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[$] Testing compat_linux on NetBSD with the Linux Test Project
NetBSD has long had support for running Linux binaries via its kernel-level compat_linux feature, but test coverage for it was less complete than some might hope. In order to provide better testing for compat_linux, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant Henrique Brito opted to work on enabling the Linux Test Project (LTP) test suite to compile and run on NetBSD. At EuroBSDCon 2026, Brito's mentor, Stephen Borrill, provided a report on the project, and the status of LTP on NetBSD. The work has already resulted in some minor fixes, and a good list of additional problems to solve.
[$] Looking forward to Git 2.56 — and 3.0
The Git source-code management system is at the core of development processes worldwide, so changes, especially incompatible changes, are of great interest to the developers involved. The Git 2.56 release, which can be expected around the end of September, is currently available in release-candidate form. It is not the most earth-shaking of releases, but the one that follows, which might be the long-awaited Git 3.0, may well be.
[$] Thread-identity switcheroo for io_uring
The io_uring subsystem is all about asynchronous execution; applications count on it to not block — unless explicitly requested to. Within io_uring, maintaining the "never blocks" guarantee has sometimes been a challenge, given that many paths in the kernel were never designed for asynchronous execution. This problem has been worked around, but at a significant cost to performance. Now, io_uring maintainer Jens Axboe has posted an RFC patch set with a somewhat radical (and potentially scary) solution to the problem.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 17, 2026
Posted Sep 17, 2026 1:12 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 17, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Server-data encryption; PostgreSQL scary patches; Faster kernel builds; BPF for blk-iocost; Lessons learned as DPL.
- Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Ways to encrypt data on servers
At the 2026 edition of FOSSY, Romeo Solano gave a fast-paced, humorous presentation on what could have been a rather boring topic: server encryption. There are a number of threats that we face in today's world, from criminals, government overreach, espionage, and more, that can be thwarted with encryption. But encrypting data on a system that may live elsewhere, without any access to its keyboard at boot time, is rather more difficult than encrypting the disk of a laptop. Solano described the problems and gave a tour of some of the solutions in the talk.
[$] Adding BPF to blk-iocost
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.
[$] Lessons learned as the Debian Project Leader
What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.
[$] Accelerating the kernel's build process
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.
[$] PostgreSQL 19's "scary patch contest"
PostgreSQL 19 was
expected to be released in September, in keeping with the database
project's longstanding tradition of a major release every year. However,
some late-breaking concerns about several of the features slated for inclusion
has some developers worried about the quality of the release. On August 25, PostgreSQL
contributor Robert Haas sent
an email with the subject "scary patch contest
" about several patches
that have required an unusually large number of bug fixes leading up to the
release, which has raised questions about their readiness for a stable
release. One of the patches has been reverted, but several are still under heavy
revision, and an extra beta release has been slotted in to allow for additional
testing.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 10, 2026
Posted Sep 10, 2026 1:43 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 10, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Rust's never type; Debian and CERN; memory tiering; testing multithreaded Python; fixing TCMalloc; Typst.
- Briefs: Rustls; Asahi Linux; Buildroot 2026.08; Grml 2026.09; Audacity 4.0; Jellyfin 12.0; LibreOffice Base; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Igalia celebrates "Twenty-Five Years Upstream"
The open-source consulting firm Igalia has put out an announcement celebrating 25 years of working on upstream FOSS projects for its clients. The list of projects the company has worked on is rather eye-opening: WebKit, mobile-browser rendering (on Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen), the Linux kernel (CPU and GPU scheduling), 3D graphics drivers, the Orca screen reader, GStreamer, and lots more. Beyond that, the company, which is a worker-owned cooperative, does its work in ways that benefit the community as well as its clients:
None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working better than it does today. What they get from us is not a patch to carry forever. We do the work upstream, in the project itself, so it arrives in the next release and keeps working long after the contract ends. Our customers ship products built on code that nobody has to maintain alone, and everyone else gets the same code. That has been the arrangement from the start.
Three new stable kernels
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.2.7, 6.18.53, and 6.12.111 stable kernels. As is usual these days, they are quite large; also no surprise is that they provide many important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of those kernels are advised to update.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, perl-Net-DNS, sudo, tomcat, and tomcat9), Debian (chromium, gimp, libde265, libevent, linux-6.12, ruby-jwt, and unbound), Fedora (asterisk, chromium, doctl, dovecot, evolution, firefox, forgejo, freeciv, freeipa, gegl04, gimp, libheif, nss, opkssh, parted, ruby, stb, thunderbird, unbound, and webkitgtk), Mageia (bind, gawk, gdk-pixbuf2.0, graphicsmagick, gstreamer1.0-plugins-base, libde265, libpcap, libssh, mpg123, ntfs-3g, ntpsec, patch, perl-YAML, postfix, python-configargparse, and python-httplib2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, image-builder, kernel, libevent, libsoup, libsoup3, perl-Net-DNS, python-lxml, sudo, tomcat, tomcat9, and unbound), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (alloy, dovecot22, ffmpeg-8, firefox, firefox-esr, freeipmi, glibc, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, helm, ImageMagick, jq, kbd, kernel-devel, libpcap, libsoup, libzypp, zypper, NetworkManager-applet-l2tp, nginx, openCryptoki, pcre2, python311, python313-aiosmtplib, python313-litellm, rpm, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and rclone).
Kernel prepatch 7.3-rc4
Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4
kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'
".
Systemtap 5.6 released
Version 5.6 of the Systemtap tracing tool has been released.
BPF LSM hooks and XDP packet-processing probes for the --bpf runtime, BTF-based kernel.tracepoint probes, statement execution tracing, a new @enumname() operator, richer runtime error context, dyninst hardware watchpoints, modern systemd service templates, and broad Linux 7.2 runtime/tapset compatibility work. Multithreaded speedups throughout.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, coreutils, kernel, libevent, libsoup3, microcode_ctl, perl-Net-DNS, postgresql18, postgresql:16, postgresql:18, tomcat, and unbound), Debian (bind9, chromium, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, nginx, xz-utils, and zip), Fedora (chromium, freeipmi, GitPython, gnatcoll, nodejs-undici, parted, python-django5, and sblim-cmpi-base), Mageia (imagemagick and python-starlette), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, coreutils, corosync, firewalld, kernel, libevent, libsoup, microcode_ctl, nginx:1.24, perl, perl:5.32, postgresql:16, postgresql:18, redis, rsync, rsyslog, tesseract, and unbound), Red Hat (vim), SUSE (alsa, chirp, chromium, cjose, cups, discount, firefox, gh, glibc, gvfs, jq, kernel, libcjose-devel, libmbedcrypto7, libpcap, mbedtls-2, netcdf, nodejs18, openai-codex, openvpn, pcre2, perl-net-dns, sngrep, tiff, and znc), and Ubuntu (bison, bubblewrap, and gst-plugins-good1.0).
GNOME 51 released
Version 51 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. The list of changes includes a number of performance improvements, offline data and better transit information in the Maps application, a new interface for the file previewer, and more.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, corosync, firewalld, kernel, kernel-rt, libevent, libsoup, microcode_ctl, nginx:1.26, python-lxml, rsyslog, tesseract, and unbound), Debian (firefox-esr, mkvtoolnix, thunderbird, and tor), Fedora (open62541, php-pecl-mongodb2, python-django6, python-jwcrypto, and roundcubemail), Mageia (aom, cockpit, libgd, packagekit, and python-h2), Red Hat (corosync, delve, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, libvirt, opentelemetry-collector, and rhc-worker-playbook), Slackware (mozilla-firefox and mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (acl, attr, alloy, ansible-core, clamav, containerized-data-importer, corosync, cups, distribution, glibc, google-cloud-sap-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, gvfs, helm, jq, kbd, kubernetes1.34-apiserver, kubernetes1.35-apiserver, lcms2, libcupsfilters, liblzmasdk26, libzypp, zypper, mistral-vibe, opensc, openvpn, pcre2, python-jwcrypto, tomcat, tomcat10, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (guix, libheif, perl, python-cryptography, sqlite3, and valkey).
Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century (Register)
The Register looks forward to the upcoming Fedora 45 release.
The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libkcapi, nginx, nginx:1.24, openssl, osbuild-composer, perl, perl:5.32, python-tornado, rsync, and rust), Debian (cjose and nginx), Fedora (environment-modules, erlang, GitPython, knot, perl-Authen-SASL, python-configargparse, ruby, rubygems, and sblim-sfcb), Oracle (firefox, git-lfs, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, libkcapi, nginx, nginx:1.26, openssl, osbuild-composer, perl, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql18, python-tornado, and rust), Red Hat (fence-agents, git-lfs, microcode_ctl, osbuild-composer, podman, python-pyasn1, and resource-agents), SUSE (389-ds, ant, bson-devel, chirp-20260911, docker, gimp, google-cloud-sap-agent, hauler, kernel, kimi-code, libpcap, python-GitPython, python310, syncthing, yast2-samba-client, and zstd-jni), and Ubuntu (aom, imagemagick, kitty, openssh, phpseclib, policykit-1, python-sql, python-webob, shibboleth-sp, simplesamlphp, snapcast, srt, and suricata-update).
