Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.17.5, 6.12.55, and 6.6.114 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

The Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities truly is a gift that keeps on giving. New variants are still being discovered in current CPUs nearly eight years after the disclosure of this problem, and developers are still working to minimize the performance costs that come from defending against it. The masked user-space access mechanism is a case in point: it reduces the cost of defending against some speculative attacks, but it brought some challenges of its own that are only now being addressed.

The AlmaLinux project has announced that the upcoming 10.1 release will include support for Btrfs:

Btrfs support encompasses both kernel and userspace enablement, and it is now possible to install AlmaLinux OS with a Btrfs filesystem from the very beginning. Initial enablement was scoped to the installer and storage management stack, and broader support within the AlmaLinux software collection for Btrfs features is forthcoming.

Btrfs support in AlmaLinux OS did not happen in isolation. This was proposed and scoped in RFC 0005, and has been built upon prior efforts by the Fedora Btrfs SIG in Fedora Linux and the CentOS Hyperscale SIG in CentOS Stream.

AlmaLinux OS is designed to be binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL); Btrfs, however, has never been supported in RHEL. A technology preview of Btrfs in RHEL 6 and 7 ended with the filesystem being dropped from RHEL 8 and onward. AlmaLinux OS 10.1 is currently in beta.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ipa, kernel, and thunderbird), Debian (gdk-pixbuf, gegl, gimp, intel-microcode, raptor2, request-tracker4, and request-tracker5), Fedora (samba and wireshark), Mageia (haproxy, nginx, openssl, and python-django), Oracle (kernel and thunderbird), Red Hat (redis and redis:7), Slackware (bind), SUSE (aws-cli, local-npm-registry, python-boto3, python- botocore, python-coverage, python-flaky, python-pluggy, python-pytest, python- pytest-cov, python-pytest-html, python-pytest-metada, cargo-audit-advisory-db-20251021, fetchmail, git-bug, ImageMagick, istioctl, kernel, krb5, libsoup, libxslt, python-Authlib, and sccache), and Ubuntu (bind9, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Git 3.0 topics; Lazy imports for Python; RubyGems; LLMs for patch review; DebugFS.
• Briefs: Fedora AI policy; OpenBSD 7.8; DigiKam 8.8.0; Forgejo 13.0; KDE Plasma 6.5; RubyGems; Valkey 9.0.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Fedora Council has approved an AI-assisted contributions policy. This follows several weeks of discussion, some of which was covered by LWN on October 1. The final policy contains substantial differences from the initial proposal, and now requires disclosure of AI tools "when the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes".

KDE Plasma 6.5 has been released. Notable new features include automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on time of day, support for the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol, as well as a number of usability and accessibility improvements. See the complete changelog for a list of the new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

DebugFS is the kernel's anything-goes, no-rules interface: whenever a kernel developer needs quick access to internal details of the kernel to debug a problem, or to implement an experimental control interface, they can expose them via DebugFS. This is possible because DebugFS is not subject to the normal rules for user-space-interface stability, nor to the rules about exposing sensitive kernel information. Supporting DebugFS in Rust drivers is an important step toward being able to debug real drivers on real hardware. Matthew Maurer spoke at Kangrejos 2025 about his recently merged DebugFS bindings for Rust.

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released. As usual, this release includes a long list of changes; see the changelog for all of the details.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, and mod_http2), SUSE (ffmpeg-4, kernel, libqt5-qtbase, protobuf, python-ldap, and python313), and Ubuntu (erlang, ffmpeg, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.14, linux-azure-nvidia-6.14, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle-5.4, and linux-realtime-6.14).

Version 9.0.0 of the Valkey distributed key-value database has been released. Notable features of this release include Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support, new filters for client commands, multi-database support for cluster mode and much more. See the Valkey 9.0.0 RC1 release notes for a full list of new features in this major release.

According to a recent blog post, this release includes major improvements to performance and scaling of Valkey clusters to more than 2,000 nodes and one billion requests per second. Valkey began as a fork of the Redis key-value database in March 2024, but has evolved separately since then.

The Git source-code management system is a foundational tool upon which much of the free-software community is based. For many people, Git simply works, though perhaps in quirky ways, so the activity of its development community may not often appear on their radar. There is a lot happening in the Git world at the moment, though, as the project works toward a 3.0 release sometime in 2026. Topics of interest in the Git community include the SHA-256 transition, the introduction of code written in Rust, and how the project should view contributions created with the assistance of large language models.

Version 8.8.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released. "This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency". Changes include an import/export feature for tag hierarchies, focus-point visualization for some camera models, automatic use of the monitor color profile, and a background-blur tool.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libssh, and perl-JSON-XS), Debian (ark and libphp-adodb), Fedora (chromium and gi-docgen), Mageia (quictls), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, httpd, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, microcode_ctl, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (go1.24, go1.25, krb5, python-ldap, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, and python-ldap).

In September, a group of long-time maintainers of Ruby packaging tools projects had their GitHub privileges revoked by nonprofit corporation Ruby Central in what many people are calling a hostile takeover. Ruby Central and its board members have issued several public statements that have, so far, failed to satisfy many in the Ruby community. In response, some of the former contributors to RubyGems are working on an alternative service called gem.coop. On October 17, ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler repositories was handed over to the Ruby core team, even though those projects had never been part of core Ruby previously. The takeover and subsequent events have raised a number of questions in the Ruby community.

Importing modules in Python is ubiquitous; most Python programs start with at least a few import statements. But the performance impact of those imports can be large—and may be entirely wasted effort if the symbols imported end up being unused. There are multiple ways to lazily import modules, including one in the standard library, but none of them are part of the Python language itself. That may soon change, if the recently proposed PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") is approved.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, incus, lxd, pgagent, svgpp, and sysstat), Fedora (chromium, complyctl, fetchmail, firefox, mbedtls, mingw-binutils, mingw-python3, mingw-qt5-qtsvg, mingw-qt6-qtsvg, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, runc, and suricata), Mageia (expat), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, qt5-qtbase, and qt6-qtbase), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (chromium, coredns, ctdb, firefox, kernel, libexslt0, libpoppler-cpp2, ollama, openssl-1_1, pam, samba, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (samba).

The 6.18-rc2 kernel prepatch is out.

End result: rc2 is on the bigger side, and we still have some of the remaining regressions outstanding, but we should be making slow progress. It's fairly early days yet, so I'm not very worried. Things on the whole look fairly normal.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.4 6.12.54 6.6.113 6.1.157, and 5.15.195 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes; users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.

The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler. Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"):

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

Ruby Central has also issued a statement.