Software in the Public Interest has released its annual report for 2024. It includes reports from the long list of projects housed under the SPI umbrella, but the financial statements are not included at this time.

Loadable kernel modules require access to kernel data structures and functions to get their job done; the kernel provides this access by way of exported symbols. Almost since this mechanism was created, there have been debates over which symbols should be exported, and how. The 6.16 kernel gained a new export mechanism that limits access to symbols to specific kernel modules. That code is likely to change soon, but the addition of an enforcement mechanism has since been backed out.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg), Fedora (gnutls, linux-firmware, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-python-requests, and salt), Mageia (qtimageformats6), Oracle (gnome-remote-desktop, golang, kernel, libxml2, and perl-File-Find-Rule), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, kernel, and protobuf), and Ubuntu (apport, glibc, gnutls28, and roundcube).

Parrot is a Debian-based distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools; the 6.4 release is now available. "Many tools, like Metasploit, Sliver, Caido and Empire received important updates, the Linux kernel was updated to a more recent version, and the latest LTS version of Firefox was provided with all our privacy oriented patches.".

The 6.12.38, 6.6.98, 6.1.145, and 5.15.188 stable kernel updates have been released, each contains a single AMD-related fix. "Only users of AMD x86-based processors need to upgrade, all others may skip this release".

Linus has released 6.16-rc6 for testing; it includes a fix for a somewhat scary regression that came up over the week.

So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster, because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both of those subsystems).

But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then it bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I'm feeling much better about the release again. We're back on track, and despite that little scare, I think we're in good shape.

The kernel's perf events subsystem can produce high-quality profiles, with full function-call chains, of resource usage within the kernel itself. Developers, however, often would like to see profiles of the whole system in one integrated report with, for example, call-stack information that crosses the boundary between the kernel and user space. Support for unwinding user-space call stacks in the perf events subsystem is currently inefficient at best. A long-running effort to provide reliable, user-space call-stack unwinding within the kernel, which will improve that situation considerably, appears to be reaching fruition.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Python packaging; Kernel API specification; Kselftests and KUnit; niri; pedalboard.
• Briefs: Git security fixes; Amarok 3.3; Bash 5.3; Thunderbird 140; tmux-rs; U-Boot 2025.07; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Versions v2.43.7, v2.44.4, v2.45.4, v2.46.4, v2.47.3, v2.48.2, v2.49.1 and v2.50.1 of the Git source-code management system have been released. "This is a set of coordinated security fix releases. Please update at your earliest convenience". See the announcement for details; many of the vulnerabilities have to do with tricks buried in untrusted repositories.

The kernel project, for many years, lacked a formal testing setup; it was often joked that testing was the project's main reason for keeping users around. While many types of kernel testing can only be done in the presence of specific hardware, there are other parts of the kernel that could be more widely tested. Over time, though, the kernel has gained two separate testing frameworks and a growing body of automated tests to go with them. These two frameworks — kselftests and KUnit — take different approaches to the testing problem; now this patch series from Thomas Weißschuh aims to bring them together.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (djvulibre and slurm-wlm), Red Hat (apache-commons-vfs, container-tools:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, podman, python3, rsync, socat, and sudo), SUSE (apache2, helm-mirror, incus, kernel, openssl-3, python-Django, and systemd), and Ubuntu (dcmtk, File::Find::Rule, ghostscript, jquery, and libssh).

The 6.16-rc5 kernel prepatch has been released. Quoth Linus: "Please keep testing, but this all feels fairly regular for this phase of the release".

The 6.15.5, 6.12.36, 6.6.96, and 6.1.143 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The kernel project makes a strong promise to its users: the kernel ABI will not be changed in ways that break user-space code. The occasional failure notwithstanding, kernel developers do try to live up to that promise. They are handicapped by one little problem, though: there is no description of what the kernel ABI is, and no comprehensive way to test whether a given change breaks it. The kernel API specification framework proposed (in its second revision) by Sasha Levin addresses some of those concerns, but the solution is incomplete and does not come for free.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel features from Python; i686 in Fedora; Kernel development with LLMs; Rust drivers; Load balancing with machine learning; Transparent huge pages.
• Briefs: Bcachefs removal; Coccinelle for Rust; Netdev Foundation; Oracle Linux 10; GNU HHIS 5.0; Rust 1.88.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Netdev Foundation, which is "a user-led effort under the supervision of the Linux Foundation, focused on financially supporting Linux networking development", has announced its existence.

The initial motivation was to move the NIPA testing outside of Meta, so that more people can help and contribute. But there should be sufficient budget to sponsor more projects.

(NIPA is Netdev Infrastructure for Patch Automation).

The copyleft-next project is an effort to develop a next-generation copyleft license; it was covered here back in 2013 (as well as in 2015 and 2021). The project has stalled in recent years, but now Richard Fontana and Bradley Kuhn have announced a new effort to push copyleft-next forward:

Today, GPLv3 turns exactly 18 years old. This month, GPLv2 turned 34 years old. These are both great licenses and we love them. Nevertheless, at least once in a generation, FOSS needs a new approach to strong copyleft.

Version 5.0 of the GNU Health Hospital Information System has been released. This project, working to support medical offices, shows just how far the free-software effort can reach. Changes in this release include improved reporting and analytics, more comprehensive handling of many types of patient information, a reworked medical-imaging subsystem, better insurance and billing functionality, and more.

The extensible scheduler class ("sched_ext") allows the loading of a custom CPU scheduler into the kernel as a set of BPF functions; it was merged for the 6.12 kernel release. Since then, sched_ext has enabled a wide range of experimentation with scheduling algorithms. At the 2025 Open Source Summit North America, Ching-Chun ("Jim") Huang presented work that has been done to apply (local) machine learning to the problem of scheduling processes on complex systems.

The OsmAnd map and navigation app project recently celebrated its 15th anniversary.

All these 15 years can be roughly divided into three stages. For the first five years, we built the very basic functionality—offline maps and navigation that just worked. Over the next five years, we transformed OsmAnd into a full-fledged application with plugins, extensive settings, and professional tools. We dedicated the third five-year period to deep internal work: completely rewriting and improving key components like the rendering engine and routing algorithms.

Now, a new, fourth stage begins. We have reached functional maturity, and our main goal for the near future is to polish what we've already built. We will focus on stability, speed, and consolidation. User expectations are growing, and what was once considered normal must now be flawless.

(Thanks to Paul Wise).