Version 4.5 of the Mastodon decentralized social-media platform has been released. Notable features in this release include quote posts, native emoji support, as well as enhanced moderation and blocking features for server administrators. The project also has a post detailing new features in 4.5 for developers of clients and other software that interacts with Mastodon.
hosted and stewarded" by Freedesktop.org.
For those who are unaware, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is the definition for POSIX operating systems to organize system and user data. It is broadly adopted by Linux, BSD, and other operating systems that follow POSIX-like conventions.
See this page for the specification's new home.
Mason Freed and Dominik Röttsches have published a document with a timeline and plans for removing Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) from the Chromium project and Chrome browser:
Chromium has officially deprecated XSLT, including the XSLTProcessor JavaScript API and the XML stylesheet processing instruction. We intend to remove support from version 155 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines. This document provides some history and context, explains how we are removing XSLT to make Chrome safer, and provides a path for migrating before these features are removed from the browser.
LWN covered the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) discussion about XSLT in August.
Version 2.3.0 of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt) has been released. The highlight of this release is continued improvement in Wayland support across LXQt components. Rather than offering its own compositor, the LXQt project takes a modular approach and works with several Wayland compositors, such as KWin, labwc, and niri.
Linux has many security features and tools that have evolved over
the years to address threats as they emerge and security gaps as they
are discovered. Linux security is all, as Lennart Poettering observed at the All Systems Go! conference held
in Berlin, somewhat random and not a "clean
"
design. To many observers, that may also appear to be the case for
systemd; however, Poettering said that he does have a vision for how
all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit
together. He wanted to use his talk to explain "how the individual
security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they
exist in the first place
".
Version
1.3 of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) Runtime
Specification has been released. The specification covers the
configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of containers. The
most notable change in 1.3 is the addition of FreeBSD to the
specification, which the FreeBSD Foundation calls
"a watershed moment for FreeBSD
":
The addition of cloud-native container support complements FreeBSD's already robust virtualization capabilities, particularly the powerful FreeBSD jails technology that has been a cornerstone of the operating system for over two decades. In fact, OCI containers on FreeBSD are implemented using jails as the underlying isolation mechanism, bringing together the security and resource management benefits of jails with the portability and ecosystem advantages of OCI-compliant containers.
Version 6.18 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include new configuration keys for providing credentials to systemd, BPF token delegation, VirtIO support for sound cards, the ability to export ISO volumes, improvements to the IncusOS command-line utility, and more.
Version 1.0 of the Capability Hardware Extension to RISC-V for IoT (CHERIoT) specification has been released. CHERIoT is a hardware-software system for secure embedded devices, and the specification provides a full description of the ISA and its intended use by CHERIoT RTOS. David Chisnall has written a blog post about the release that explains its significance as well as plans for CHERIoT 2.0 and beyond:
The last change that we made to the ISA was in December 2024, so we are confident that this is a stable release that we can support in hardware for a long time. This specification was implemented by the 1.0 release of CHERIoT Ibex and by CHERIoT Kudu (which has not yet had an official release). These two implementations demonstrate that the ISA scales from three-stage single-issue pipelines to six-stage dual-issue pipelines, roughly the same range of microarchitectures supported by Arm's M profile.
We at SCI have the first of our ICENI chips, which use the CHERIoT Ibex core, on the way back from the fab now and will be scaling up to mass production in the new year. I am not allowed to speak for other folks building CHERIoT silicon, but I expect 2026 to be an exciting year for the CHERIoT project!
While it remains true that KASLR should not be trusted to prevent exploitation, particularly in local contexts, it is regrettable that the attitude around Linux KASLR is so fatalistic that putting in the engineering effort to preserve its remaining integrity is not considered to be worthwhile. The joint effect of these two issues dramatically simplified what might otherwise have been a more complicated and likely less reliable exploit.
recommendations about some of the PEP's details, a few suggestions for filling a couple of small gaps", including:
Use lazy as the keyword. We debated many of the given alternatives (and some we came up with ourselves), and ultimately agreed with the PEP's choice of the lazy keyword. The closest challenger was defer, but once we tried to use that in all the places where the term is visible, we ultimately didn't think it was as good an overall fit. The same was true with all the other alternative keywords we could come up with, so... lazy it is!What about from foo lazy import bar? Nope! We like that in both module imports and from-imports that the lazy keyword is the first thing on the line. It helps to visually recognize lazy imports of both varieties.
Python already has several ways to run programs concurrently — including asynchronous functions, threads, subinterpreters, and multiprocessing — but all of those options have drawbacks of one kind or another. PEP 703 ("Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython") removed a major barrier to running Python threads in parallel, but also exposed Python programmers to the same tricky synchronization problems found in other languages supporting multithreaded programs. A new draft proposal by Mark Shannon, PEP 805 ("Safe Parallel Python"), suggests a way for the CPython runtime to cut down on concurrency bugs, making it more practical for Python programmers to use versions of the language without the global interpreter lock (GIL).
Wasm is similar to every other arch in Linux, but also different. One important difference is that there is no way to suspend execution of a task. There is a way around this though: Linux supports up to 8k CPUs (or possibly more...). We can just spin up a new CPU dedicated to each user task (process/thread) and never preempt it
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