in recent times, so it is not surprising that it was the topic of three separate sessions in the memory-management track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Two of those sessions were concerned with improving the performance and maintainability of the swap code, while one (shared with the storage track) was about how swapping could be friendlier to solid-state storage devices.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, gimp:2.8, jq, kernel, and rsync), Debian (chromium, ffmpeg, firewalld, kernel, nginx, openjpeg2, openssh, php7.4, and redis), Fedora (apptainer, chromium, coturn, dnsmasq, firefox, kernel, libgit2_1.8, libmetal, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, open-amp, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, pgbouncer, pypy, python-jupytext, python-uv-build, rsync, rust-astral-tokio-tar, uriparser, uv, valkey, and yelp), Mageia (dpkg, firefox, thunderbird, golang, haproxy, and samba), Slackware (dnsmasq and kernel), and SUSE (apache-commons-configuration2, apache2, apptainer, chromedriver, cups-filters, curl, dnsmasq, expat, ffmpeg-4, ffmpeg-7, firebird, firewalld, flux2-cli, glibc, go1.25, go1.26, gosec, grub2, ImageMagick, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-openj9, java-1_8_0-openjdk, java-21-openj9, java-25-openj9, kdenlive, kernel, kerne
The 7.1-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting: the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools. People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying "that was already fixed a week/month ago" and pointing to the public discussion. Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we're making it clear that AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved - and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports. (He is referring to this pull request with patches from Willy Tarreau defining what constitutes a security bug and responsible ways to use AI to find bugs).
We have received word that Peter G. Neuman, who, among many other things, ran the RISKS Digest for decades, has passed away. He will be much missed.
The 7.0.9, 6.18.32, 6.12.90, and 6.6.140 stable kernels have been released. Each contains yet another set of important fixes.
Roman Gushchin began his session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit by saying that the community has seen a lot of proposals adding BPF-based interfaces for memory management. None of them have made their way into the mainline, though. He wanted to explore the ways in which BPF might be helpful and the obstacles that have kept BPF-based solutions out so far. This session was followed by a discussion led by Shakeel Butt on what the requirements for a new, BPF-based interface for memory control groups might look like.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.0.8, 6.18.31, 6.12.89, 6.6.139, 6.1.173, 5.15.207, and 5.10.256 stable kernels. These kernels contain a patch for CVE-2026-46333 a vulnerability reported by the Qualys Security Advisory team, though Jann Horn proposed a patch in 2020. The vulnerability has a proof-of-concept exploit published already. Some of the kernels have additional patches for other bugs; as always, users are advised to upgrade.
Recent times have seen a lot of effort put into the implementation of the kexec handover and live update orchestrator features in the Linux kernel. But that work is not yet complete. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Pratyush Yadav led a memory-management-track session on adding the ability to preserve hugetlbfs-provided memory during the live-update process.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, gsasl, nodejs, postgresql-15, postgresql-17, python3.9, and thunderbird), Fedora (expat, firefox, freerdp, GitPython, kernel, php, rust-podman-sequoia, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-chameleon-gnupg, rust-sequoia-git, rust-sequoia-keystore-server, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-openpgp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, and rust-sequoia-sqv), Mageia (awstats, libreoffice, perl-HTTP-Tiny, and tomcat), Oracle (corosync, freerdp, gimp, git-lfs, glib2, jq, kernel, krb5, libsoup3, libtiff, openexr, thunderbird, uek-kernel, and yggdrasil), Red Hat (podman and skopeo), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, avahi, c-ares, cairo, containerd, cpp-httplib, dnsmasq, dovecot24, ffmpeg-4, firefox, helm, ImageMagick, iproute2, kernel, krb5, libtpms, ongres-scram, ongres-stringprep, plexus-testing, maven, maven-doxia, mojo-parent, sisu, openCryptoki, openssh, perl-Text-CSV_XS, php8, python-lxml, python-Twisted-doc, python311-click, python311-GitPython
The kernel's control-group subsystem works well for resource management, Chris Li said at the beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Control groups work less well for other use cases, though. He was there to present his proposed enhancement, called "policy groups", that would address some of the shortcomings that he has encountered. A consensus on how this feature should look still seems distant, though.
In back-to-back sessions at the start of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (which spilled over into a third slot), the atomic-buffered-writes feature was discussed. In the first session, Pankaj Raghav and Andres Freund set the stage with an introduction to the problem, along with a use case for its solution: the PostgreSQL database system. In the second, Ojaswin Mujoo described a potential way forward for the feature using an approach based on writethrough, which effectively means that the kernel immediately writes the data to disk instead of waiting for writeback from the page cache to occur. As might be expected, there was quite a bit of discussion among the assembled filesystems and storage developers during the combined sessions for those tracks.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 stable kernels. These kernels do not include a patch for the Fragnesia local-privilege-escalation exploit that came to light on May 13, but do include many other important fixes throughout the tree. Users are, as always, advised to upgrade.
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