The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, usually just called CERN, is not only the birthplace of the World Wide Web, it is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. As such, its computing environment is both truly unique and of great interest to people outside of CERN who hope to find lessons applicable to their own computing needs. The upcoming migration of some of CERN's systems from CentOS Linux to Debian, which was the topic of a talk at the recent MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026, is of particular interest.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

The restartable sequences feature is one of the stranger corners of the kernel's user-space interface; it provides a way for user space to carry out simple lockless operations and be informed if it is preempted over the course of an operation (and must, thus, restart). Work merged in the 6.19 release to improve the performance of restartable sequences broke the TCMalloc allocator, which was relying on an undocumented (and unintended) kernel behavior. Now, Olivier Dion is proposing an addition to the restartable-sequences API that will bring TCMalloc back into the fold; it does not make the restartable-sequences API any less strange, though.

Version 2026.08 of the Buildroot embedded Linux system builder has been released. Buildroot 2026.08 includes nearly 1,000 changes from 100 contributors; some of the notable changes include support for Linux 7.1.x, Binutils 2.46.1, GCC 16.2.0, glibc 2.44, as well as adding the M68K and IBM Power 10/11 architectures.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, freerdp, gegl04, go-fdo-client, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, and pipewire), Debian (aom, chromium, libde265, libssh2, thunderbird, and tryton-server), Fedora (chromium, composer, cosmic-greeter, gegl04, greetd, ibus-table, jss, libheif, lightdm, lxdm, memcached, perl-DBD-Pg, plasma-login-manager, rust-webbrowser, sddm, selinux-policy, slitherer, and tkimg), Mageia (expat, mingw-expat, mbedtls, microcode, python-linkify-it-py, and tomcat), Oracle (buildah, container-tools:ol8, dbus-broker, freerdp, go-toolset:ol8, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-uek, nodejs24, php, and pipewire), Slackware (libpcap, libxml2, mozilla-firefox, mozilla-thunderbird, and util-linux), SUSE (bson-devel, busybox, bzip2, c-ares, cpio, cups-filters, dracut, ffmpeg-7, ffmpeg-8, file-roller, firefox, firefox-esr, glances-common, grafana, hauler, helm, helm3, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, lcms2, libcupsfilters, libheif, libmsgpack-c2, libsoup, libsoup2, libusb-1_0, libvirt, LibVNCServer, mcphost, ollama, opencode, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, php-composer2, podman, postgresql15, postgresql17, postgresql18, python, python-aiohttp, python-h2, python-sqlparse, python310, rpcbind, sssd, thunderbird, trivy, ucode-intel, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-7.0, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-hwe-7.0, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-fips, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-realtime, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gcp-7.0, linux-oem-7.0, minetest, and miniupnpd).

The Asahi Linux project has announced that support for Apple's M3-series chips has been added to the Asahi installer.

Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months. Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now.

See the blog post for other current limitations of M3 support.

The 7.3-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said:

This didn't *feel* like a particularly busy rc2, but it clearly was. rc2 is usually the quietest time when people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to start finding bugs. But not this time - this is a "full fat" rc release. [...]

Nothing looks particularly odd, even if the rc2 timing is a bit unusual. It might be just random, but we'll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that's really the cause or not, it's an easy thing to blame ;)