The full set of videos from the recently concluded Kernel Recipes conference has been posted. Also noteworthy are the associated caricature drawings, by Frank Tizzoni, of attendees and the speakers.

The 2026 Python Language Summit was held on July 14 in Kraków, Poland; there is now a series of reports available on the topics that were discussed there. They include the memory buffer protocol, garbage collection, free-threaded Python, and "Spicycrab".

The election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board will be held electronically after the close of the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference. The call for candidates is open, with a nomination deadline of October 8. There are five seats to fill this time, including the one vacated by the unfortunate passing of Dan Williams.

Serving on the TAB is a good way to help the kernel-development community. Please see this article from last year for an overview of what the TAB does and why membership is rewarding, then consider putting in your nomination.

Version 157.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. It features "Firefox's biggest visual refresh in years", the ability to use hardware AV1 decoding with WebRTC calls, and a number of fixes.

Andres Freund has a few claims to fame, but chief among them is his many years of work to improve the performance of the PostgreSQL relational database management system. That work requires working with — or around — many Linux kernel features and behaviors. He put in an appearance at the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes to talk about his experience working with the kernel project, how the kernel could better support applications like PostgreSQL, and some interesting developments in the PostgreSQL world.

As a professor of biomedical engineering, Martin Uecker perhaps does not fit the profile of a typical presenter at Kernel Recipes. He is, however, a longtime Linux user, and works on free software for controlling magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. He was at the conference to talk about the C programming language, the specific problem of undefined behavior in C, and whether it can eventually be made into a memory-safe language.

The 7.3-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "I don't think there's any real pattern to it other than 'big'. But nothing looks particularly alarming, I think that despite the diffstat it's just the same old, same old."

Version 18.1 of the GDB interactive debugger has been released. Changes include new commands to manipulate the environment of the subprocess, the ability to save the command history to a file, support for a couple of new targets, several Python API additions, and more. See the NEWS file for the complete list.

Johannes Schindelin has posted a detailed summary of the discussions held at the 2026 Git Contributors' Summit. Topics covered include Git 3.0, security process, documentation, the pluggable object database, use of LLMs, and more.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Git 2.56; gccrs; NetBSD and compat_linux; io_uring; Desktop UX.
• Briefs: WordPress vulnerability; Radicle vulnerability; Systemtap 5.6; GNOME 51; Systemd v262; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Git source-code management system is at the core of development processes worldwide, so changes, especially incompatible changes, are of great interest to the developers involved. The Git 2.56 release, which can be expected around the end of September, is currently available in release-candidate form. It is not the most earth-shaking of releases, but the one that follows, which might be the long-awaited Git 3.0, may well be.

Version 5.6 of the Systemtap tracing tool has been released.

BPF LSM hooks and XDP packet-processing probes for the --bpf runtime, BTF-based kernel.tracepoint probes, statement execution tracing, a new @enumname() operator, richer runtime error context, dyninst hardware watchpoints, modern systemd service templates, and broad Linux 7.2 runtime/tapset compatibility work. Multithreaded speedups throughout.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, coreutils, kernel, libevent, libsoup3, microcode_ctl, perl-Net-DNS, postgresql18, postgresql:16, postgresql:18, tomcat, and unbound), Debian (bind9, chromium, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, nginx, xz-utils, and zip), Fedora (chromium, freeipmi, GitPython, gnatcoll, nodejs-undici, parted, python-django5, and sblim-cmpi-base), Mageia (imagemagick and python-starlette), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, coreutils, corosync, firewalld, kernel, libevent, libsoup, microcode_ctl, nginx:1.24, perl, perl:5.32, postgresql:16, postgresql:18, redis, rsync, rsyslog, tesseract, and unbound), Red Hat (vim), SUSE (alsa, chirp, chromium, cjose, cups, discount, firefox, gh, glibc, gvfs, jq, kernel, libcjose-devel, libmbedcrypto7, libpcap, mbedtls-2, netcdf, nodejs18, openai-codex, openvpn, pcre2, perl-net-dns, sngrep, tiff, and znc), and Ubuntu (bison, bubblewrap, and gst-plugins-good1.0).

The io_uring subsystem is all about asynchronous execution; applications count on it to not block — unless explicitly requested to. Within io_uring, maintaining the "never blocks" guarantee has sometimes been a challenge, given that many paths in the kernel were never designed for asynchronous execution. This problem has been worked around, but at a significant cost to performance. Now, io_uring maintainer Jens Axboe has posted an RFC patch set with a somewhat radical (and potentially scary) solution to the problem.

Version 51 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. The list of changes includes a number of performance improvements, offline data and better transit information in the Maps application, a new interface for the file previewer, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, corosync, firewalld, kernel, kernel-rt, libevent, libsoup, microcode_ctl, nginx:1.26, python-lxml, rsyslog, tesseract, and unbound), Debian (firefox-esr, mkvtoolnix, thunderbird, and tor), Fedora (open62541, php-pecl-mongodb2, python-django6, python-jwcrypto, and roundcubemail), Mageia (aom, cockpit, libgd, packagekit, and python-h2), Red Hat (corosync, delve, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, libvirt, opentelemetry-collector, and rhc-worker-playbook), Slackware (mozilla-firefox and mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (acl, attr, alloy, ansible-core, clamav, containerized-data-importer, corosync, cups, distribution, glibc, google-cloud-sap-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, gvfs, helm, jq, kbd, kubernetes1.34-apiserver, kubernetes1.35-apiserver, lcms2, libcupsfilters, liblzmasdk26, libzypp, zypper, mistral-vibe, opensc, openvpn, pcre2, python-jwcrypto, tomcat, tomcat10, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (guix, libheif, perl, python-cryptography, sqlite3, and valkey).

The Register looks forward to the upcoming Fedora 45 release.

The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libkcapi, nginx, nginx:1.24, openssl, osbuild-composer, perl, perl:5.32, python-tornado, rsync, and rust), Debian (cjose and nginx), Fedora (environment-modules, erlang, GitPython, knot, perl-Authen-SASL, python-configargparse, ruby, rubygems, and sblim-sfcb), Oracle (firefox, git-lfs, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, libkcapi, nginx, nginx:1.26, openssl, osbuild-composer, perl, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql18, python-tornado, and rust), Red Hat (fence-agents, git-lfs, microcode_ctl, osbuild-composer, podman, python-pyasn1, and resource-agents), SUSE (389-ds, ant, bson-devel, chirp-20260911, docker, gimp, google-cloud-sap-agent, hauler, kernel, kimi-code, libpcap, python-GitPython, python310, syncthing, yast2-samba-client, and zstd-jni), and Ubuntu (aom, imagemagick, kitty, openssh, phpseclib, policykit-1, python-sql, python-webob, shibboleth-sp, simplesamlphp, snapcast, srt, and suricata-update).

The scheduling of block I/O requests has long been a challenge for operating-system kernels. For many years, the performance characteristics of rotating drives meant that putting considerable resources into request ordering was worthwhile. In a world with fast, solid-state drives, scheduling is more concerned with enforcing fairness between competing users while being fast enough to keep up with drives that can perform millions of I/O operations per second. The blk-iocost I/O controller was designed for the solid-state world and generally performs well, but there is always a desire to do better. This patch series from Tao Cui aims to make blk-iocost more flexible by enabling the loading of a BPF program to make cost decisions.

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