The 6.9.11, 6.6.42, and 6.1.101 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Fedora (exim, python-zipp, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, and xmedcon), Red Hat (cups, fence-agents, freeradius, freeradius:3.0, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, podman, and resource-agents), Slackware (htdig and libxml2), SUSE (exim), and Ubuntu (ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and poppler).

David Howells wanted to discuss swap handling in light of multi-page folios in a combined storage, filesystem, and memory-management session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Swapping has always been done with a one-to-one mapping of memory pages to swap slots, he said, but swapping multi-page folios breaks that assumption. He wondered if it would make sense to use filesystem techniques to track swapped-out folios.

Simon Willison, co-creator of the popular Django web framework for Python, gave a keynote presentation at PyCon 2024 on a topic that is unrelated to that work: large language models (LLMs). The topic grew out of some other work that he is doing on Datasette, which is a Python-based "tool for exploring and publishing data". The talk was a look beyond the hype to try to discover what useful things you can actually do today using these models. Unsurprisingly, there were some cautionary notes from Willison, as well.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (botan2, chromium, ffmpeg, fluent-bit, gtk3, httpd, suricata, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), Mageia (apache, chromium-browser-stable, libfm & libfm-qt, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libndp, qt5-qtbase, ruby, skopeo, thunderbird, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, firefox, libndp, qt5-qtbase, and thunderbird), SUSE (caddy, chromium, emacs, global, mockito, snakeyaml, testng, and opera), and Ubuntu (thunderbird).

The sad news that Peter de Schrijver has passed away has just reached us. An obituary in Dutch relates that he passed in a Helsinki hospital on July 12. Mind Software Consulting, which he founded, has a message of condolences as well. De Schrijver was a Debian Developer and a Linux kernel contributor; he will be missed.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that it will be changing its logo to remove the feather that has been part of its brand since 1997. ASF members will have input on the rebranding process and be able to vote on the new logo, which will be unveiled at the Community Over Code conference in October.

The feather is a well-loved and iconic part of the ASF brand. We know of community members who have ASF feather tattoos. People love taking photos with the feather at our flagship event each year.

So why would we change it? As a non-Indigenous entity, we acknowledge that it is inappropriate for the Foundation to use Indigenous themes or language. We thank Natives in Tech and other members of the broader open source community for bringing this issue to the forefront. Today we are announcing we will be retiring the feather icon and logo and replacing it with a new logo that embodies the Foundation's rich history of providing software for the public good.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released seven new stable kernels: 6.9.10, 6.6.41, 6.1.100, 5.15.163, 5.10.222, 5.4.280, and 4.19.318. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Leah Rumancik led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on the testing needed to qualify XFS patches for the stable kernels. At last year's summit, Rumancik, Amir Goldstein, and Chandan Babu Rajendra presented on their efforts to test and backport fixes for the XFS filesystem to three separate stable kernels. There has been some longstanding unhappiness in the XFS-development community with the stable-kernel process, which led to backports ceasing for that filesystem until Goldstein started working on XFS testing for the stable trees a few years ago. In this year's session, Rumancik updated attendees on how things had gone over the last year and wanted to discuss some remaining pain points for the process.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (freeradius), Red Hat (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-17-openjdk), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (ghostscript, gnutls, podman, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (linux-hwe-6.5, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and stunnel).

Maintenance of the kernel is a difficult, often thankless, task; how it is being handled, the role of maintainers, burnout, and so on are recurring topics at kernel-related conferences. At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Josef Bacik and Christian Brauner led a session to discuss possible changes to the way filesystems are maintained, though Bacik took the lead role (and the podium). There are a number of interrelated topics, including merging new filesystems, removing old ones, making and testing changes throughout the filesystem tree, and more.

Amir Goldstein led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on his project to build a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system using fanotify. The idea is to monitor file access in order to determine when to retrieve content from non-local storage (e.g. the cloud). The session was a follow-up to last year's introduction to the project, which covered some of the problems he had encountered; this year, he was updating attendees on its status and progress, along with some other problem areas that he wanted to discuss.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.6.40 and 6.1.99 stable kernels. Both contain a fix for the USB subsystem; anyone who uses those kernel series and "the XHCI USB host controller driver (i.e. USB 3) must upgrade".

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cups, krb5, pgadmin4, python3.6, and yarnpkg), Mageia (freeradius, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, and dwarves, kernel-linus, and squid), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and less), SUSE (avahi, c-ares, cairo, cups, fdo-client, gdk-pixbuf, git, libarchive, openvswitch3, podman, polkit, python-black, python-Jinja2, python-urllib3, skopeo, squashfs, tiff, traceroute, and wget), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm).

The 6.9.9, 6.6.39, and 6.1.98 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Debian (exim4 and firefox-esr), Fedora (dotnet8.0, firefox, onnx, qt6-qtbase, squid, and wordpress), Mageia (golang, netatalk, php, and poppler), Red Hat (ghostscript, httpd, openssh, python3, and ruby), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel and openssh), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-ibm-5.15, and python3.5, python3.6, python3.7, python3.8, python3.9, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12).

The eventfs filesystem provides an interface to the tracepoints that are available to be used by various Linux tracing tools (e.g. ftrace, perf, uprobes, etc.); it is meant to be a version of the tracefs filesystem that dynamically allocates its entries as needed. The goal is to reduce the memory required for multiple instances of tracefs, as Steven Rostedt described in a session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. He returned to the 2024 edition of the summit to talk further about how to make pseudo (or virtual) filesystems, such as tracefs/eventfs, more like regular Linux filesystems, where the directory entries (dentries) and inodes are only created (and cached) as needed.

Sxmo, short for "Simple X Mobile", is described on its web site as "a minimalist environment for Linux mobile devices"; it offers a menu-driven interface that is controlled with the phone's hardware buttons. Sxmo enables the user to send SMS messages from a text editor and is entirely customizable with shell scripts. This peculiar mobile user interface significantly differs from the prevailing approach—but it works.

There are a number of kernel filesystems that store their directory entries directly in the directory-entry cache (dcache) without having any permanent storage for those objects. It started out as a "neat hack" for ramfs, Al Viro said, at the start of his filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Unfortunately, as the use of this technique has grown into other filesystems, there has been a lot of scope creep that has gotten out of control. He wanted to discuss some new infrastructure that he is working on to try to clean some of that up.