A pull request that touches over 8,000 files, changing over 20,000 lines of code in the process, is (fortunately) not something that happens every day. It did happen at the end of the 7.0 merge window, though, when Linus Torvalds merged an extensive set of changes by Kees Cook to the venerable kmalloc() API (and its users). As a result of that work, though, the kernel has a new set of type-safe memory-allocation functions, with a last-minute bonus change to make the API a little easier to use.

Linus has released 7.0-rc4 for testing.

Then Thursday hit with the networking pull. And then on Friday everybody else decided to send in their work for the week, with a few more trickling in over the weekend. End result: what had for a short few days looked like a nice calm week turned into another "bigger than usual" release candidate.

To be fair, that "almost everything comes in at the end of the week" is 100% normal, and none of this is surprising. I was admittedly hoping that things would start to calm down, but that was not to be.

I no longer really believe that it was the one extra week we had last release cycle: I'm starting to suspect it's the psychological result of "hey, new major number", and people are just being a bit more active as a result.

Reddit user "Ok_Lingonberry3296" has posted the results of an extensive investigation into the companies that are pushing US state legislatures to enact age-verification bills.

I've been pulling public records on the wave of "age verification" bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level while the company behind it faces zero new requirements for its own platforms.

(See also this article for a look at the California law.)

Qualys has sent out a somewhat breathless advisory describing a number of vulnerabilities in the AppArmor security module, which is used in a number of Debian-based distributions (among others).

This "CrackArmor" advisory exposes a confused-deputy flaw allowing unprivileged users to manipulate security profiles via pseudo-files, bypass user-namespace restrictions, and execute arbitrary code within the kernel. These flaws facilitate local privilege escalation to root through complex interactions with tools like Sudo and Postfix, alongside denial-of-service attacks via stack exhaustion and Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) bypasses via out-of-bounds reads.

One of the first changes merged for the upcoming 7.0 release was nullfs, an empty filesystem that cannot actually contain any files. One might logically wonder why the kernel would need such a thing. It turns out, though, that there are places where a null filesystem can come in handy. For 7.0, nullfs will be used to make life a bit easier for init programs; future releases will likely use nullfs to increase the isolation of kernel threads from the init process.

Linus has released 7.0-rc3 for testing. "So it's still pretty early in the release cycle, and it just feels a bit busier than I'd like. But nothing particularly stands out or looks bad."

Geoff Huston looks at the network time protocol, and efforts to secure it, in detail.

NTP operates in the clear, and it is often the case that the servers used by a client are not local. This provides an opportunity for an adversary to disrupt an NTP session, by masquerading as a NTP server, or altering NTP payloads in an effort to disrupt a client's time-of-day clock. Many application-level protocols are time sensitive, including TLS, HTTPS, DNSSEC and NFS. Most Cloud applications rely on a coordinated time to determine the most recent version of a data object. Disrupting time can cause significant chaos in distributed network environments.

While it can be relatively straightforward to secure a TCP-based protocol by adding an initial TLS handshake and operating a TLS shim between TCP and the application traffic, it's not so straightforward to use TLS in place of a UDP-based protocol for NTP. TLS can add significant jitter to the packet exchange. Where the privacy of the UDP payload is essential, then DTLS might conceivably be considered, but in the case of NTP the privacy of the timestamps is not essential, but the veracity and authenticity of the server is important.

NTS, a secured version of NTP, is designed to address this requirement relating to the veracity and authenticity of packets passed from a NTS server to an NTS client. The protocol adds a NTS Key Establishment protocol (NTS-KE) in additional to a conventional NTPv4 UDP packet exchange (RFC 8915).

Version 25.12.0 of the OpenWrt router distribution is available; this release has been dedicated to the memory of Dave Täht. Changes include a switch to the apk package manager, the integration of the attended sysupgrade method, and support for a long list of new targets.

Version 1.94.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include array windows (an iterator for slices), some Cargo enhancements, and a number of newly stabilized APIs.

The grith.ai blog reports on an LLM prompt-injection vulnerability that led to 4,000 installations of a compromised version of the Cline utility.

For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine without consent. Approximately 4,000 downloads occurred before the package was pulled.

The interesting part is not the payload. It is how the attacker got the npm token in the first place: by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed.

Chardet is a Python module that attempts to determine which character set was used to encode a text string. It was originally written by Mark Pilgrim, who is also the author of a number of Python books; the 1.0 release happened in 2006. For many years, this module has been under the maintainership of Dan Blanchard. Chardet has always been licensed under the LGPL, but, with the 7.0.0 release, Blanchard changed the terms to the permissive MIT license. That has led to an extensive (and ongoing) discussion on when code can be relicensed against the wishes of its original author, and whether using a large language model to rewrite code is a legitimate way to strip copyleft requirements from code.

The multi-generational LRU (MGLRU) is an alternative memory-management algorithm that was merged for the 6.1 kernel in late 2022. It brought a promise of much-improved performance and simplified code. Since then, though, progress on MGLRU has stalled, and it still is not enabled on many systems. As the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) approaches, several memory-management developers have indicated a desire to talk about the future of MGLRU. While some developers are looking for ways to improve the subsystem, another has called for it to be removed entirely.

This 404 Media article looks at how the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) is using location data from phones to track the location of people of interest.

Specifically, CBP says the data was in part sourced via real-time bidding, or RTB. Whenever an advertisement is displayed inside an app, a near instantaneous bidding process happens with companies vying to have their advert served to a certain demographic. A side effect of this is that surveillance firms, or rogue advertising companies working on their behalf, can observe this process and siphon information about mobile phones, including their location. All of this is essentially invisible to an ordinary phone user, but happens constantly.

We should note that the minimal advertising shown on LWN is not delivered via this bidding system.

Matthew Garrett examines the factors that go into the decision about whether to install a firmware update or not.

I trust my CPU vendor. I don't trust my CPU vendor because I want to, I trust my CPU vendor because I have no choice. I don't think it's likely that my CPU vendor has designed a CPU that identifies when I'm generating cryptographic keys and biases the RNG output so my keys are significantly weaker than they look, but it's not literally impossible. I generate keys on it anyway, because what choice do I have? At some point I will buy a new laptop because Electron will no longer fit in 32GB of RAM and I will have to make the same affirmation of trust, because the alternative is that I just don't have a computer.

There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altogether — that the write will not be partially completed (or "torn"), in other words. For years, kernel developers have worked on providing atomic writes as a way of satisfying that need; see, for example, sessions from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit from 2023, 2024, and 2025 (twice). While atomic direct I/O is now supported by some filesystems, atomic buffered I/O still is not. Filling that gap seems certain to be a 2026 LSFMM+BPF topic but, thanks to an early discussion, the shape of a solution might already be coming into focus.

Toke Høiland-Jørgensen has posted an overview of how zero-copy networking works in the Linux kernel.

Since the memory is being copied directly from userspace to the network device, the userspace application has to keep it around unmodified, until it has finished sending. The sendmsg() syscall itself is asynchronous, and will return without waiting for this. Instead, once the memory buffers are no longer needed by the stack, the kernel will return a notification to userspace that the buffers can be reused.

Motorola has announced that it will be working with the GrapheneOS Foundation, a producer of a security-enhanced Android distribution. "Together, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.". LWN looked at GrapheneOS last July.

The 7.0-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus:

So I'm not super-happy with how big this is, but I'm hoping it's just the random timing noise we see every once in a while where I just happen to get more pull requests one week, only for the next week to then be quieter.

Version 1.24.0 of the groff text-formatting system has been released. Improvements include the ability to insert hyperlinks between man pages, a new polygon command for the pic preprocessor, various PDF-output improvements, and more.

The International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF ("triple-eye eff"), is a small set of standards that form a basis for serving, displaying, and reusing image data on the web. It consists of a number of API definitions that compose with each other to achieve a standard for providing, for example, presentations of high-resolution images at multiple zoom levels, as well as bundling multiple images together. Presentations may include metadata about details like authorship, dates, references to other representations of the same work, copyright information, bibliographic identifiers, etc. Presentations can be further grouped into collections, and metadata can be added in the form of transcriptions, annotations, or captions. IIIF is most popular with cultural-heritage organizations, such as libraries, universities, and archives.