Transparent huge pages (THPs) are, theoretically, supposed to allow processes to benefit from larger page sizes without changes to their code. This does work, but the performance impacts from THPs are not always a benefit, so system administrators with specific knowledge of their workloads may want the ability to fine-tune THPs to the application. On May 15, Usama Arif shared a patch set that would add a prctl() option for setting THP defaults for a process; that patch set has sparked discussion about whether such a setting is a good fit for prctl(), and what alternative designs may work instead.

In 2023, Fujita Tomonori wrote a Rust version of the existing driver for the Asix AX88796B embedded Ethernet controller. At slightly more than 100 lines, it's about as simple as a driver can be, and therefore is a useful touchstone for the differences between writing Rust and C in the kernel. Looking at the Rust syntax, types, and APIs used by the driver and contrasting them with the C version will help illustrate those differences.

Kernel versions 6.15.4, 6.12.35, 6.6.95, 6.1.142, 5.15.186, 5.10.239, and 5.4.295 have all been released.

The Linux kernel is seeing a steady accumulation of Rust code. As it becomes more prevalent, maintainers may want to know how to read, review, and test the Rust code that relates to their areas of expertise. Just as kernel C code is different from user-space C code, so too is kernel Rust code somewhat different from user-space Rust code. That fact makes Rust's extensive documentation of less use than it otherwise would be, and means that potential contributors with user-space experience will need some additional instruction. This article is the first in a multi-part series aimed at helping existing kernel contributors become familiar with Rust, and helping existing Rust programmers become familiar with what the kernel does differently from the typical Rust project.

Debian's long-awaited tag2upload service is now ready for Debian maintainers to use in some circumstances. Tag2upload makes it easier for maintainers to upload packages, by allowing them to push a signed Git commit that will automatically be picked up and built, instead of pushing a build from their local machine. LWN covered the discussion around the service in July of last year. With the timing of its readiness, it's likely to become more useful once Debian 13 ("trixie") is released.

Be very aware of the freeze! Do not just upload to unstable as your first test! Uploads to unstable, targeting trixie, can be done with tag2upload - but in most cases you will probably want to upload the same package to experimental first.

The fundamental concept of checkpoint/restore is elegant: capture a process's state and resurrect it later, perhaps elsewhere. Checkpointing meticulously records a process's memory, open files, CPU state, and more into a snapshot. Restoration then reconstructs the process from this state. This established technique faces new challenges with GPU-accelerated applications, where low-latency restoration is crucial for fault tolerance, live migration, and fast startups. Recently, the restore process for AMD GPUs has been redesigned to eliminate substantial bottlenecks.

Smatch is a GPL-licensed static-analysis tool for C that has a lot of specialized checks for the kernel. Smatch has been used in the kernel for more than 20 years; Dan Carpenter, its primary author, decided last year that some details of its plugin system were due for a rewrite. He spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about his work on Smatch, the changes to its implementation, and how those changes enabled him to easily add additional checks for locking bugs in the kernel.

The 6.16 merge window closed on June 8, as expected, containing 12,899 non-merge commits. This is slightly more than the 6.15 merge window, but well in line with expectations. 7,353 of those were merged after the summary of the first half of the merge window was written. More detailed statistics can be found in the LWN kernel source database.

The European Union's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has caused a stir in the software-development world. Thanks to advocacy by the Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation, Mozilla, and others, open-source software projects generally have minimal requirements under the CRA — but nothing to do with law is ever quite so simple. Marta Rybczyńska spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about the impact of the CRA on the open-source ecosystem, with an emphasis on the importance of understanding a project's role under the CRA. She later participated in a panel discussion with Joakim Bech, Kate Stewart, and Mike Bursell about how the CRA would impact embedded open-source development.

Cong Wang and Daniel Borkmann each led session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about their respective plans to speed up networking in the Linux kernel. Both sessions described ways to remove unnecessary operations in the networking stack, but they focused on different areas. Wang spoke about using BPF to speed up socket operations, while Borkmann spoke about eliminating the overhead of networking operations on virtual machines.

This year's Linaro Connect in Lisbon, Portugal featured a number of talks about the use of open-source components in safety-critical systems. Kate Stewart gave a keynote on the topic on the first day of the conference. In it, she highlighted several projects that have been working to pursue safety certification and spoke about the importance of being able to trace software's origins to safety. In a talk on the second day, Roberto Bagnara shared his experience with working on one of those projects, the Xen hypervisor, to conform to a formal set of rules for safety-critical code.

As of this writing, 5,546 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel repository for the 6.16 release. This is a bit less than half of the total commits for 6.15, so the merge window is well on its way. Read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.16 merge window.

Mahé Tardy led two sessions about some of the challenges that he, Kornilios Kourtis, and John Fastabend have run into in their work on Tetragon (Apache-licensed BPF-based security monitoring software) at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The session prompted discussion about the feasibility of letting BPF programs send data over the network, as well as potential new kfuncs to let BPF firewalls send TCP reset packets. Tardy presented several possible ways that these could be accomplished.

Srinivas Narayana led a remote session about extending Agni to prove the correctness of the BPF verifier's handling of different execution paths as part of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The problem of ensuring the correctness of path exploration is much more difficult than the problem of ensuring the correctness of arithmetic operations (which was the subject of the previous session), however. Narayana's plan to tackle the problem makes use of a mixture of specialized techniques — and may need some assistance from the BPF developers to make it feasible at all.

The BPF verifier is an increasingly complex and security-critical piece of code. When the kinds of people who are apt to work on BPF see a situation like that, they naturally question whether it's possible to use formal verification to ensure that the implementation of the code in question is correct. Santosh Nagarakatte led the first of two extra-long sessions in the BPF track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about his team's work formally verifying the BPF verifier with a custom tool called Agni.