• Front: Maintaining curl; GNOME governance; Guix in Debian; Tracking untrusted data in the kernel; 32-Bit support; systemd v258.
• Briefs: bcachefs maintenance; Linux from Scratch 12.4; Elf spec; Niri 25.08; Python documentary; GNOME executive director; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 25.08 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include xwayland-satellite integration, modal exit confirmation, and the introduction of basic support for screen readers:

A series of posts by fireborn earlier this year on the screen reader situation in Linux got me curious: how does one support screen readers in a Wayland compositor? The documentation is unfortunately scarce and difficult to find. Thankfully, @DataTriny from the AccessKit project came across my issue, pointed me at the right protocols, and answered a lot of my questions.

So, as of this release, niri has basic support for screen readers! We implement the org.freedesktop.a11y.KeyboardMonitor D-Bus interface for Orca to listen and grab keyboard keys, and we expose the main niri UI elements via AccessKit. [...]

The current screen reader support and further considerations are documented on the new Accessibility wiki page.

LWN covered niri in July.

Version 12.4 of Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) have been released. LFS provides step-by-step instructions on building a customized Linux system entirely from source, and BLFS helps to extend an LFS installation into a more usable system. Notable changes in this release include updates to GNU Binutils 2.45, GCC 15.2, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.42, and Linux 6.15.1. See the Changelog for all updates since 12.3.

The Linux kernel has to handle many different sources of data that should not be trusted: user space, network connections, and removable storage, to name a few. The kernel has to remain secure even if one of these sends garbled (or malicious) data. Benno Lossin has been working on an API for kernel Rust code that makes it harder to accidentally make decisions based on data from user space. That work is now on its fourth revision, and Lossin has asked kernel developers to experiment with it and see where problems remain, making this a good time to look at the proposed API.

During the opening of RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington, the Rust Foundation announced a new initiative to provide financial and administrative support to open-source Rust projects. The first project to benefit from the new Rust Innovation Lab is Rustls, an implementation of TLS in Rust. The foundation welcomes inquiries from other projects. Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, Executive Director of the Rust Foundation said:

Rustls is hopefully the first of many really good [...] projects that will find a home in the foundation.

Cary Coutant has announced a draft for version 4.3 of the Executable and Linking Format (ELF) object file format. The specification was formerly part of the Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4) gABI document:

The last published gABI documents were the Fourth Edition and a draft of Edition 4.1, both published in March 1997. The ELF portions of the document were updated several times between 1998 and 2015, published online [...]

I've published the last draft from 2015 as Version 4.2, and collected the several changes since then, along with new e_machine values, as Version 4.3.

The source for the draft is on GitHub in reStructuredText format, and Coutant has collected the mailing list discussions for changes in 4.3 as GitHub issues. Thanks to Jose E. Marchesi for the tip.

As a rule, if a package is shipped with a Debian release, users can count on it being available, and updated, for the entire life of the release. If package foo is included in the stable release—currently Debian 13 ("trixie")—a user can reasonably expect that it will continue to be available with security backports as long as that release is supported, though it may not be included in Debian 14 ("forky"). However, it is likely that the Guix package manager will soon be removed from the repositories for Debian 13 and Debian 12 ("bookworm", also called oldstable).

Open source maintainers, already overwhelmed by legitimate contributions, have no realistic way to counter this threat. How do you verify that a helpful contributor with months of solid commits isn't an LLM generated persona? How do you distinguish between genuine community feedback and AI created pressure campaigns? The same tools that make these attacks possible are largely inaccessible to volunteer maintainers. They lack the resources, skills, or time to deploy defensive processes and systems.

The detection problem becomes exponentially harder when LLMs can generate code that passes all existing security reviews, contribution histories that look perfectly normal, and social interactions that feel authentically human. Traditional code analysis tools will struggle against LLM generated backdoors designed specifically to evade detection. Meanwhile, the human intuition that spot social engineering attacks becomes useless when the "humans" are actually sophisticated language models.

We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.

The next release of systemd has been percolating for an unusually long time. Systemd releases are usually about six months apart, but v257 came out in December 2024, and v258 just now seems to be nearing the finish line; the third release candidate for v258 was published on August 20 (release notes). Now is a good time to dig in and take a look at some of the new features, enhancements, and removals coming soon to systemd. These include new workload-management features, a concept for multiple home-directory environments, and the final, once-and-for-all removal of support for control groups version 1.

Attendees at EuroPython had the chance to preview part of Python: The Documentary during a keynote panel. The full film, created by CultRepo, is now available on YouTube:

This is the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world's biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

This 90-minute documentary features Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, and they tell the story of Python's rise, its community-driven evolution, the conflicts that almost tore it apart, and the language's impact on... well... everything.

The video of the keynote is also available.