Welcome to LWN.net
LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information, and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities.
[$] A new era for memory-management maintainership
On April 21, Andrew Morton let it be known that he intends to begin stepping away from the maintainership of kernel's memory-management subsystem — a responsibility he has carried since before memory management was even seen as its own subsystem. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, one of the first sessions in the memory-management track was devoted to how the maintainership would be managed going forward. There are a lot of questions still to be answered.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 7, 2026
Posted May 7, 2026 0:01 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 7, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: LLMs and security; restartable sequences and TCMalloc; Fedora and GNOME bug reports; Prolly trees; Arm on s390.
- Briefs: NHS open source; Alpine outage; GCC 16.1; Incus 7.0 LTS; NetHack 5.0.0; PHP license; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] LLM-driven security reports disrupt coordinated disclosure
Predictions that LLM tools would cause a surge in reports of security vulnerabilities have, unquestionably, borne out. As expected, maintainers are having to wade through more security reports than ever before; in addition, LLM tools are disrupting traditional-coordinated disclosure practices as well. The method of Copy Fail's disclosure, in particular, left vendors, projects, and users scrambling. In addition, maintainers are seeing parallel discovery of the same security flaws within the embargo window. Both of these developments mean that coordinated security disclosures may become a thing of the past.
[$] Hardware-assisted Arm VMs for s390
A recent patch set from Steffen Eiden and others has set the groundwork for allowing hardware-assisted emulation of Arm CPUs on s390 CPUs. Version two of the posting fixes a handful of smaller problems, but does not differ much. The patches were welcomed by the Arm maintainers, pending some discussion of how the collaboration between the architectures could be structured to prevent maintainability problems on the Arm side. When those details are resolved, the patches could pave the way for transparently running Arm-based virtual machines (VMs) on s390 hosts at native or near-native speeds.
[$] Bug-monitoring expectations and Fedora GNOME packages
For a number of years, users submitting bugs reports against GNOME packages in Fedora have
received an auto-reply saying that the reports were not actively
monitored; users were encouraged to file bugs with GNOME upstream instead. However,
that practice seems to be in conflict with the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) policy
that package maintainers "deal with reported bugs in a timely manner
". On
April 28, FESCo discussed the disconnect between practice and policy; so far,
it has only opted to tweak the wording of the automatic response.
[$] Version-controlled databases using Prolly trees
Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of B-trees, which are tree structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block devices. Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database. The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects.
[$] Restartable sequences, TCMalloc, and Hyrum's Law
Hyrum's Law states that any observable behavior of a system will eventually be depended upon by somebody. The kernel community is currently contending with a clear demonstration of that principle. The recent work to address some restartable-sequences performance problems in the 6.19 release maintained the documented API in all respects, but that was not enough; Google's TCMalloc library, as it turns out, violates the documented API, prevents other code from using restartable features, and breaks with 6.19. But the kernel's no-regressions rule is forcing developers to find a way to accommodate TCMalloc's behavior.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 30, 2026
Posted Apr 30, 2026 0:18 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 30, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Famfs; Python packaging council; Zig concurrency; pages and folios; Strawberry music manager; 7.1 merge window.
- Briefs: GnuPG 2.5.19; Copy Fail; Plasma security; Fedora 44; Ubuntu 26.04; Niri 26.04; pip 26.1; RIP Seth Nickell; RIP Tomáš Kalibera; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Python packaging council approved
The Python packaging world now has a formal
governance council, of the form described in PEP 772 ("Packaging
Council governance process"), which was approved
by the steering council on April 16. It has been over a year
since the PEP was first proposed in February 2025 and it has undergone
lengthy discussions in multiple postings to the Python discussion forum. The
packaging council will have "broad authority over packaging standards,
tools, and implementations
"; it will consist of five members who will
be elected in a vote that is likely to come in June—after PyCon US 2026 is held mid-May.
Strawberry is ripe for managing music collections
There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing) a music collection. Strawberry is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music files, and more.
Dirty Frag: a zero-day universal Linux LPE
Hyunwoo Kim has announced the Dirty Frag security flaw, a local-privilege-escalation (LPE) vulnerability similar to the recently disclosed Copy Fail flaw:
Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for these vulnerabilities. After consultation with the linux-distros@vs.openwall.org maintainers, and at the maintainers' request, I am publicly releasing this Dirty Frag document.
As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions.
Kim, who discovered the flaw and had attempted a coordinated disclosure set for May 12, has released the code for an exploit, as well as a example script to remove the vulnerable modules. A full write-up, with the disclosure timeline, is also available. It's unknown at this time whether this is an example of parallel discovery or how the third party was able to disclose it prior to the end of the embargo. We will be following up as more information comes to light.
An update on KDE's Union style engine
Arjen Hiemstra has published an article on the status of the Union project: a single system to support all of KDE's technologies used for styling applications.
The work on Union's Breeze implementation has progressed to the point where it is very hard to distinguish whether or not you are running the Union version. We have also tested with a bunch of applications and made sure that any differences were fixed. So we are at a stage where we need to get Union into the hands of more people, both to get extra people testing whether there are any major issues, but also to have interested people creating new styles.
This means that with the upcoming Plasma 6.7 release, we plan to include Union. Discussion is currently ongoing whether we will enable it by default, but even if not there will be a way to try it out.
See Hiemstra's introductory article on Union, published in February 2025, for more about the project and its creation. KDE 6.7 is expected to be released in mid-June.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dovecot, fence-agents, freeipmi, git-lfs, image-builder, kernel, libsoup, osbuild-composer, and python-tornado), Debian (apache2, libdatetime-timezone-perl, lrzip, tzdata, and wireshark), Fedora (dovecot, forgejo-runner, gh, gnutls, krb5, nano, pdns, pyOpenSSL, squid, vim, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, krb5-appl, libexif, libtiff, nano, nginx, ntfs-3g, opam, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, perl-Starlet, perl-Starman, tcpflow, and virtualbox), Oracle (dovecot, fence-agents, freeipmi, image-builder, kernel, libcap, LibRaw, libsoup, openssh, osbuild-composer, python, python-tornado, python3, systemd, thunderbird, and tigervnc), SUSE (containerd, curl, erlang, flatpak, java-11-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, liblxc-devel, libpng12, libthrift-0_23_0, openCryptoki, openexr, openssl-3, python3, python311-social-auth-core, rclone, skim, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apache2, coin3, editorconfig-core, insighttoolkit, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.17, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.17, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.17, linux-oem-6.17, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp-6.8, nghttp2, python-dynaconf, slurm-wlm, swish-e, and webkit2gtk).
Three stable kernel updates
The 7.0.4, 6.18.27, and 6.12.86 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.
Incus 7.0 LTS released
Version 7.0 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the inclusion of a low-level backup API, the addition of basic S3 operations directly in Incus to replace the now-unmaintained MinIO project, as well as the removal of support for cgroups v1 and xtables (iptables/ip6tables/ebtables). This is a long-term-support (LTS) release, with support through June 2031.
The first 2 years will feature bug and security fixes as well as minor usability improvements, delivered through occasional point releases (7.0.x). After that initial two years, Incus 7.0 LTS will move to security only maintenance for the remaining of its 5 years of support.
A total of 204 individuals contributed to Incus between the 6.0 LTS and 7.0 LTS releases with 45 contributing between the 6.23 and 7.0 LTS releases.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, dovecot, image-builder, python-tornado, resource-agents, and systemd), Debian (openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and pyjwt), Fedora (pdns, pyOpenSSL, and squid), Slackware (hunspell), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bubblewrap, cmctl, coredns, curl, dpkg, firefox, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, libpng12, PackageKit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (docker.io-app, nghttp2, python-django, and python-mako).
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libcap, LibRaw, openssh, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (libarchive and lxd), Fedora (chromium, insight, nodejs20, rust-sequoia-git, and uriparser), Mageia (kernel, kmod-virtualbox), Oracle (kernel, libcap, thunderbird, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, sudo, and systemd), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (freerdp, hauler, helm, himmelblau, kernel, libspectre, thunderbird, trivy, and xen), and Ubuntu (curl, exim4, and sed).
The retirement of the PHP license
The PHP project has long shipped under its own license — except for the parts under the Zend Engine License. The PHP project has now announced that the PHP license has been retired, and the PHP code has been relicensed under the three-clause BSD license. See this blog entry for more details.
Getting here required more than writing an RFC. The PHP License gives the PHP Group the authority to change it, which meant tracking down each of the original PHP Group members and getting their written consent. Each approved the proposal. Perforce Software, the successor to Zend Technologies, needed to sign off on the Zend Engine side, as well. They provided a formal letter confirming their full authority and support for the change. I hired an attorney to review the proposal and provide advice on any legal questions that might surface during the discussion period. Speaking of which, I allowed for a six-month community discussion period preceding the vote, which passed unanimously.
LWN covered the license-change process back in March.
Alpine Linux systems currently offline
The Alpine Linux account on fosstodon.org reports
that all systems hosted at Linode, including its GitLab instance,
"are suspended at the moment due to some billing issue
". They
are working to get it resolved, but in the meantime all of their
services appear to be down.
Update: Alpine Linux's servers are back online.
NetHack 5.0.0 released
Version 5.0.0 of the NetHack dungeon-exploration game, a distant relative of Rogue and Hack, has been released. NetHack's code is now compliant with the C99 standard, and the release includes more than 3,100 bug fixes and changes, detailed in doc/fixes5-0-0.txt (may contain game spoilers). Saved games from previous versions will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.
