Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: LLMs and copyright; Systemd packaging in Debian; Gccrs; FineIBT; 6.18 Merge window; Interrupt-aware spinlocks; Fedora's /boot.
• Briefs: Linux 6.18-rc1; Librephone; LMDE 7; Ubuntu 25.10; Firefox 144.0; Julia 1.12; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Free Software Foundation has announced the launch of the Librephone project, which is aimed at the creation of a fully-free operating system for mobile devices.

Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.

Version 144.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes this time include improvements to tab-group and profile management, stronger encryption for stored passwords, a "search image with Google Lens" operation, and "Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine built into the browser".

The Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab concerns itself with many aspects of software licensing, Krzysztof Siewicz said at the beginning of his 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron session. These include supporting projects that are facing licensing challenges, collecting copyright assignments, and addressing GPL violations. In this session, though, there was really only one topic that the audience wanted to know about: the interaction between free-software licensing and large language models (LLMs).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ghostscript and libfcgi), Fedora (qt5-qtsvg), Red Hat (kernel, perl-FCGI, perl-FCGI:0.78, and vim), SUSE (bluez, curl, podman, postgresql14, python-xmltodict, and udisks2), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, and subversion).

Linus has released 6.18-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "This was one of the good merge windows where I didn't end up having to bisect any particular problem on [any] of the machines I was testing. Let's hope that success mostly translates to the bigger picture too."

Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who is working on just that compiler (known as "gccrs"), provided an update on the status of that project and what is coming next.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.
• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 3.14.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of changes this time around, including official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more; see the announcement for details.

Taylor Blau has posted an extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor's Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on Google Docs for those who prefer that format.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (kernel, open-vm-tools, and postgresql), SUSE (chromedriver and chromium), and Ubuntu (haproxy and pam-u2f).

Support for BPF in the kernel has been tied to the LLVM toolchain since the advent of extended BPF. There has been a growing effort to add BPF support to the GNU toolchain as well, though. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, the developers involved got together with representatives of the kernel community to talk about the state of that work and what needs to happen next.

OpenSSH 10.1 has been released. Along with "a minor security fix" and some other bug fixes, this release disallows control characters in user names passed via the command line, adds better logging around certificate refusals, and a new RefuseConnection server configuration option.

The Free Software Foundation has announced the selection of Ian Kelling as the organization's president.

Kelling, age forty-three, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors. The board is confident Kelling is the right person to help the organization achieve its long-term goals. His commitment to free software comes from a life of exploring ways to exert user control. He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger."

The GNU Tools Cauldron is almost entirely focused on user-space tools, but kernel developers need a solid toolchain too. In what appears to be a developing tradition (started in 2024), some kernel developers attended the 2025 Cauldron for the second year in a row to discuss their needs with the assembled toolchain developers. Topics covered in this year's gathering include Rust, better BPF type format (BTF) support, SFrame, and more.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Fedora and AI; Linting kernel Rust; openSUSE Leap 16; mmap() file operation; 6.17 statistics; dirlock.
• Briefs: Bcachefs removal; Alpine /usr merge; F-Droid; Fedora AI policy; OpenSUSE Leap 16; PostgreSQL 18; Radicle 1.5.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The openSUSE Leap 16 release is now available.

This major version update of our fixed-release community-Linux distribution has a fresh software stack and introduces an unmatched maintenance- and security-support cycle, a new installer and simplified migration options.

See our look at this release for more information.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-internetarchive and tiff), Fedora (nextcloud), Oracle (kernel, openssh, and squid), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and ncurses), SUSE (afterburn and chromium), and Ubuntu (open-vm-tools, ruby-rack, and tiff).

After marking bcachefs "externally maintained" in 6.17, Linus Torvalds has removed it entirely for 6.18. "It's now a DKMS module, making the in-kernel code stale, so remove it to avoid any version confusion."

The 6.17 development cycle ended on September 28 with the release of the 6.17 kernel. This cycle brought in 13,089 non-merge changesets, a slowdown from its predecessor but still within the normal bounds for recent kernels. The time has come for a look at where those changes came from, with a bit of a side trip into bug statistics.