The Lix and Nix projects have jointly
disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges
to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. "All systems that build
untrusted derivations are affected.
" Releases with fixes from each project
are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement
for more details on the vulnerabilities.
Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it can correctly model a program's needs. The Rust for Linux project has worked to provide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C code in the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about a patch series implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait for representing objects that are allocated in C code, but which Rust code is responsible for cleaning up (if not necessarily deallocating) when it is done with them. He hoped to finally reach a consensus on the patch series, after months of discussion on the mailing list.
PostgreSQL core
team member Peter Eisentraut has written a blog
post reflecting on the "unusually high number of features
" that have
been taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period
began.
Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was also a long tail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases. In past times, many of these would not have surfaced until much later and we would have fixed them bit by bit over the subsequent five years. But with LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time. Most if not all of the affected reverted features were written a long time ago when LLM-assisted code review was not as useful as it is now, meaning that the effective quality bar has been raised after the time the feature was written and committed. Unless the capabilities of LLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situation should sort itself out for future development cycles.
A corollary of that is that, at least for the most part, as far as I can tell, this situation is not due to "vibe coding". This code was written well before that was a possibility.
LWN covered the unusually large number of bug fixes required for PostgreSQL 19 features in September.
minimal but usable" 64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.
The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0.
We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone.
On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of developers, maintainers, contributors, and users who have kept so many devices alive along the way.
[...] We've been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17's release in June. Android 17's first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17's code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We're early this year!
As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless something new comes up."
One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.
Version 3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types, the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, package start-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimental JIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python 3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and the changelog for a full list of changes.
At the 2026 All Systems Go! conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek delivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of the systemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by a maintainer round table where Boccassi, Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Daan De Meyer, and project leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size, health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)
Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions of sites, has announced that it will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February 10, 2027:
This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. We will not revoke valid certificates as a part of this process.
This is the second stage of Let's Encrypt's plan, announced in 2025, to move to 45-day certificate lifetimes as required by the the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. In 2028, Let's Encrypt will switch to 45-day certificates.
Tomáš Šedovič is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team, which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals, including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes aimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how the project organizes, tracks, and amends goals. The Rust for Linux project has inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an inside view of the process might be helpful.
Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustc pattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he has noticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult to automatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling. The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessing internal information from the Rust compiler.
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