Willy Tarreau and William Lallemand have posted an extensive white paper examining the landscape of the available SSL implementations.

OpenSSL 3.0 performs significantly worse than alternative SSL libraries, forcing organizations to provision more hardware just to maintain existing throughput. This raises important questions about performance, energy efficiency, and operational costs.

Examining alternatives—BoringSSL, LibreSSL, WolfSSL, and AWS-LC—reveals a landscape of trade-offs. Each offers different approaches to API compatibility, performance optimization, and QUIC support. For developers navigating the modern SSL ecosystem, understanding these trade-offs is crucial for optimizing performance, maintaining compatibility, and future-proofing their infrastructure.

Version 2025.5 of the Home Assistant home automation system has been released. With this release, the project is celebrating two million active installations. Changes include improvements to the backup system, Z-Wave Long Range support, a number of new integrations, and more.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Debian and essential packages; Custom BPF OOM killers; Speculation barriers for BPF programs; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Deepin on openSUSE; AUTOSEL; Mission Center 1.0.0; OASIS ODF; Redis license; USENIX ATC; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Lukas Fittl writes in detail on the pganalyze blog about the asynchronous I/O capability coming with the PostgreSQL 18 release.

Asynchronous I/O delivers the most noticeable gains in cloud environments where storage is network-attached, such as Amazon EBS volumes. In these setups, individual disk reads often take multiple milliseconds, introducing substantial latency compared to local SSDs.

With traditional synchronous I/O, each of these reads blocks query execution until the data arrives, leading to idle CPU time and degraded throughput. By contrast, asynchronous I/O allows Postgres to issue multiple read requests in parallel and continue processing while waiting for results. This reduces query latency and enables much more efficient use of available I/O bandwidth and CPU cycles.

Those of us who have spent our lives playing with computers naturally see the appeal of deploying them though the home for both data acquisition and automation. But many of us who have watched the evolution of the technology industry are increasingly unwilling to entrust critical household functions to cloud-based servers run by companies that may not have our best interests at heart. The Apache-licensed Home Assistant project offers a welcome alternative: locally controlled automation with free software. This two-part series covers roughly a year of Home Assistant use, starting with a set of overall observations about the project.

Linus has released 6.15-rc6 for testing.

Everything still looks fairly normal - we've got a bit more commits than we did in rc5, which isn't the trend I want to see as the release progresses, but the difference isn't all that big and it feels more like just the normal noise in timing fluctuation in pull requests of fixes than any real signal.

So I won't worry about it. We've got another two weeks to go in the normal release schedule, and it still feels like everything is on track.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libeconf and rubygems), Fedora (libxmp), Gentoo (glibc), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, libxslt, and virtuoso-opensource), SUSE (augeas, git-lfs, kanidm, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (linux-lts-xenial).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Home Assistant; YaST; bpfilter; Flatpak; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Screen security; Guix on Codeberg; Postgres I/O; GNOME executive director; Nextcloud blog; Podman 5.5.0; OSL sustainability; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a somewhat belated memorial for John Young, the founder of Cryptome.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public's right to know.

The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems.

The 6.14.7, 6.12.29, 6.6.91, 6.1.139, and 5.15.183 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The 6.15-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So while I wish we hadn't had some of the excitement of last week, on the whole it all still looks pretty solid, and unless something strange happens I'll do the final 6.15 release next weekend."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dropbear, firefox-esr, intel-microcode, net-tools, openafs, thunderbird, and xrdp), Fedora (chromium, micropython, syslog-ng, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (dropbear and openssh), Oracle (.NET 9.0, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, git-lfs, grafana, kernel, and osbuild and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (cargo-c, gimp, iputils-20240905, kernel, libraw, microcode_ctl, openssh, pnpm, python311-cramjam, python311-httptools, python311-jwcrypto, python311-loguru, python311-mechanize, python311-nltk, python311-oauthlib, python311-py7zr, python311-pycapnp, python311-pyspnego, python311-pywayland, python311-suds, python311-treq, python311-ujson, python311-waitress, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionmailer, ruby3.4-rubygem-actiontext, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord, ruby3.4-rubygem-activestorage, ruby3.4-rubygem-fluentd, ruby3.4-rubygem-globalid, ruby3.4-rubygem-jquery-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-kramdown, ruby3.4-rubygem-loofah, ruby3.4-rubygem-multi_xml, ruby3.4-rubygem-puma, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, ruby3.4-rubygem-sprockets, ruby3.4-rubygem-web-console, ruby3.4-rubygem-websocket-extensions, ucode-intel-20250512, and valkey), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-oracle, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (known as "OSPM") Summit took place on March 18-20, 2025. It was organized by Juri Lelli, Frauke Jäger, Tommaso Cucinotta, and Lorenzo Pieralisi, and was hosted by Linutronix at Alte Fabrik, Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany. The event was sponsored by Linutronix, Arm, and the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and wireless-regdb), Fedora (iputils, open-vm-tools, sfnt2woff-zopfli, and woff), Red Hat (postgresql:12), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, brltty, helm, python-maturin, and rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-fips).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Home Assistant; Setuptools; Debian AI GR; DMA-mapping API; BPF CI; OSPM 2025
• Briefs: Go audit; Oniux; Asahi progress; Rust in FreeBSD; RHEL 10; Rust 1.87.0; RIP John L. Young; Quote; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Our recent article on Home Assistant observed that the project emphasizes installations using its own Linux distribution or within containers. The project has now made that emphasis rather stronger with this announcement of the deprecation of the "core" and "supervised" installation modes, which allowed Home Assistant to be installed as an ordinary application on a Linux system.

These are advanced installation methods, with only a small percentage of the community opting to use them. If you are using these methods, you can continue to do so (you can even continue to update your system), but in six months time, you will no longer be supported, which I'll explain the impacts of in the next section. References to these installation methods will be removed from our documentation after our next release (2025.6).

Support for 32-bit Arm and x86 architectures has also been deprecated.

Mozilla has announced that it is shutting down Pocket, a bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla in 2017, this coming July. "Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet9.0, dropbear, ghostscript, nbdkit, openssh, python-watchfiles, rpm-ostree, yelp, yelp-xsl, and zsync), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (aaa_glibc and mozilla), SUSE (chromedriver, open-vm-tools, postgresql14, python-cryptography, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-hwe-5.4, python, and sqlite3).

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as "OSPM") took place on March 18-20, 2025. Topics discussed on the second day include improvements to device suspend and resume, the status and future of sched_ext, the scx_lavd scheduler, improving the efficiency of load balancing, and hierarchical constant bandwidth server scheduling.