One of the more significant changes in the 7.0 kernel release is to use the lazy-preemption mode by default in the CPU scheduler. The scheduler developers have wanted to reduce the number of preemption modes for years, and lazy preemption looks like a step toward that goal. But then there came this report from Salvatore Dipietro that lazy preemption caused a 50% performance regression on a PostgreSQL benchmark. Investigation showed that the situation is not actually so grave, but the episode highlights just how sensitive some workloads can be to configuration changes; there may be surprises in store for other users as well.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, freerdp, libarchive, and thunderbird), Debian (chromium, openssh, and thunderbird), Fedora (aurorae, bluedevil, breeze-gtk, buildah, cockpit, extra-cmake-modules, flatpak-kcm, grub2-breeze-theme, kactivitymanagerd, kcm_wacomtablet, kde-cli-tools, kde-gtk-config, kdecoration, kdeplasma-addons, kf6, kf6-attica, kf6-baloo, kf6-bluez-qt, kf6-breeze-icons, kf6-frameworkintegration, kf6-kapidox, kf6-karchive, kf6-kauth, kf6-kbookmarks, kf6-kcalendarcore, kf6-kcmutils, kf6-kcodecs, kf6-kcolorscheme, kf6-kcompletion, kf6-kconfig, kf6-kconfigwidgets, kf6-kcontacts, kf6-kcoreaddons, kf6-kcrash, kf6-kdav, kf6-kdbusaddons, kf6-kdeclarative, kf6-kded, kf6-kdesu, kf6-kdnssd, kf6-kdoctools, kf6-kfilemetadata, kf6-kglobalaccel, kf6-kguiaddons, kf6-kholidays, kf6-ki18n, kf6-kiconthemes, kf6-kidletime, kf6-kimageformats, kf6-kio, kf6-kirigami, kf6-kitemmodels, kf6-kitemviews, kf6-kjobwidgets, kf6-knewstuff, kf6-knotifications, kf6-knotifyconfig, kf6-kpackage, kf6-kparts, kf6-kpeople, kf6-kplotting, kf6-kpty, kf6-kquickcharts, kf6-krunner, kf6-kservice, kf6-kstatusnotifieritem, kf6-ksvg, kf6-ktexteditor, kf6-ktexttemplate, kf6-ktextwidgets, kf6-kunitconversion, kf6-kuserfeedback, kf6-kwallet, kf6-kwidgetsaddons, kf6-kwindowsystem, kf6-kxmlgui, kf6-modemmanager-qt, kf6-networkmanager-qt, kf6-prison, kf6-purpose, kf6-qqc2-desktop-style, kf6-solid, kf6-sonnet, kf6-syndication, kf6-syntax-highlighting, kf6-threadweaver, kgamma, kglobalacceld, kinfocenter, kmenuedit, knighttime, kpipewire, krdp, kscreen, kscreenlocker, ksshaskpass, ksystemstats, kwayland, kwayland-integration, kwin, kwin-x11, kwrited, layer-shell-qt, libexif, libkscreen, libksysguard, libplasma, nix, ocean-sound-theme, oxygen-sounds, pam-kwallet, plasma-activities, plasma-activities-stats, plasma-breeze, plasma-browser-integration, plasma-desktop, plasma-dialer, plasma-discover, plasma-disks, plasma-drkonqi, plasma-firewall, plasma-integration, plasma-keyboard, plasma-login-manager, plasma-milou, plasma-mobile, plasma-nano, plasma-nm, plasma-oxygen, plasma-pa, plasma-print-manager, plasma-sdk, plasma-setup, plasma-systemmonitor, plasma-systemsettings, plasma-thunderbolt, plasma-vault, plasma-welcome, plasma-workspace, plasma-workspace-wallpapers, plasma-workspace-x11, plasma5support, plymouth-kcm, plymouth-theme-breeze, podman, polkit-kde, powerdevil, qqc2-breeze-style, sddm-kcm, skopeo, spacebar, spectacle, thunderbird, and xdg-desktop-portal-kde), Mageia (cockpit-338), Oracle (capstone, cockpit, firefox, fontforge, freerdp, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, kernel, nghttp2, nodejs:20, nodejs:24, openexr, and squid), Red Hat (gnutls, libarchive, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, libtiff, libvpx, libxslt, multiple packages, python, python3, python3.11, python3.12, and python3.9), Slackware (libxml2), SUSE (apache-pdfbox, azure-storage-azcopy, corosync, cups, freerdp, iproute2, libsdb2_4_2, libtpms, NetworkManager, openssl-1_1, ovmf, plexus-utils, python, python-CairoSVG, python-jwcrypto, python-PyJWT, python-pyOpenSSL, python-urllib3, python3, python314, rust1.93, shim, smc-tools, terraform-provider-local, terraform-provider-random, terraform-provider-tls, thunderbird, tiff, util-linux, and vim), and Ubuntu (libowasp-esapi-java, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux, linux-realtime, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-realtime-6.17, ofono, and ruby-rack).