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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 29, 2026
Posted Jan 29, 2026 1:01 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 29, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: PostmarketOS; LKRG 1.0; Fedora elections; EROFS, NTFS, and XFS; Fedora and GPG 2.5; BPF kfuncs.
- Briefs: curl bounties; GPG security; Guix 1.5.0; ReactOS turns 30; glibc 2.43; Rust 1.93; Xfwl4; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Open source for phones: postmarketOS
Phones running Linux are ubiquitous these days and it has been that way since Android started working toward dominance in the smartphone market. Unfortunately, Android has slowly increased its freedom-unfriendliness and has become something of a privacy nightmare. In a talk entitled "We need an open-source phone OS" at Open Source Summit Japan 2025, Luca Weiss described the smartphone landscape and gave an overview of postmarketOS as an alternative Linux operating system for mobile handsets.
[$] Who should vote in Fedora elections?
Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is not easy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership and voting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that have elections for representative bodies. The Fedora Council, the project's top-level governance body, is wrestling with that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interest group (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for the sole purpose of allowing them to vote in the most recent Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) election. That opened a large can of worms about what it means to be a contributor and how contributors can be identified for voting purposes.
[$] Implicit arguments for BPF kfuncs
The kernel's "kfunc" mechanism is a way of exporting kernel functions so that they can be called directly from BPF programs. There are over 300 kfuncs in current kernels, ranging in functionality from string processing (bpf_strnlen()) to custom schedulers (scx_bpf_kick_cpu()) and beyond. Sometimes these kfuncs need access to context information that is not directly available to BPF programs, and which thus cannot be passed in as arguments. The implicit arguments patch set from Ihor Solodrai is the latest attempt to solve this problem.
[$] Fedora and GPG 2.5
The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) project decided to break from the OpenPGP standard for email encryption in 2023, and instead adopted its own homegrown LibrePGP specification. The GPG 2.4 branch, the last one to adhere to OpenPGP, will be reaching the end of life in mid-2026. The Fedora project is currently having a discussion about how that affects the distribution, its users, and what to offer once 2.4 is no longer receiving updates.
[$] Filesystem medley: EROFS, NTFS, and XFS
Filesystems seem to be one of those many areas where the problems are well understood, but there is always somebody working toward a better solution. As a result, filesystem development in the Linux kernel continues at a fast pace even after all these years. In recent news, the EROFS filesystem is on the path to gain a useful page-cache-sharing feature, there is a new NTFS implementation on the horizon, and XFS may be about to get an infrastructure for self healing.
[$] Linux Kernel Runtime Guard reaches its 1.0 release
The Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a out-of-tree loadable kernel module that attempts to detect and report violations of the kernel's internal invariants, such as might be caused by an in-progress security exploit or a rootkit. LKRG has been experimental since its initial release in 2018. In September 2025, the project announced the 1.0 version. With the promises of stability that version brings, users might want more information to decide whether to include it in their kernel.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 22, 2026
Posted Jan 22, 2026 0:47 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 22, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Singularity; fsconfig(); io_uring restrictions; GPG vulnerabilities; slab allocator; AshOS.
- Briefs: Pixel exploit; telnetd exploit; OzLabs; korgalore; Firefox Nightly RPMs; Forgejo 14.0; Pandas 3.0; Wine 11.0; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Cleanup on aisle fsconfig()
As part of the process of writing man pages for the "new" mount API, which has been available in the kernel since 2019, Aleksa Sarai encountered a number of places where the fsconfig() system call—for configuring filesystems before mounting—needs to be cleaned up. In the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) session that he led, Sarai wanted to discuss some of the problems he found, including at least one with security implications. The idea of the session was for him to describe the various bugs and ambiguities that he had found, but he also wanted attendees to raise other problems they had with the system call.
Responses to gpg.fail
At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in December, researchers Lexi Groves ("49016") and Liam Wachter said that they had discovered a number of flaws in popular implementations of OpenPGP email-encryption standard. They also released an accompanying web site, gpg.fail, with descriptions of the discoveries. Most of those presented were found in GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), though the pair also discussed problems in age, Minisign, Sequoia, and the OpenPGP standard (RFC 9580) itself. The discoveries have spurred some interesting discussions and as well as responses from GPG and Sequoia developers.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, openssl, and python3.9), Debian (gimp, libmatio, pyasn1, and python-django), Fedora (perl-HarfBuzz-Shaper, python-tinycss2, and weasyprint), Mageia (glib2.0), Oracle (curl, fence-agents, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, glibc, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, mariadb, osbuild-composer, perl, php:8.2, python-urllib3, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, and python3.12-urllib3), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bind, buildah, busybox, container-suseconnect, coredns, gdk-pixbuf, gimp, go1.24, go1.24-openssl, go1.25, helm, kernel, kubernetes, libheif, libpcap, libpng16, openjpeg2, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, php8, python-jaraco.context, python-marshmallow, python-pyasn1, python-urllib3, python-virtualenv, python311, python313, rabbitmq-server, xen, zli, and zot-registry), and Ubuntu (containerd, containerd-app and wlc).
Mourning Didier Spaier
We have received the sad news that Didier Spaier, maintainer of the blind-friendly Slackware-based Slint distribution, has recently passed away. Philippe Delavalade, who posted the announcement to the Slint mailing list, said:
Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the installer; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as possible for visually impaired people.
You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as quickly as possible to our issues and questions.
He will be irreplaceable.
OSI pauses 2026 board election cycle
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced
that it will not be holding the 2026 spring board election. Instead,
it will be creating a working group to "review and improve OSI's
board member selection process
" and provide recommendations by
September 2026:
The public election process was designed to gather community priorities and improve board member selection, while final appointments remained with the board.
Over time, that nuance has become a source of understandable confusion for community members. Many reasonably expected elections to function as elections normally do, and in fact, the board has generally adopted the electorate's recommendations. When a process feels unclear, trust suffers. When trust suffers, engagement becomes harder. This is especially problematic for an organization whose mission depends on legitimacy and credibility. [...]
OSI tried its experiment for the right reasons, but a variety of factors resulted in "elections" that are performatively democratic while being gameable and representative of only a small group, and we've learned from the results. Now we are making space to align our director selection process with our bylaws, to rebuild trust, and to develop better, more durable and truly representative participation in which the global stakeholder community can be heard.
LWN covered the previous OSI election in March 2025.
PC Gamer on the scx_horoscope scheduler
PC Gamer has run an amusing review of the scx_horoscope scheduler for Linux, which uses astrology to optimize scheduling decisions.
The scheduler is full of bizarre features, like its ability to perform real planetary calculations based on accurate geocentric planetary positions, lunar phase scheduling (the full moon gives a 1.4x boost to tasking, apparently) and "zodiac-based task classification".That latter feature is easily one of my favourite bits. Specific planetary bodies "rule" over specific system tasks, so the Sun is in charge of critical system processes, the Moon (tied to emotions, of course) rules over interactive tasks, and Jupiter is assigned to memory-heavy applications, among others.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (openssl), Fedora (assimp, chromium, curl, freerdp, gimp, and harfbuzz), Mageia (glibc, haproxy, iperf, and python-pyasn1), Red Hat (image-builder, openssl, and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (avahi, cups, gio-branding-upstream, google-osconfig-agent, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel-firmware, libmatio-devel, libopenjp2-7, nodejs22, php8, python-python-multipart, python311-urllib3_1, qemu, and xen), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, jaraco.context, openssl, and openssl, openssl1.0).
A critical GnuPG security update
There is a new GnuPG update for a "critical security bug
" in recent
GnuPG releases.
A crafted CMS (S/MIME) EnvelopedData message carrying an oversized wrapped session key can cause a stack buffer overflow in gpg-agent during the PKDECRYPT--kem=CMS handling. This can easily be used for a DoS but, worse, the memory corruption can very likley also be used to mount a remote code execution attack. The bug was introduced while changing an internal API to the FIPS required KEM API.
Only versions 2.5.13 through 2.5.16 are affected.
The GNU C Library is moving from Sourceware
GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O'Donell has announced that the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hosted at the Linux Foundation.
While it was clear to the GNU Toolchain leadership that requirements were coming to improve the toolchain cyber-security posture, these requirements were not clear to all project developers. As part of receiving this feedback we have worked to document and define a secure development policy for glibc and at a higher level the GNU Toolchain. While Sourceware has started making some critical technical changes, the GNU Toolchain still faces serious, systemic concerns about securing a global, highly available service and building a sustainable, diverse sponsorship model.
This has been a long-running discussion; see this 2022 article for some background.
Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor
The Xfce team has announced that it will be providing funding to Brian Tarricone to work on xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for Xfce:
Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks.
The first attempt at creating an Xfce Wayland compositor involved modifying the existing xfwm4 code to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel. However, this approach turned out to be the wrong path forward for several reasons:
- Xfwm4 is architected in a way that makes it very difficult to put the window management behavior behind generic interfaces that don't include X11 specifics.
- Refactoring Xfwm4 is risky, since it might introduce new bugs to X11. Having two parallel code bases will allow for rapid development and experimentation with the Wayland compositor, with zero risk to break xfwm4.
- Some X11 window management concepts just aren't available or supported by Wayland protocols at this time, and dealing with those differences can be difficult in an X11-first code base.
- Using the existing codebase would require us to use C and wlroots, even if a better alternative is available.
Work has already commenced on the project, and the project hopes to share a development release in mid-2026.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, python-urllib3, python3.11-urllib3, and python3.12-urllib3), Debian (imagemagick, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and openjdk-21), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ghostscript, glibc, mingw-glib2, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-libsoup, mingw-openexr, and qownnotes), Mageia (kernel-linus), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), SUSE (go1.24-openssl, go1.25-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, kernel, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openvswitch3, python-pyasn1, python311, and qemu), and Ubuntu (git-lfs, node-form-data, and screen).
Stenberg: The end of the curl bug-bounty program
Curl creator Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post explaining why the project is ending its bug-bounty program, which started in April 2019:
The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live.
I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These "helpers" try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don't think we need more of that.
There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.
Stenberg writes that he still expects "the best and our most
valued security reporters
" to continue informing the project when
security vulnerabilities are discovered. The program will officially
end on January 31, 2026.
