Nothing particularly stands out to me, but it's early in the release yet, so let's see how it goes."
Eduard Zingerman presented a daring proposal that "makes sense if you think
about it a bit
" at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He wants to inline
performance-sensitive kernel functions
into the BPF programs that call them. His
prototype does not yet address all of the design problems inherent in that idea,
but it did spark a lengthy discussion about the feasibility of his proposal.
GCC will use color when emitting its text messages on stderr at a suitably modern terminal, using a few colors that seem to work well in a number of different terminal themes—but the exact rules for choosing which color to use for each aspect of the output have been rather arbitrary.For GCC 15, I've gone through C and C++'s errors, looking for places where two different things in the source are being contrasted, such as type mismatches. These diagnostics now use color to visually highlight and distinguish the differences.
Tom Schuster, Frederik Braun, and Christoph Kerschbaumer have published an article on the Firefox Security team's Attack & Defense blog that explains recent work to harden Firefox's frontend code.
We have rewritten over 600 JavaScript event handlers to mitigate XSS and other injection attacks in the main Firefox user interface. This mitigation will ship in Firefox 138. However, blocking the execution of scripts in the parent process is not the end - we will expand this technique to other contexts in the near future. There is still more work to do as the UI requires JavaScript APIs with a high level of privileges. However: We still eliminated a whole class of attacks, significantly raising the bar for attackers to exploit Firefox.
Four candidates have stepped up to run in the 2025 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. Andreas Tille, who is in his first term as DPL, is running again. Sruthi Chandran, Gianfranco Costamagna, and Julian Andres Klode are the other candidates running for a chance to serve a term as DPL. The campaigning phase ended on April 5, and Debian members began voting on April 6. Voting ends on April 19. This year, the campaign period has been lively and sometimes contentious, touching on problems with Debian team delegations and finances.
The 6.15 merge window saw the inclusion of a new type of lock for BPF programs: a resilient queued spinlock that Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi has been working on for some time. Eventually, he hopes to convert all of the spinlocks currently used in the BPF subsystem to his new lock. He gave a remote presentation about the design of the lock at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF summit.
OpenSSH 10.0 has been released. Support for the DSA signature algorithm, which was disabled by default beginning in 2015, has been removed. Other notable changes include using the post-quantum algorithm mlkem768x25519-sha256 for key agreement by default, support for systemd-style socket activation in Portable OpenSSH, and moving code for user authentication from the sshd-session binary to the new ssh-auth binary:
Splitting this code into a separate binary ensures that the crucial pre-authentication attack surface has an entirely disjoint address space from the code used for the rest of the connection. It also yields a small runtime memory saving as the authentication code will be unloaded after the authentication phase completes. This change should be largely invisible to users, though some log messages may now come from "sshd-auth" instead of "sshd-session". Downstream distributors of OpenSSH will need to package the sshd-auth binary.
The release notes also warn that "software that naively matches
versions using patterns like "OpenSSH_1*"
" may be confused by the
new version number.
Version 1.4 of FreeDOS has been released. This is the first stable release since 2022, and includes improvements to the Fdisk hard-disk-management program, and reliability updates for the mTCP set of TCP/IP applications for DOS.
This version was much smoother because Jerome Shidel, our distribution manager, had an idea after FreeDOS 1.3 that we could have a rolling test release that collected all of the changes that people make over time. Previous to this, each new FreeDOS distribution (like 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3) required bundling up packages into a "release candidate," and we would go through several iterations of updating the release candidates.
Jerome's method of building the FreeDOS distribution made it easier to automate a test release, which we decided to update every month. As the test releases accumulated enough changes to warrant a release, we could then make the next test release a "release candidate" which would iterate to the next version of the FreeDOS distribution. Since 2022, we've released monthly test releases. Thanks Jerome!
LWN covered FreeDOS last year for its 30th anniversary.
Joplin is an open-source note-taking application designed to handle taking many kinds of notes, whether it is managing code snippets, writing documentation, jotting down lecture notes, or drafting a novel. Joplin has Markdown support, a plugin system for extensibility, and accepts multimedia content, allowing users to attach images, videos, and audio files to their notes. It can provide synchronization of content across devices using end-to-end encryption, or users can opt to stick to local storage only. Joplin even offers a command-line version for terminal-based usage. Joplin 3.2, the most recent feature release, brought long-awaited multi-window support, multi-column layouts, enhanced accessibility, and theme detection.
Pahole (originally "Poke-a-hole") is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved in the kernel's build process to rearrange the information produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although there are plans to render it unnecessary. Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Interested readers can find his slides here.
We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real. Modern programming environments such as Go, Node, and Rust have made it trivial to reuse work by others, but our instincts about responsible behaviors have not yet adapted to this new reality.The fact that the 1974 Multics review anticipated many of the problems we face today is evidence that these problems are fundamental and have no easy answers. We must work to make continuous improvements to open source software supply chain security, making attacks more and more difficult and expensive.
As expected, this was one of the bigger merge windows, almost certainly just because we had some pent-up development due to the previous releases being impacted by the holiday season. That said, while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing.". In the end, 12.633 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline during this merge window.
the ugly stepchild" of the kernel's memory-management subsystem. Ugly or not, the ability to manage memory that is attached to a peripheral device rather than a CPU is increasingly important on current hardware. Popple hoped to cover some of the challenges with ZONE_DEVICE and find ways to make the stepchild a bit more attractive, if not bring it into the family entirely.
Yonghong Song brought a story about tracking down the cause of a strange verifier error message to the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He then presented some possible ways to improve Clang's user experience for anyone running into the same class of error in the future. Toward the end of his allotted time, he also discussed the problems with optimizations that change the signature of functions — a problem that José Marchesi had also brought up in the previous session.
some security bullshit". But it also holds the potential to protect the kernel from a wide range of vulnerabilities, both known and unknown, while reducing the impact of existing mitigations. Implementing address-space isolation with reasonable performance, though, is going to require some significant changes. Jackman was there to get feedback from the memory-management community on how those changes should be implemented.
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