The 6.9.1, 6.8.10, 6.6.31, 6.1.91, 5.15.159, 5.10.217, 5.4.276, and 4.19.314 stable kernels have been released. These versions include several important fixes; as usual, Greg Kroah-Hartman advises users to update right away.

This means that over time, the security of the RHEL kernels get worse and worse as more issues are discovered in the upstream code and are potentially exploitable but fewer and fewer of the fixes for these known bugs are back-ported into RHEL kernels.

After reaching RHEL 8.7, the theory is that the kernel has been stabilized, with a corresponding improvement in security. However we still have an influx of newly discovered bugs in the upstream kernel affecting RHEL 8.7 that are not addressed. Each minor version of upstream is released on an approximately quarterly basis and we can see that the influx of new bugs that are unaddressed in RHEL is growing. The number of known issues in these kernels increases by approximately 250 new bugs per quarter or more.

Version 0.10 of the Vim-based text editor Neovim is now available. This release includes a new default color scheme, enhanced support for rendering multibyte characters, support for hyperlinks, system clipboard synchronization, and more. Many features have been deprecated in 0.10 and will be removed in future release. Neovim core contributor Gregory Anders has written a summary of some of the highlights and thoughts on upcoming releases:

We follow a "fun driven development" paradigm: for the most part, contributors and maintainers work on things that are personally interesting to them. Because of this, it can be difficult to predict what will happen in future releases. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, the best way to do it is to take a crack at it yourself: many of the features mentioned in this very blog post were contributed by users that are not part of the "core" maintenance team!

Syed is known for her mission-driven leadership, focused on increasing transparency into the most powerful institutions in society. She comes to Mozilla after leading The Markup, an award-winning publication that challenges technology to serve the public good, from its launch through its successful acquisition in 2024.

In 2014, ESET researchers said the 2011 attack likely infected kernel.org servers with a second piece of malware they called Ebury. The malware, the firm said, came in the form of a malicious code library that, when installed, created a backdoor in OpenSSH that provided the attackers with a remote root shell on infected hosts with no valid password required. In a little less than 22 months, starting in August 2011, Ebury spread to 25,000 servers. Besides the four belonging to the Linux Kernel Organization, the infection also touched one or more servers inside hosting facilities and an unnamed domain registrar and web hosting provider.

Version 24.0 of the Arch-based Manjaro distribution is now available with the 6.9 kernel, GNOME 46, Xfce 4.18, and an update to the Pamac package installer. This is also the project's first release with KDE Plasma 6:

The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 6.0 series and KDE Gear 24.02. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.

With Plasma 6, KDE's technology stack has undergone major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of application framework, Qt, and an improved graphics platform when Wayland is used. These changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible. You will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love. But these under-the-hood upgrades benefit Plasma's security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware. Thus Plasma delivers an overall more reliable user experience, while paving the way for many more improvements in the future.

The project also offers minimal install images with the 6.6 LTS and 6.1 LTS kernels to support older hardware.

Large language models (LLMs) have been the subject of much discussion and scrutiny recently. Of particular interest to open-source enthusiasts are the problems with running LLMs on one's own hardware — especially when doing so requires NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA toolkit, which remains unavailable in many environments. Mozilla has developed llamafile as a potential solution to these problems. Llamafile can compile LLM weights into portable, native executables for easy integration, archival, or distribution. These executables can take advantage of supported GPUs when present, but do not require them.