The second 7.1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "It's not small, and while it's a bit early to say for sure, I do suspect we're seeing the same continued pattern of more patches than usual - probably due to AI tooling - that we saw in 7.0."

Hyrum's Law states that any observable behavior of a system will eventually be depended upon by somebody. The kernel community is currently contending with a clear demonstration of that principle. The recent work to address some restartable-sequences performance problems in the 6.19 release maintained the documented API in all respects, but that was not enough; Google's TCMalloc library, as it turns out, violates the documented API, prevents other code from using restartable features, and breaks with 6.19. But the kernel's no-regressions rule is forcing developers to find a way to accommodate TCMalloc's behavior.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Famfs; Python packaging council; Zig concurrency; pages and folios; Strawberry music manager; 7.1 merge window.
• Briefs: GnuPG 2.5.19; Copy Fail; Plasma security; Fedora 44; Ubuntu 26.04; Niri 26.04; pip 26.1; RIP Seth Nickell; RIP Tomáš Kalibera; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.1-rc1 and closed the 7.1 merge window, 12,996 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository; just over 9,000 of those arrived after the first-half summary was written. These changes were more driver-oriented than those seen earlier, but still also included many new features across the kernel as a whole.

Linus has released 7.1-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release.

Things look fairly normal, although we do have a few different projects to cull some old hardware support to help minimize maintenance burden: phasing out i486 support (configs deleted, code deletions to follow) and independently starting to remove some really old networking hardware support, and removing some SoC support that never went anywhere.

But we're more than making up for any stale code removal with all the new features and code added, so the diffstat still shows many more lines added than removed.

The kernel coverage here at LWN often touches on memory-management topics and, as a result, tends to talk a lot about both pages and folios. As the folio transition in the kernel has moved forward, it has often become difficult to decide which term to use in writing that is meant to be both approachable and technically correct. As this work continues, it will be increasingly common to use "folio" rather than page. This article is intended to be a convenient reference for readers wanting to differentiate the two terms or understand the state of this transition.

The famfs filesystem first showed up on the mailing lists in early 2024; since then, it has been the topic of regular discussions at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit. It has also, as result of those discussions, been through some significant changes since that initial posting. So it is not surprising that a suggestion that it needed to be rewritten yet again was not entirely well received. How much more rewriting will actually be needed is unclear, but more discussion appears certain.

There are a number of ongoing efforts to remove kernel code, mostly from the networking subsystem, as an alternative to dealing with the increase in security-bug reports from large language models. The proposed removals include ISA and PCMCIA Ethernet drivers, a pair of PCI drivers, the ax25 and amateur radio subsystem, the ATM protocols and drivers, and the ISDN subsystem.

Remove the amateur radio (AX.25, NET/ROM, ROSE) protocol implementation and all associated hamradio device drivers from the kernel tree. This set of protocols has long been a huge bug/syzbot magnet, and since nobody stepped up to help us deal with the influx of the AI-generated bug reports we need to move it out of tree to protect our sanity.

This Firefox blog post reports that the Firefox 150 release includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities found by the Claude Mythos preview.

Elite security researchers find bugs that fuzzers can't largely by reasoning through the source code. This is effective, but time-consuming and bottlenecked on scarce human expertise. Computers were completely incapable of doing this a few months ago, and now they excel at it. We have many years of experience picking apart the work of the world's best security researchers, and Mythos Preview is every bit as capable. So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't.

This can feel terrifying in the immediate term, but it's ultimately great news for defenders. A gap between machine-discoverable and human-discoverable bugs favors the attacker, who can concentrate many months of costly human effort to find a single bug. Closing this gap erodes the attacker's long-term advantage by making all discoveries cheap.