MinIO is a popular object-storage server that offered compatibility with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API. In December 2025, the company behind the project (also named MinIO) announced that the project was in maintenance mode and would not accept new changes; it was archived completely in February 2026. MinIO users have been hunting for alternatives since then, but the array of choices can be baffling. While many other projects aim to fill the space, their strengths and areas of focus tend to vary. Two of the alternatives—Ceph and Garage—are particularly compelling, and both offer solid S3 compatibility.

Version 6.0.0 of the Podman container-management tool has been released. Notable new features include the ability to set multiple static IP addresses for containers, improvements in network isolation that make Podman more compatible with Docker, changes to the way Quadlet commands function, many new options for many existing podman commands, and a rewrite of Podman's configuration file handling. There are many breaking changes; see the release notes for a full list of all new features, changes, and bug fixes.

There is a lot of work going into eliminating exploitable bugs from the kernel and preventing the addition of new ones. Even if this work is maximally successful, though, there is no chance that the kernel will be free of these bugs anytime soon. Thus, there is also ongoing interest in hardening the kernel to make the existing bugs more difficult to exploit. The upcoming 7.2 kernel release will include a change to how dynamically allocated structures are placed in memory to make them harder to overwrite, while a project to randomize structure layout at boot time has a rather longer timeline.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libpng, libsolv, libtasn1, libxml2, libxslt, python3.14, tigervnc, and vim), Debian (cloud-init, postgresql-13, and yelp), Mageia (nats-server), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind9.18, cockpit, compat-openssl11, dnsmasq, dovecot, evince, expat, flatpak, freerdp, gimp, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd, jmc, jq, kernel, libsndfile, libsoup, libtiff, mod_http2, mysql:8.0, nginx, nginx:1.24, openexr, php:8.2, poppler, pyOpenSSL, python-markdown, redis:7, samba, thunderbird, tigervnc, unbound, and vim), Red Hat (libpng, libpng12, and libpng15), SUSE (apptainer, bind, crun, freeipmi, ghc-crypton-x509-store, ghc-crypton-x509-system, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, GraphicsMagick, gstreamer-plugins-bad, hamlib, iproute2, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kubevirt1, libarchive, libheif, libpng15, mbedtls, mbedtls-2, openssl-1_1, python-biopython, python-PyJWT, tar, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, libdbi-perl, and perl).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Free-threaded Python; AUR attacks; Fedora 2FA; 7.2 merge window; BPF arenas; BPF coroutines; BPF JIT; RMR and BRMR; OSPM.
• Briefs: Tor deprecations; GIMP 0.54.1 flatpak; Mastodon 4.6; Systemd v261; Xfce on Wayland; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Compromised accounts are one of the most common ways that attackers can sneak malware into the open-source supply chain. One way to reduce account compromise is for projects to require two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), but that is easier said than done. However, Fedora is currently discussing putting 2FA requirements in place soon, following an an alleged account compromise that led to an AI agent causing a number of problems for the project. After some discussion, Fedora will begin by requiring packagers in the "provenpackager" group to enable 2FA within the next three months or so.

BPF arenas are areas of memory (potentially shared with user space) where programs have free reign to build their own data structures, unburdened by the verifier's bounds checks. Many of those data structures are potentially usable in multiple programs. Emil Tsalapatis brought his work on libarena, a library containing generic utilities for use in BPF arenas, to the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Although the library is already available as part of the kernel, it is still in its early stages and he has more work planned.

The Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by the historical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As has become traditional, the presenters at that event have since written summaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made available to LWN for publication. The second day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including device frequency scaling, using time-slice duration for CPU selection, scheduling domains on multi-cluster Arm systems, the LAVD scheduler, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libpq, memcached, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:13, postgresql:16, python-urllib3, python3.14-urllib3, redis:6, skopeo, and vim), Debian (beets, gst-plugins-bad1.0, imagemagick, libmatio, python-urllib3, and u-boot), Fedora (chromium, coturn, frr, grout, materialx, perl-Crypt-DSA, and yt-dlp), Mageia (opensc, perl-Archive-Tar, and podofo), Oracle (fence-agents, libpq, mysql:8.4, and postgresql:16), Red Hat (firefox, libpng, libpng12, libpng15, libreoffice, nginx:1.24, thunderbird, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-core, apache2, bind, bitcoin-qt6, containerized-data-importer, curl, distribution, docker-stable, dovecot24, dracut, editorconfig-core-c, exiv2, firefox, freeipmi, freerdp, ghc-aws, ghc-crypton-asn1-encoding, ghc-crypton-asn1-parse, ghc-crypton-asn1-types, ghc-crypton-pem, glib-networking, go1.25, go1.26, google-guest-agent, graphite2, hamlib, helm, himmelblau, ignition, ImageMagick, kernel, ldns, libarchive, libcaca, libheif, libinput, libjxl, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, LibVNCServer, libxslt, libyang, mcphost, mozjs128, ncurses, nginx, opensc, openssl-3, openvswitch, papers, perl-HTML-Parser, perl-HTTP-Daemon, perl-Protocol-HTTP2, podman, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python-aiohttp, python-ecdsa, python-paramiko, python-PyJWT, python-starlette, rekor, sqlite3, strongswan, tiff, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, unbound, webkit2gtk3, xwayland, and zypper, libzypp, libsolv), and Ubuntu (libcap2, libnfs, libvncserver, libxml2, and mysql-8.0).

Alexis Lothoré has been working to add support for the kernel's memory-access checker, KASAN, to just-in-time-compiled BPF code. He spoke about that work at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. KASAN support is needed, he said, to help catch bugs in the BPF just-in-time (JIT) compiler. KASAN is a great tool for catching memory-management problems in the kernel, but only in code that can be monitored by it.

The Tor Project has announced that it is planning to actively stop supporting Tor 0.4.8 and earlier C Tor versions soon.

Usually, we try not to break existing releases, even if they are unsupported, unless we have a pretty good reason. In this case, we have several reasons. [...]

The most important reason is this: in 0.4.9, we have made some former fields in our directory data obsolete -- specifically, TAP onion keys and family lines. Removing these fields will let us save a great deal of client directory bandwidth for everyone. This, in turn, will make all Tor clients bootstrap a little faster, especially those on slow connections. But when we remove these fields, clients and relays running earlier versions of Tor will no longer work, since they expect the TAP onion keys to be present. Therefore, in order to deliver improved performance faster, we need to accelerate the date on which 0.4.8 will stop working.

The target sunset date is currently September 1, 2026, after which any version prior to Tor 0.4.9 will cease to work on the network. The first stable release in the 0.4.9.x series was announced in February 2026, and the Tor 0.4.8.x series reached end of life on June 1.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg), Fedora (erlang, ffmpeg, prometheus, python-scrapy, python3-docs, python3.14, thorvg, tigervnc, and vips), Mageia (mumble and sslh), Oracle (389-ds:1.4, dracut, firefox, hplip, kernel, openssh, postgresql:15, redis:6, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (delve, gvisor-tap-vsock, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, osbuild-composer, podman, rhc, skopeo, and yggdrasil), SUSE (containerized-data-importer, graphite2, kernel, libarchive, openssh, openssh-askpass-gnome, openvswitch, openvswitch3, postfix, python-lxml, python-nltk, python-python-multipart, python-urllib3, rmt-server, terraform-provider-local, terraform-provider-null, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (google-guest-agent, haproxy, libxml2, linux-azure, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, and nginx).

The GIMP project reports that GNOME contributor "balooii" has worked to package GIMP 0.54.1—released in 1996—as a Flatpak that will build and run on modern 64-bit Linux systems. This is a Motif-based version, and the same version that was used by Larry Ewing to create Tux.

While not likely to be useful for serious graphics work today, it should be interesting for users who would like to see what a 30-year-old version of GIMP was capable of.

Probably the biggest change for Python over the last five years or so is the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language, which removes the global interpreter lock (GIL) and allows multiple threads to run in parallel in the interpreter. At PyCon US 2026, held in Long Beach, California in mid-May, longtime CPython core developer (and current steering council member) Thomas Wouters gave a talk about the feature. He looked at the motivation behind the GIL-removal efforts, some history, the current status of the free-threaded interpreter, and provided a prediction on where it all leads.

Brian Tarricone has announced the first preview release of xfwl4, a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment.

After close to six months of work, I feel like it's ready to get some wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing features. Think of this as an alpha release. [...]

The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there's a difference. In reality, of course, it won't be quite that seamless, and there's still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least.

The Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by the historical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As has become traditional, the presenters at that event have since written summaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made available to LWN for publication. The first day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including idle-state selection, user-space schedulers with sched_ext, lock-holder preemption, and much more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds:1.4, kernel, and kernel-rt), Debian (gst-libav1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, imagemagick, kernel, libconfig-inifiles-perl, libgd-perl, libhttp-daemon-perl, mediawiki, pillow, and squid), Fedora (389-ds-base, alertmanager, ansible-core, buildah, chromium, erlang-cowboy, erlang-cowlib, erlang-gun, freerdp, kubernetes1.33, kubernetes1.34, kubernetes1.35, mingw-SDL2_image, ongres-scram, ongres-stringprep, openssl, perl-Config-IniFiles, perl-Crypt-PBKDF2, podman, postgresql-jdbc, python3.13, strongswan, webkitgtk, xdg-desktop-portal, and yt-dlp), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), SUSE (alloy, amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-core, apache-sshd, jpgpj, azure-storage-azcopy, chromedriver, containerized-data-importer, firefox, glibc, graphite2, inspektor-gadget, kubevirt, lemon, openvswitch, python-starlette, python311, python311-joserfc, python313, and tinyproxy), and Ubuntu (netatalk).

Systemd v261 has been released with a long list of changes, including a new cloud "Instance Metadata Service" (IMDS) subsystem, "boot secret" functionality for use on systems that lack a physical TPM, as well as support for the kernel's Live Update Orchestration (LUO) / Kexec Handover (KHO) systems when they are present and enabled. See the release notes for the full list of changes.

BPF programs can be used to extend many aspects the Linux kernel, but BPF programs must run to completion in the same context that they began. Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi is working on changing that by allowing BPF programs to be expressed as coroutines. He spoke about his work at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. While still experimental, the change promises to make long-running BPF tasks significantly easier to write.

The Arch User Repository (AUR) has been subjected to a sustained attack recently. The attacker, or attackers, have spun up a series of new accounts then used them to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates that would install malware on users' systems. It is unclear how many users were compromised in the attack, but the maintainers were playing Whac-A-Mole for several days to respond to each newly compromised package. The project has turned off the AUR's new-user registration, for now, but it is unclear what its long-term response will be or if the AUR can be secured without major changes to its existing collaboration model.