The facilities provided by the kernel for the management of processes have evolved considerably in the last few years, driven mostly by the advent of the pidfd API. A pidfd is a file descriptor that refers to a process; unlike a process ID, a pidfd is an unambiguous handle for a process; that makes it a safer, more deterministic way of operating on processes. Christian Brauner, who has driven much of the pidfd-related work, is proposing two new flags for the clone3() system call, one of which changes the kernel's security model in a somewhat controversial way.

Version 11.1.0 of the GNU Octave scientific programming language has been released.

This major release contains many new and improved functions. Among other things, it brings better support for classdef objects and arrays, broadcasting for special matrix types (like sparse, diagonal, or permutation matrices), updates for Matlab compatibility (notably support for the nanflag, vecdim and other parameters for many basic math and statistics functions), and performance improvements in many functions.

See the release notes for details.

The Ladybird browser project has announced a move to the Rust programming language:

When we originally evaluated Rust back in 2024, we rejected it because it's not great at C++ style OOP. The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust's ownership model is not a natural fit for that.

But after another year of treading water, it's time to make the pragmatic choice. Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust into their codebases, and we think it's the right choice for Ladybird too.

Large language models are being used to translate existing code.

Linus has released 7.0-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed."

The kernel's unloved but performance-critical swapping subsystem has been undergoing multiple rounds of improvement in recent times. Recent articles have described the addition of the swap table as a new way of representing the state of the swap cache, and the removal of the swap map as the way of tracking swap space. Work in this area is not done, though; this series from Nhat Pham addresses a number of swap-related problems by replacing the new swap table structures with a single, virtual swap space.