So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now.

Significant changes in 6.15 include smarter timer-ID assignment to make checkpoint/restore operations more reliable, the ability to read status information from a pidfd after the process in question has been reaped, the PIDFD_SELF special pidfd value, nested ID-mapped mounts, zero-copy network-data reception via io_uring, The ability to read epoll events via io_uring, resilient queued spinlocks for BPF programs, guard-page enhancements allowing them to be placed in file-backed memory areas and for user space to detect their presence, the once-controversial fwctl subsystem, the optional sealing of some system mappings, and much more.

See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the in-progress KernelNewbies 6.15 page for more information.

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.

These are advanced installation methods, with only a small percentage of the community opting to use them. If you are using these methods, you can continue to do so (you can even continue to update your system), but in six months time, you will no longer be supported, which I'll explain the impacts of in the next section. References to these installation methods will be removed from our documentation after our next release (2025.6).

Support for 32-bit Arm and x86 architectures has also been deprecated.

The Fedora Council has ruled on the Fedora Engineering Steering Council's (FESCo) decision last year to revoke Peter Robinson's provenpackager status. In a statement published to the fedora-devel-announce mailing list, the council has announced that it has overturned FESCo's decision:

FESCo didn't have a specific policy for dealing with a request to remove Proven Packager rights. In addition, the FESCo process was handled entirely in private. The contributor didn't receive a formal notification or warning from FESCo, and felt blindsided by the official decision when and how it was announced. The Fedora Council would like to extend our sincerest apology on behalf of the Fedora Project to them.

LWN covered the story in December 2024.

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Shawn Webb has published a status report on work to provide basic support in FreeBSD for userland components written in Rust.

We introduced a new BSD makefile, located at share/mk/bsd.rust.mk, that enables building a Rust application during buildworld. As of this writing, we only support building and installing Rust applications. Supporting library crates is planned (we would like to be able to build/install library crates that expose an FFI, like for C/C++ compatibility). Normal library crates build and install just fine. Support for cdylib Rust library crates specifically is what's missing, but is desired and planned.

We do NOT currently support Rust in the kernel. Kernel support requires more work that we deemed out-of-scope for this initial proof-of-concept/work-in-progress patchset. We also do NOT support building multiple programs in the same BSD Makefile (like with bsd.progs.mk), though that is also a desired feature.

LWN covered a discussion about including Rust in the FreeBSD base system in August 2024.

Ihor Solodrai has been working on the BPF subsystem's continuous-integration (CI) testing for the last six months. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he remotely shared an update on his work, and solicited feedback on how the tests could be further improved. Much of the work he's done has been specific to the BPF subsystem, but some is more generic and could potentially be of use to other subsystems. He also shared some general lessons learned from working on the BPF CI tests.