The scheduling of block I/O requests has long been a challenge for operating-system kernels. For many years, the performance characteristics of rotating drives meant that putting considerable resources into request ordering was worthwhile. In a world with fast, solid-state drives, scheduling is more concerned with enforcing fairness between competing users while being fast enough to keep up with drives that can perform millions of I/O operations per second. The blk-iocost I/O controller was designed for the solid-state world and generally performs well, but there is always a desire to do better. This patch series from Tao Cui aims to make blk-iocost more flexible by enabling the loading of a BPF program to make cost decisions.
PostgreSQL contributor Tomas Vondra has published a blog post looking at development activity in the project, with data from the late 1990s to today. We're doing ~50 commits per week, give or take. In ~2010 we were doing maybe 25/week, and the trend seems to be a slow and consistent growth. The monthly average makes the trend a bit easier to spot. Which is good, although there's a lot of other important details (size of commits, are they new features or fixes, ...). It however nicely aligns with the number of active committers, which also grew ~2x between 2010 and today. So maybe that's working as expected.
Pádraig Brady has announced GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) version 9.12. "There have been 288 commits by 16 people in the 21 weeks since 9.11". New features include an -A option for uname which labels all output, as well as adding awareness of the failfs and nullfs file types to stat and tail. There are many in this release as well, including a fix for a bug "present in 'the beginning'" that caused some utilities to fail when traversing hierarchies if files are being removed in parallel.
What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.
Sean Whitton has announced that the original fix for an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs (CVE-2024-53920) was incomplete. Bas Alberts discovered that viewing or editing untrusted files in modes other than Emacs's Lisp mode can also result in arbitrary code execution. This problem affects all Emacs versions affected by CVE-2024-53920. This means Emacs 24 and newer, and possibly also older versions. A minimal fix, attached, is queued up for release with Emacs 31.2. We (the Emacs upstream maintainers) don't expect to backport the fix to older Emacs releases ourselves. LWN covered the original vulnerability in December 2024.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.2.6, 6.18.52, 6.12.110, 6.6.157, 6.1.188, 5.15.221, 5.10.270 stable kernels. According to Kroah-Hartman, this batch may set a record for the number of patches with more than 9,000 in total between them. There are more than 1,800 patches in 7.2.6 alone. Users of these kernels are, of course, advised to upgrade.
Just a reminder that prices for LWN subscriptions will increase after September 15. Until then, the older rate still applies. See this article for details on this change. Thanks, yet again, to all of our subscribers for your support — that is what keeps LWN going.
The 7.3-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "Another fairly large rc release, and again one with a bigger filesystem footprint that we usually see."
All of the videos from the EuroPython 2026 conference, held in Kraków from July 13 through July 19, are now online along with a recap of the event from conference organizers.
Kernel developers do a lot of kernel builds. Since the kernel is not a small program, those builds can take a fair amount of time, even on a fast machine. The kernel also has a complex build system; it is probably fair to say that few developers truly understand it, and fewer still are willing to try to improve it. Lorenzo Stoakes, armed with LLM-based assistance, decided to give it a try, though, and has managed to reduce the time it takes to build a kernel — and not by a small amount.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.5 and 6.18.51 stable kernels. There are more than 550 patches in each with fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
The Forgejo software-forge project has announced the release of versions 16.0.4 and 15.0.8, which fixes two security vulnerabilities. One is a critical flaw that would allow remote-code execution (RCE): When generating a new repository from a template repository, Forgejo clones the template repository, removes the .git folder, performs variable template expansion on files listed in .forgejo/template, and initializes a new git repository. During this process, variable template expansion could be misused in order to create a new .git folder, which git would adopt and incorporate during its initialization of a new git repository. A malicious template repository could be used to read arbitrary data from the Forgejo host, and to execute arbitrary processes on the Forgejo host, as a remote code execution attack. To address this issue, after variable expansion is completed, any existing .git folder is removed from the directory before the git repository is initialized. The project recommends
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