Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.171, 5.15.205, and 5.10.255 stable kernels, quickly followed by 6.1.172 and 5.15.206 kernels. This is another round of stable kernels to provide fixes for one of the CVEs (CVE-2026-43284) assigned following the Dirty Frag and Copy Fail 2 security disclosures. There is not, yet, a stable kernel with a fix for CVE-2026-43500, though a patch to fix the second half is in the works.
An unusual, some might say hostile, approach to disclosing an alleged
remote-code-execution (RCE) flaw in the Forgejo software-collaboration platform has
sparked a multifaceted conversation. A so-called
"carrot disclosure
" in April has raised questions about the
researcher's methods of unveiling a security problem, Forgejo's
security policies, and the project's overall security posture.
For most users, the cost of 'this socket family stops working for the day' is much smaller than the cost of running a known vulnerable kernel until the fix land."
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.5, 6.18.28, 6.12.87, and 6.6.138 stable kernels. These kernels contain a partial fix for the Dirty Frag and Copy Fail 2 security flaws. Kroah-Hartman has confirmed that a second patch is required, but it is still in development and has not yet been merged.
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.
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.
Connexion