Last year we revived the tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year. Since that seemed to go over well, we decided we should continue the practice and look back on some of the most noteworthy events and releases of 2025.

The IPFire project, an open-source firewall Linux distribution, has released version 2.29 - Core Update 199. Notable changes in this release include an update to Linux 6.12.58, support for WiFi 6 and 7 features on wireless access points, as well as native support for link-local discovery protocol (LLDP) and Cisco discovery protocol (CDP).

A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google's commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem.

The release schedule for security patches is unchanged.

The nature and role of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB) is not well-understood, though a recent LWN article shed some light on its role and history. At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), the TAB held a question and answer session to address whatever it was the community wanted to know (video). Those questions ended up covering the role of large language models in kernel development, what it is like to be on the TAB, how the TAB can help grease the wheels of corporate bureaucracy, and more.

Aleksa Sarai, as the maintainer of the runc container runtime, faces a constant battle against security problems. Recently, runc has seen another instance of a security vulnerability that can be traced back to the difficulty of handling file paths on Linux. Sarai spoke at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (slides; video) about some of the problems runc has had with path-traversal vulnerabilities, and to ask people to please use libpathrs, the library that he has been developing for safe path traversal.

Version 26.0 ("Anh-Linh") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution has been released. Manjaro 26.0 includes Linux 6.18, GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, Xfce 4.20, and more.

Version 1.30 of the GNU ddrescue data recovery tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements to automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head, addition of a --no-sweep option to disable reading of skipped areas, and more.

So this rc is still a bit smaller than usual, but it's not _much_ smaller, and I think next week is likely going to be more or less back to normal.

Which is all exactly as expected, and nothing here looks particularly odd. I'll make an rc8 this release just because of the time lost to the holidays, not because it looks like we'd have any particular issues pending (knock wood).

The members of the security team contain a handful of core kernel developers that have experience dealing with security bugs, and represent different major subsystems of the kernel. They do this work as individuals, and specifically can NOT tell their employer, or anyone else, anything that is discussed on the security alias before it is resolved. This arrangement has allowed the kernel security team to remain independent and continue to operate across the different governments that the members operate in, and it looks to become the normal way project security teams work with the advent of the European Union's new CRA law coming into effect.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.3 stable kernel. As always, this update contains important fixes; users of this kernel are advised to upgrade.

Version 4.19.0 of the shadow-utils project has been released. Notable changes in this release include disallowing some usernames that were previously accepted with the --badname option, and removing support for escaped newlines in configuration files. Possibly more interesting is the announcement that the project is deprecating a number of programs, hashing algorithms, and the ability to periodically expire passwords:

Scientific research shows that periodic password expiration leads to predictable password patterns, and that even in a theoretical scenario where that wouldn't happen the gains in security are mathematically negligible (paper link).

Modern security standards, such as NIST SP 800-63B-4 in the USA, prohibit periodic password expiration. [...]

To align with these, we're deprecating the ability to periodically expire passwords. The specifics and long-term roadmap are currently being discussed, and we invite feedback from users, particularly from those in regulated environments. See #1432.

The release announcement notes that the features will remain functional "for a significant period" to minimize disruption.

Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post about the decision to ban the use strcpy() in curl:

The main challenge with strcpy is that when using it we do not specify the length of the target buffer nor of the source string. [...]

To make sure that the size checks cannot be separated from the copy itself we introduced a string copy replacement function the other day that takes the target buffer, target size, source buffer and source string length as arguments and only if the copy can be made and the null terminator also fits there, the operation is done.