Linus has released 6.18-rc7, probably the last -rc before the 6.18 release.

So the rc6 kernel wasn't great: we had a last-minute core VM regression that caused people problems.

That's not a great thing late in the release cycle like that, but it was a fairly trivial fix, and the cause wasn't some horrid bug, just a latent gotcha that happened to then bite a late VM fix. So while not great, it also doesn't make me worry about the state of 6.18. We're still on track for a final release next weekend unless some big new problem rears its ugly head.

The Oracle blog has a lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs.

We describe here two new GNU extensions which specify size information for FAMs. These are a new attribute, "counted_by" and a new builtin function, "__builtin_counted_by_ref". Both extensions can be used in GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general.

This work has been covered on LWN as well.

The call for candidates for the 2025 election for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has been posted.

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF's board of directors; it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community conference planning, and more.

Nominations close on December 13.

Version 8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new "|>" operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines equivalent:

    $result = strlen("Hello world");
    $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, "#[\NoDiscard]" to indicate that the return value should be used, attributes on constants, and more; see the migration guide for details.