BPF LSM hooks and XDP packet-processing probes for the --bpf runtime, BTF-based kernel.tracepoint probes, statement execution tracing, a new @enumname() operator, richer runtime error context, dyninst hardware watchpoints, modern systemd service templates, and broad Linux 7.2 runtime/tapset compatibility work. Multithreaded speedups throughout.

• Front: Server-data encryption; PostgreSQL scary patches; Faster kernel builds; BPF for blk-iocost; Lessons learned as DPL.
• Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade.

PostgreSQL contributor Tomas Vondra has published a blog post looking at development activity in the project, with data from the late 1990s to today.

We're doing ~50 commits per week, give or take. In ~2010 we were doing maybe 25/week, and the trend seems to be a slow and consistent growth. The monthly average makes the trend a bit easier to spot. Which is good, although there's a lot of other important details (size of commits, are they new features or fixes, ...).

It however nicely aligns with the number of active committers, which also grew ~2x between 2010 and today. So maybe that's working as expected.

Pádraig Brady has announced GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) version 9.12. "There have been 288 commits by 16 people in the 21 weeks since 9.11". New features include an -A option for uname which labels all output, as well as adding awareness of the failfs and nullfs filesystem types to stat and tail.

There are many bug fixes in this release as well, including one for a bug "present in 'the beginning'" that caused some utilities to fail when traversing hierarchies if files are being removed in parallel.

What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.

Sean Whitton has announced that the original fix for an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs (CVE-2024-53920) was incomplete. Bas Alberts discovered that viewing or editing untrusted files in modes other than Emacs's Lisp mode can also result in arbitrary code execution.

This problem affects all Emacs versions affected by CVE-2024-53920. This means Emacs 24 and newer, and possibly also older versions.

A minimal fix, attached, is queued up for release with Emacs 31.2. We (the Emacs upstream maintainers) don't expect to backport the fix to older Emacs releases ourselves.

LWN covered the original vulnerability in December 2024.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.2.6, 6.18.52, 6.12.110, 6.6.157, 6.1.188, 5.15.221, 5.10.270 stable kernels.

According to Kroah-Hartman, this batch may set a record for the number of patches with more than 9,000 in total between them. There are more than 1,800 patches in 7.2.6 alone. Users of these kernels are, of course, advised to upgrade.