Linus has released 6.16-rc4 for testing. "Despite a fairly large merge window, things continue to look fairly calm on the rc front".

Version 1.88.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the ability to chain let expressions, "naked" functions that have no compiler-generated prologue or epilogue, automatic garbage collection in cargo, a set of stabilized APIs, and more.

Version 10 of the Oracle Linux distribution has been released.

Oracle Linux 10 is now generally available for 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. Oracle Linux 10 delivers robust security and exceptional performance for business agility and demanding workloads at cloud scale. Key features include modernized cryptographic capabilities, advancements in developer tooling, and innovations for resilient infrastructure.

Kernel development and machine learning seem like vastly different areas of endeavor; there are not, yet, stories circulating about the vibe-coding of new memory-management algorithms. There may well be places where machine learning (and large language models — LLMs — in particular) prove to be helpful on the edges of the kernel project, though. At the 2025 North-American edition of the Open Source Summit, Sasha Levin presented some of the work he has done putting LLMs to work to make the kernel better

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Libxml2; GNOME and systemd; Rust in the kernel; Defconfigs; ngnfs, Free-threaded Python; Asterinas.
• Briefs: LSFMM+BPF book; tag2upload; PostmarketOS 25.06; Firefox 140.0; NLnet funding; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

It took time and the writing of over 60 articles, but LWN's coverage from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit is now complete. We have also made an EPUB book (13MB) containing the full set of coverage available to all readers. This coverage constitutes the definitive guide to the challenges that these core-kernel communities are facing and their development plans for the coming year.

Documenting an event of this intensity at such a detailed level is not a small undertaking. We are grateful to the Linux Foundation for funding our travel to our event and, especially, to LWN's subscribers for making the whole thing possible. If you appreciate this type of coverage and have not yet subscribed, please sign up today to help make more of it possible.

Version 140.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include more control over vertical tabs, a dialog to add custom search engines, improvements to translation performance, and more.

Working on the kernel can be a challenging task but, for many, configuring a kernel build can be the largest obstacle to getting started. The kernel has thousands of configuration options; many of those, if set incorrectly, will result in a kernel that does not work on the target system. The key to helping users with complex configuration problems is to provide reasonable defaults but, in the kernel community, there is currently little consensus around what those defaults should be.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dns-root-data and xorg-server), Fedora (glibc, mingw-glib2, and optipng), Red Hat (iputils, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libarchive, mod_auth_openidc, mod_proxy_cluster, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (python313), and Ubuntu (fig2dev, gnuplot, gss-ntlmssp, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.15, and linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime).

Linus has released 6.16-rc3 for testing. "So rc2 was smaller than usual, but rc3 seems to be right in the usual ballpark for this time, so everything looks entirely normal."

Asterinas is a new Linux-ABI-compatible kernel project written in Rust, based on what the authors call a "framekernel architecture". The project overlaps somewhat with the goals of the Rust for Linux project, but approaches the problem space from a different direction by trying to get the best from both monolithic and microkernel designs.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: GNOME a11y; hierarchical scheduler; CoMaps; GPU restore; FAIR.pm; buffered I/O writeback; NFS; Lustre
• Briefs: Rocky Linux 10.0; Git 2.50; KDE Plasma 6.4; Kubernetes Slack; Python Language Summit; Radicle Desktop; Quote; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The POSIX realtime model, which is implemented in the Linux kernel, can ensure that a realtime process obtains the CPU time it needs to get its job done. It can be less effective, though, when there are multiple realtime processes competing for the available CPU resources. The hierarchical constant bandwidth server patch series, posted by Yuri Andriaccio with work by Luca Abeni, Alessio Balsini, and Andrea Parri, is a modification to the Linux scheduler intended to make it possible to configure systems with multiple realtime tasks in a deterministic and correct manner.

The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the project's leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps.

The Python Software Foundation blog is carrying a set of detailed summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit:

The Python Language Summit 2025 occurred on May 14th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Core developers and special guests from around the world gathered in one room for an entire day of presentations and discussions about the future of the Python programming language.

Topics covered include making breaking changes less painful, free-threaded Python, interaction with Rust, and challenges faced by the Steering Council.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Nyxt; Cyber Resilience Act; Unwanted file descriptors; Core-dump API; 6.16 Merge window; Uniprocessor configurations; Smatch; FUSE zero-copy; iov_iter; Fedora documentation.
• Briefs: Android tracking; /e/OS 3.0; FreeBSD laptops; Ubuntu X11 support; Netdev 0x19; OIN anniversary; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The "Local Mess" GitHub repository is dedicated to the disclosure of an Android tracking exploit used by (at least) Meta and Yandex.

While there are subtle differences in the way Meta and Yandex bridge web and mobile contexts and identifiers, both of them essentially misuse the unvetted access to localhost sockets. The Android OS allows any installed app with the INTERNET permission to open a listening socket on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1). Browsers running on the same device also access this interface without user consent or platform mediation. This allows JavaScript embedded on web pages to communicate with native Android apps and share identifiers and browsing habits, bridging ephemeral web identifiers to long-lived mobile app IDs using standard Web APIs.

This backdoor, the use of which has evidently stopped since its disclosure, allow tracking of users across sites regardless of cookie policies or use of incognito browser modes.

The Linux kernel famously scales from the smallest of systems to massive servers with thousands of CPUs. It was not always that way, though; the initial version of the kernel could only manage a single processor. That limitation was lifted, obviously, but single-processor machines have always been treated specially in the scheduler. That longstanding situation may soon come to an end, though, if this patch series from Ingo Molnar makes it upstream.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The central feature of the OIN community is a patent cross-license that covers core Open Source functionality and expands in parallel with the growth of Open Source technology. As growth in Open Source has accelerated, OIN has proactively expanded the scope of the OIN license's benefit by including more than 4,500 software components and platforms in its Linux System definition, which comprises the list of Open Source code and associated functionality in OIN's patent cross-license.

LWN's first look at OIN was this article by Pamela Jones in late 2005.

The 6.15.2, 6.14.11, and 6.12.33 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively small set of important fixes.

Note that this is the end of the line for the 6.14.x updates; Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the timing of this move:

If you notice, this has happened a bit more "early" than previous end-of-life announcements. Normally, after -rc1 is out there is a TON of stable patches happening due to the changes that come into the merge-window that were marked for stable backports but didn't get into Linus's release before -final. As some people have objected to this large influx being added to a stable kernel that is just about to go end-of-life, let's try marking this end-of-life a bit earlier to see how it goes.