Hyunwoo Kim has announced the Dirty Frag security flaw, a local-privilege-escalation (LPE) vulnerability similar to the recently disclosed Copy Fail flaw:

Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for these vulnerabilities. After consultation with the linux-distros@vs.openwall.org maintainers, and at the maintainers' request, I am publicly releasing this Dirty Frag document.

As with the previous Copy Fail vulnerability, Dirty Frag likewise allows immediate root privilege escalation on all major distributions.

Kim, who discovered the flaw and had attempted a coordinated disclosure set for May 12, has released the code for an exploit, as well as a example script to remove the vulnerable modules. A full write-up, with the disclosure timeline, is also available. It's unknown at this time whether this is an example of parallel discovery or how the third party was able to disclose it prior to the end of the embargo. We will be following up as more information comes to light.

Arjen Hiemstra has published an article on the status of the Union project: a single system to support all of KDE's technologies used for styling applications.

The work on Union's Breeze implementation has progressed to the point where it is very hard to distinguish whether or not you are running the Union version. We have also tested with a bunch of applications and made sure that any differences were fixed. So we are at a stage where we need to get Union into the hands of more people, both to get extra people testing whether there are any major issues, but also to have interested people creating new styles.

This means that with the upcoming Plasma 6.7 release, we plan to include Union. Discussion is currently ongoing whether we will enable it by default, but even if not there will be a way to try it out.

See Hiemstra's introductory article on Union, published in February 2025, for more about the project and its creation. KDE 6.7 is expected to be released in mid-June.

• Front: LLMs and security; restartable sequences and TCMalloc; Fedora and GNOME bug reports; Prolly trees; Arm on s390.
• Briefs: NHS open source; Alpine outage; GCC 16.1; Incus 7.0 LTS; NetHack 5.0.0; PHP license; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Predictions that LLM tools would cause a surge in reports of security vulnerabilities have, unquestionably, borne out. As expected, maintainers are having to wade through more security reports than ever before; in addition, LLM tools are disrupting traditional-coordinated disclosure practices as well. The method of Copy Fail's disclosure, in particular, left vendors, projects, and users scrambling. In addition, maintainers are seeing parallel discovery of the same security flaws within the embargo window. Both of these developments mean that coordinated security disclosures may become a thing of the past.

Version 7.0 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the inclusion of a low-level backup API, the addition of basic S3 operations directly in Incus to replace the now-unmaintained MinIO project, as well as the removal of support for cgroups v1 and xtables (iptables/ip6tables/ebtables). This is a long-term-support (LTS) release, with support through June 2031.

The first 2 years will feature bug and security fixes as well as minor usability improvements, delivered through occasional point releases (7.0.x). After that initial two years, Incus 7.0 LTS will move to security only maintenance for the remaining of its 5 years of support.

A total of 204 individuals contributed to Incus between the 6.0 LTS and 7.0 LTS releases with 45 contributing between the 6.23 and 7.0 LTS releases.

A recent patch set from Steffen Eiden and others has set the groundwork for allowing hardware-assisted emulation of Arm CPUs on s390 CPUs. Version two of the posting fixes a handful of smaller problems, but does not differ much. The patches were welcomed by the Arm maintainers, pending some discussion of how the collaboration between the architectures could be structured to prevent maintainability problems on the Arm side. When those details are resolved, the patches could pave the way for transparently running Arm-based virtual machines (VMs) on s390 hosts at native or near-native speeds.

Getting here required more than writing an RFC. The PHP License gives the PHP Group the authority to change it, which meant tracking down each of the original PHP Group members and getting their written consent. Each approved the proposal. Perforce Software, the successor to Zend Technologies, needed to sign off on the Zend Engine side, as well. They provided a formal letter confirming their full authority and support for the change. I hired an attorney to review the proposal and provide advice on any legal questions that might surface during the discussion period. Speaking of which, I allowed for a six-month community discussion period preceding the vote, which passed unanimously.

LWN covered the license-change process back in March.

The Alpine Linux account on fosstodon.org reports that all systems hosted at Linode, including its GitLab instance, "are suspended at the moment due to some billing issue". They are working to get it resolved, but in the meantime all of their services appear to be down.

Update: Alpine Linux's servers are back online.

For a number of years, users submitting bugs reports against GNOME packages in Fedora have received an auto-reply saying that the reports were not actively monitored; users were encouraged to file bugs with GNOME upstream instead. However, that practice seems to be in conflict with the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) policy that package maintainers "deal with reported bugs in a timely manner". On April 28, FESCo discussed the disconnect between practice and policy; so far, it has only opted to tweak the wording of the automatic response.

Version 5.0.0 of the NetHack dungeon-exploration game, a distant relative of Rogue and Hack, has been released. NetHack's code is now compliant with the C99 standard, and the release includes more than 3,100 bug fixes and changes, detailed in doc/fixes5-0-0.txt (may contain game spoilers). Saved games from previous versions will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.

Terence Eden reports that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put it mildly, agree with the decision:

The majority of code repos published by the NHS are not meaningfully affected by any advance in security scanning. They're mostly data sets, internal tools, guidance, research tools, front-end design and the like. There is nothing in them which could realistically lead to a security incident.

When I was working at NHSX during the pandemic, we were so confident of the safety and necessity of open source, we made sure the Covid Contact Tracing app was open sourced the minute it was available to the public. That was a nationally mandated app, installed on millions of phones, subject to intense scrutiny from hostile powers - and yet, despite publishing the code, architecture and documentation, the open source code caused zero security incidents.

Furthermore, this new guidance is in direct contradiction to the UK's Tech Code of Practice point 3 "Be open and use open source" which insists on code being open.

Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of B-trees, which are tree structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block devices. Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database. The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects.