Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4 kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'".

At the 2026 edition of FOSSY, Romeo Solano gave a fast-paced, humorous presentation on what could have been a rather boring topic: server encryption. There are a number of threats that we face in today's world, from criminals, government overreach, espionage, and more, that can be thwarted with encryption. But encrypting data on a system that may live elsewhere, without any access to its keyboard at boot time, is rather more difficult than encrypting the disk of a laptop. Solano described the problems and gave a tour of some of the solutions in the talk.

Typst is a system for typesetting documents into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progress, HTML. It is adept at handling technical material, and is often considered to be an eventual LaTeX replacement. We last looked in on Typst a year ago, when it had reached version 0.13. A new version, 0.15, was released in June with lots of new features, including support for variable fonts, MathML, multiple bibliographies, and more. Typst is free, Apache-2.0-licensed software, programmed in Rust.

Python's support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over the last few years with the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language. But testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering, which adds an element of non-determinism. At PyCon US, Larry Hastings gave a talk (YouTube video) about his blanket project, which is meant to provide mechanisms for deterministic testing of multithreaded Python code.

At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.

At the outset of his PyCon US 2026 talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib instead. That's kind of a tall order, at least for longtime Python users, since string-based paths have been pervasive—and mostly work. It is that "mostly" part that makes Hunner want to see things change, of course, so he set out to describe a lesser-known corner of the language and to try to change some minds.

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds, which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN did look at the topic just over two years ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion about the subsystem at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. In it, he talked about maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the FUSE community these days it seems.

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out of the kernel. The FUSE server can use the io_uring facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single, large buffer size that is excessive for small I/O operations. He led a discussion on that topic in the filesystem track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in Zagreb, Croatia.

The famfs filesystem, which is meant to provide shared access to huge memory-resident files on CXL and other devices, returned to the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) in 2026. It was first discussed at LSFMM+BPF 2024 and a new implementation was described at the 2025 gathering, but it still has not made its way into the kernel; LWN looked at a discussion about merging famfs back in April 2026.

It should come as no surprise that a gathering of filesystem developers would discuss filesystem testing; it has been a mainstay of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit over the years and the 2026 summit was no exception. Ted Ts'o led the discussion this time; he had a few different topics to raise, including his perception of increasing regressions for ext4 in the stable kernels and what can be done to help reduce them. As with other similar sessions at the summit over the years, there is a lot of interest in collaborating on test inputs and outputs, but finding a way to centralize that information has so far eluded the filesystem community.