Performance of Python programs has been a major focus of development for the language over the last five years or so; the Faster CPython project has been a big part of that effort. One of its subprojects is to add an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to the language; at last year's PyCon US, project member Brandt Bucher gave an introduction to the copy-and-patch JIT compiler. At PyCon US 2025, he followed that up with a talk on "What they don't tell you about building a JIT compiler for CPython" to describe some of the things he wishes he had known when he set out to work on that project. There was something of an elephant in the room, however, in that Microsoft dropped support for the project and laid off most of its Faster CPython team a few days before the talk.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis and thunderbird), Fedora (cef, git, gnutls, httpd, linux-firmware, luajit, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-python-requests, perl, php, python-requests, python3.6, salt, and selenium-manager), Mageia (dpkg, firefox, gnupg2, and golang), Slackware (httpd and kernel), SUSE (afterburn, cmctl, git, go1.23, go1.24, k9s, liboqs-devel, libxml2, php8, python36, trivy, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp and nix).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.15.6, 6.12.37, 6.6.97, 6.1.144, and 5.15.187 stable kernels. As is the usual case, each contains important fixes all over the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (sslh), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, gnome-remote-desktop, golang, javapackages-tools:201801, jq, libvpx, libxml2, mpfr, and perl-File-Find-Rule-Perl), Red Hat (glib2, libblockdev, and sudo), Slackware (git), SUSE (avif-tools, containerd, djvulibre, gpg2, helm, kernel, libpoppler-cpp2, libxml2, libxml2-2, openssl-3, perl-YAML-LibYAML, python-cryptography, python-setuptools, python311-pycares, tomcat10, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (djvulibre, git, libyaml-libyaml-perl, and protobuf).

It is no secret that the Python packaging world is at something of a crossroads; there have been debates and discussions about the packaging landscape that started long before our 2023 series describing some of the difficulties. There has been progress since then—and incremental improvements all along, in truth—but a new initiative is looking to overhaul packaging for the language. At PyCon US 2025, Barry Warsaw and Jonathan Dekhtiar gave a presentation on the WheelNext project, which is a community effort that aims to improve the experience for users and providers of Python packages while also working with toolmakers and other parts of the ecosystem to "reinvent the wheel". While the project's name refers to Python's wheel binary distribution format, its goals stretch much further than simply the format.

The U-Boot universal bootloader project has announced the release of version 2025.07. It has multiple new features including "uthreads" (inspired by the "bthreads" coroutines in the barebox bootloader), exFAT support, new architecture and SoC support and improvements to existing platforms, cleanups, better testing, and more. Project leader Tom Rini took the opportunity to mention his efforts toward getting some help with the project and more formal governance:

As this is a full release, and not just a release candidate I'm hoping for a few more people to read this and then read what I'm linking to as well. For the overall health of the project, and the community, I'm hoping to find a few people within the community that can help with overall organization and management. I would like to long term be able to move us to being under the Software Freedom Conservancy umbrella and that in turn means having a organizational structure that's not just a single person.

He also noted that there is a community meeting on July 8th, 2025 at 9am (GMT -06:00) on Google Meet.

The GNU project's Bourne Again SHell (Bash) has released version 5.3, with some significant new features, including some from the associated Readline 8.3 release, which provides command-line editing and other features for Bash and lots of other programs. Bash 5.3 has a "new form of command substitution that executes the command in the current shell execution context", pathname-completion sorting will be handled based on the GLOBSORT shell variable, generated completions can go to a shell variable instead of to stdout, the source code has been updated to C23, and more. Meanwhile:

Readline has new features as well. There is a new option that allows case-insensitive searching, a new command that executes a named readline command, and a new command that exports possible word completions in a specified format for consumption by another process.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird and xmedcon), Fedora (darktable, mbedtls, sudo, and yarnpkg), Mageia (catdoc and php), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, python-setuptools, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, socat, sudo, tigervnc, webkit2gtk3, webkitgtk4, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (alloy, apache-commons-fileupload, apache2-mod_security2, assimp-devel, chromedriver, clamav, clustershell, corepack22, ctdb, curl, dpkg, erlang-rabbitmq-client, ffmpeg-4, firefox, firefox-esr, flake-pilot, fractal, gdm, ggml-devel-5699, gio-branding-upstream, git-lfs, glib2, glibc, go1.23, go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, gpg2, grafana, grype, helm, himmelblau, icu, jgit, jq, jupyter-bqplot-jupyterlab, jupyter-jupyterlab-templates, jupyter-matplotlib, jupyter-nbclassic, jupyter-nbdime, jupyter-panel, jupyter-plotly, keylime-ima-policy, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.31-apiserver, kubernetes1.32-apiserver, libbd_btrfs-devel, libetebase-devel, libmozjs-128-0, libprotobuf-lite31_1_0, libQt5Bootstrap-devel-static-32bit, libsoup, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libspdlog1_15, libssh, libssh-config, libsystemd0, libtpms-devel, libwireshark18, libwx_gtk2u_adv-suse16_0_0, mirrorsorcerer, moarvm, nix, nodejs-electron, nova, oci-cli, opa, openbao, ovmf-202505, pam, pam_pkcs11, perl, perl-32bit, perl-CryptX, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, podman, polaris, postgresql-jdbc, pure-ftpd, python-furo-doc, python-requests, python310, python311, python311-Django, python311-Django4, python311-jupyter-core, python311-Pillow, python311-pydata-sphinx-theme, python311-requests, python311-salt, python311-urllib3, python312, python313, python314, python39, radare2, redis, samba, SDL, SDL2, sudo, teleport, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, traefik, traefik2, valkey, velociraptor, vim, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, and linux-oem-6.14).

The pedalboard library for Python is aimed at audio processing of various sorts, from converting between formats to adding audio effects. The maintainer of pedalboard, Peter Sobot, gave a talk about audio in Python at PyCon US 2025, which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in May. He started from the basics of digital audio and then moved into working with pedalboard. There were, as might be guessed, audio examples in the talk, along with some visual information; interested readers may want to view the YouTube video of the presentation.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, aardvark-dns, apache-commons-beanutils, bootc, buildah, corosync, delve and golang, exiv2, expat, firefox, ghostscript, git, git-lfs, gnutls, grafana, grafana-pcp, grub2, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, and gstreamer1-rtsp-server, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gvisor-tap-vsock, iptraf-ng, java-21-openjdk, kernel, keylime-agent-rust, krb5, libarchive, libblockdev, libsoup3, libtasn1, libvpx, libxslt, microcode_ctl, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs22, nodejs:20, openjpeg2, osbuild and osbuild-composer, perl-FCGI, perl-Module-ScanDeps, perl-YAML-LibYAML, php, php:8.2, php:8.3, podman, protobuf, python-jinja2, python-requests, python3.11, python3.12, python3.12-cryptography, python3.9, rpm-ostree, rsync, rust-bootupd, skopeo, thunderbird, tigervnc, tomcat, tomcat9, webkit2gtk3, xdg-utils, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (ring), Mageia (libarchive and rootcerts, nss & firefox), Oracle (.NET 9.0, corosync, firefox, osbuild-composer, pam, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, skopeo, sudo, and thunderbird), Red Hat (microcode_ctl, pam, php, thunderbird, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (clamav, icu, libgepub, libsoup, python-requests, tomcat, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (clamav, logback, mongo-c-driver, pcs, and python-flask-cors).

Every release of the Linux kernel has lots of new features, many of which are accessible from user space. Usually, though, the GNU C Library (glibc) and tools that access the Linux user-space API lag behind the kernel releases. Geoffrey Thomas showed how Python programs can access these new kernel features as soon as the kernel is released in his "What's New in the Linux Kernel... from Python" talk at PyCon US 2025. While he had two examples of accessing new kernel features, the real goal of the talk was to demonstrate how to go about connecting Python to the Linux kernel.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (mod_proxy_cluster), Debian (catdoc, chromium, nagvis, and sudo), Fedora (chromium, gum, kubernetes1.32, moodle, podman, python3-docs, python3.13, salt, and tigervnc), Mageia (x11-server, x11-server-xwayland & tigervnc), Oracle (apache-commons-beanutils, exiv2, expat, firefox, git, git-lfs, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, ipa, java-21-openjdk, kea, kernel, libarchive, libblockdev, libsoup3, libvpx, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs22, osbuild-composer, perl, perl-File-Find-Rule, php, python-jinja2, python-tornado, sqlite, thunderbird, valkey, varnish, weldr-client, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, xz, and yggdrasil), Red Hat (apache-commons-beanutils, javapackages-tools:201801, kernel, and python3.11), SUSE (apache-commons-fileupload, gimp, glib2, himmelblau, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, sqlite3, thunderbird, yelp, and yelp-xsl), and Ubuntu (samba).

The history of the bcachefs filesystem in the kernel has been turbulent, most recently with Linus Torvalds refusing a pull request for the 6.16-rc3 release. Torvalds has now pulled the code in question, but also said:

I think we'll be parting ways in the 6.17 merge window.

You made it very clear that I can't even question any bug-fixes and I should just pull anything and everything.

Honestly, at that point, I don't really feel comfortable being involved at all, and the only thing we both seemed to really fundamentally agree on in that discussion was "we're done".

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet has his own view of the situation. Both Torvalds and Overstreet refer to a seemingly private conversation where the pull request (and other topics) were discussed.

Over on the Collabora blog, Tathagata Roy has an update on the progress of targeting the Coccinelle tool for matching and transforming source code to Rust. The Coccinelle for Rust project, which we covered in a 2024 talk by Roy at Kangrejos, is adding the ability to transform Rust programs and the goal is "to bring Coccinelle For Rust at par with Coccinelle For C in terms of basic functionalities". There is still work to be done to get there, but progress is being made in various areas.

Computational Tree Logic (CTL) is the heart of Coccinelle, which takes semantic patches and generalizes them over Rust files. Prior to using this engine, CfR used an ad-hoc method for matching patterns of code. This engine is the same as the one used for Coccinelle for C, with a few minor changes. Most of the changes were idiomatic but to the same effect. More information on the engine and its language (CTL-VW) can be found in the POPL Paper. With a standard engine, each step of the matching process can be logged, allowing us to learn and reuse the same design patterns from Coccinelle for C, including critical test cases.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and libxml2), Fedora (firefox, libtpms, and tigervnc), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and nss & firefox), Oracle (emacs, iputils, kernel, krb5, libarchive, mod_proxy_cluster, pam, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, and qt5-qtbase), Red Hat (opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, and weldr-client), SUSE (clamav, firefox, go1.24-openssl, and helm), and Ubuntu (libarchive, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and python-urllib3).

One of the biggest changes to come to the Python world is the addition of the free-threading interpreter, which eliminates the global interpreter lock (GIL) that kept the interpreter thread-safe, but also serialized multi-threaded Python code. Over the years, the GIL has been a source of complaints about the scalability of Python code using threads, so many developers have been looking forward to the change, which has been an experimental feature since Python 3.13 was released in October 2024. Making the free-threaded version work with the rest of the Python ecosystem, especially native extensions, is an ongoing effort, however; Nathan Goldbaum and Lysandros Nikolaou spoke at PyCon US 2025 about those efforts.

The Collabora blog has a summary, written by Nicolas Dufresne, about the Linux Media Summit held on May 13 in Nice, France. It was co-located with the Embedded Recipes conference and had sessions on stateless video encoders, camera support, staging drivers, memory accounting, and a multi-committer model for the media subsystem. "Our largest Media Summit to date brought together around 20 engaged participants. Engagement was strong, marked by thoughtful questions and lively discussions."

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libblockdev and open-vm-tools), Debian (debian-security-support, gdk-pixbuf, konsole, and node-send), Fedora (apache-commons-beanutils, chromium, clamav, dotnet9.0, libblockdev, mediawiki, mingw-python-setuptools, pam, perl-File-Find-Rule, python-pycares, python-setuptools, spdlog, udisks2, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Oracle (apache-commons-beanutils, container-tools:ol8, gimp:2.8, idm:DL1, perl-FCGI:0.78, and postgresql), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, delve, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, and spice-client-win), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, apache2-mod_security2, distribution, gstreamer-plugins-good, icu, ignition, perl, python310, python311, python312, and python39), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j1.2 and botan).

A new filesystem was the topic of a session led by Zach Brown at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF). The ngnfs filesystem is not a "next generation" NFS, as might be guessed from the name; Brown said that he did not think about that linkage ("I hate naming so much") until it was pointed out to him by Chuck Lever in an email. It is, instead, a filesystem for enormous data sets that are mostly stored offline.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.15.3, 6.12.34, and 6.6.94 stable kernels. Each contains a relatively large number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.