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[$] Efficient access to local storage for BPF programs
When a BPF program is used to filter or redirect packets in the networking subsystem, the program will often want to associate data with each packet as it moves through the kernel. The kernel's local BPF storage API, which associates extra data with some kernel objects, provides a way to do that. (See also the BPF map types that end in STORAGE.) Amery Hung and Jakub Sitnicki led two sessions at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about how to make accesses to local storage data more efficient. Hung spoke about general performance problems related to locking, while Sitnicki examined the use of local storage in the networking subsystem in particular.
[$] Secure Boot certificate expiration is here
Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems rely on certificates issued by Microsoft to verify the software used to boot a system is trusted by the user. One of those certificates expired recently, but that will not cause systems that are able to boot to stop doing so. There are situations where the expiration may cause problems, however, and the window for relying on existing signed binaries is shorter than it might appear. Users and administrators will want to stay on top of these changes. Over the last year, part of my job at Microsoft has been to work on this problem. LWN wrote about the certificate expiration in July 2025, and this article follows up with where we are now.
[$] Flexible metaprogramming with Rhombus
Lisp-like languages have historically led the world in metaprogramming and flexibility. While many modern languages have adopted the idea of macros, Lisp-like languages such as Racket have continued pushing the envelope, attempting to make macros as easy as possible to incorporate into everyday programs. On the other hand, Lisp's minimal, parenthesis-based syntax can be hard to adapt to — to the point that Lisp is sometimes said to stand for "Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses". Rhombus is a new programming language that aims to have the best of both worlds, marrying Racket's metaprogramming capabilities to a simple Python-like syntax and reasonable standard-library defaults.
[$] The rest of the 7.2 merge window
Linus Torvalds released 7.2-rc1 and closed the 7.2 merge window on June 28; by that time, 13,412 non-merge commits had found their way into the mainline. That makes this the busiest merge window since the 6.7 development cycle in 2024 (15,418 commits, including 2,800 for the entire bcachefs development history). Just under half of those commits arrived after LWN's summary of the first half of the merge window was written. As usual, the commits in the latter part of the merge window were more heavily focused on fixes, but there were still a lot of new features and significant changes merged as well.
[$] Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
The xsnow application, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and other pleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obvious channel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainer seems to have included a political protest in the program: an Easter egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia ("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should be removed from the Debian xsnow package, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbid such a feature outright.
[$] Reports from OSPM 2026, day three
The Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by the historical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As has become traditional, the presenters at that event have since written summaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made available to LWN for publication. The third day's sessions covered a wide range of topics, including GPU affinity, profile-guided scheduling, paravirtualization scheduling, quality of service, and more.
[$] Initiating writeback earlier
Writeback is the process of ensuring that dirty pages or folios in the page cache are flushed to the disk, so that changes to those files are made persistent. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Jeff Layton wanted to discuss whether the writeback operation should be initiated earlier than it is today. The consensus seemed to be that it should be done earlier, but the path toward making that happen was less clear.
[$] What's coming in Git 2.55
The Git v2.55.0-rc2 testing release appeared on June 23, suggesting that the final Git 2.55 release can be expected in the near future. While this Git update lacks radical new features, it does include a number of improvements that regular Git users will appreciate, including commands to easily edit the commit history, more formatting options, fsmonitor support for Linux, and more.
[$] A look at MinIO alternatives: Ceph and Garage
MinIO is a popular object-storage server that offered compatibility with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API. In December 2025, the company behind the project (also named MinIO) announced that the project was in maintenance mode and would not accept new changes; it was archived completely in February 2026. MinIO users have been hunting for alternatives since then, but the array of choices can be baffling. While many other projects aim to fill the space, their strengths and areas of focus tend to vary. Two of the alternatives—Ceph and Garage—are particularly compelling, and both offer solid S3 compatibility.
[$] Hardening the kernel with allocation tokens and bootpatch-SLR
There is a lot of work going into eliminating exploitable bugs from the kernel and preventing the addition of new ones. Even if this work is maximally successful, though, there is no chance that the kernel will be free of these bugs anytime soon. Thus, there is also ongoing interest in hardening the kernel to make the existing bugs more difficult to exploit. The upcoming 7.2 kernel release will include a change to how dynamically allocated structures are placed in memory to make them harder to overwrite, while a project to randomize structure layout at boot time has a rather longer timeline.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (coreutils, galera and mariadb11.8, giflib, git-lfs, glibc, httpd, kernel, mariadb10.11, mod_md, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-IO-Compress, perl:5.32, rrdtool, ruby, ruby4.0, and thunderbird), Debian (debian-security-support, librabbitmq, and nginx), Fedora (chromium, collectd, maradns, python-django-haystack, python-jupytext, varnish, varnish-modules, and vmod-querystring), Oracle (firefox, git-lfs, kernel, nginx:1.24, openssl, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-IO-Compress, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (7zip, apache2, buildah, cifs-utils, curl, docker, exiv2-0_26, libonnxruntime1, libsoup, nodejs22, opensc, pacemaker, perl-Config-IniFiles, podman, sg3_utils, socat, tar, tracker, and xdg-desktop-portal), and Ubuntu (curl, hplip, libgd-perl, libssh2, libyang, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, ruby3.2, ruby3.3, and tar).
Creative Commons founders' fireside chat (Creative Commons blog)
Dee Harris has published a summary of the recent "fireside chat" featuring Creative Commons founders Hal Abelson, Lawrence (Larry) Lessig, Molly Van Houweling, and Glenn Otis Brown. The chat was to mark the 25th anniversary of Creative Commons and included a look back at its history as well as a look at the landscape today:
Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down.
The video of the chat is available on YouTube.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git-lfs, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-IO-Compress, python3.12-urllib3, and runc), Debian (sogo), Fedora (perl-DBI and perl-Socket), Oracle (firefox, freerdp, git-lfs, libsoup, libxml2, mod_md, mysql, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-IO-Compress, python, python3.12-urllib3, rsync, thunderbird, tomcat, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (389-ds, 7zip, alsa, amazon-ecs-init, amazon-ssm-agent, ansible-core, apache2, atril, avahi, bind, bitcoin, capnproto, chromedriver, chromium, cosign, distribution, dnsdist, docker, dovecot24, dracut, firefox, firewalld, freeipmi, freerdp, giflib, gimp, gleam, glib-networking, glibc, glycin-loaders, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, graphite2, gsasl, hamlib, helm, himmelblau, ignition, imagemagick, istioctl, jackson-databind, jq, jupyter-jupyterlab-templates, keylime, krb5, ldns, libaom, libcaca, libgcrypt, libheif, libinput, libjxl, libnfs, libslirp-devel, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, libssh2_org, libvncserver, libyang, lldpd, logback, loupe, mbedtls, mbedtls-2, mcphost, mozjs128, mutt, nano, nginx, ocaml, ofono, openCryptoki, opencryptoki, opensc, openssh, openssl-3, papers, perl-compress-raw-zlib, perl-config-inifiles, perl-cpanel-json-xs, perl-crypt-passwdmd5, perl-DBI, perl-dbi, perl-html-parser, perl-http-daemon, perl-libwww-perl, perl-protocol-http2, postfix, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, python-aiohttp, python-biopython, python-click, python-ecdsa, python-idna, python-markdown, python-joblib,, python-paramiko, python-pdm, python-pip, python-py7zr, python-pydata-sphinx-theme, python-pyjwt, python-python-multipart, python-starlette, python-tornado6, python311-jupyter-ydoc, rpcbind, sed, sg3_utils, sqlite3, strongswan, tar, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, trivy, unbound, util-linux, warewulf4, webkit2gtk3, xar, xwayland, yt-dlp, and zypper, libzypp, libsolv), and Ubuntu (libheif, nss, qemu, roundcube, and sqlite3).
Git 2.55.0 released
Git maintainer Junio Hamano has announced Git 2.55.0, which has non-merge commits from 100 people; 33 of those are first-time contributors to the project. LWN recently covered some of the noteworthy changes in 2.55, including new features for the experimental "git history" command, addition of the Git fsmonitor daemon for Linux systems, and more.
Open source maintainership in the age of AI (Kubernetes blog)
The Kubernetes project has published a blog post explaining its AI policy:
The main problem is that AI has made generating code fast but there has been very little improvement in maintaining code bases. In this post, we will highlight the ways the Kubernetes community is adapting to the world of AI assisted coding.
The first step of this journey was to develop an AI policy. This seems mundane and bureaucratic but there were many PRs that derailed into discussions around AI usage. The AI policy helps steer the conversation around the project's stance on AI and provides a clear signal to contributors on how to use these tools responsibly.
Of note, the project requires disclosure when AI tools have been used to assist in the creation of a contribution but forbids the use of listing AI as a co-author or including "assisted-by" or "co-developed" trailers to attribute work to an LLM tool.
Mageia 10 released
Mageia 10 has been released with the 6.18 Linux kernel, DNF 5.4.0, RPM 4.20.1, and an increase in hardware requirements for x86 32-bit systems; users now need a CPU with SSE2 features. See the release notes for a full list of updates, and the errata page for known problems.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, golang, kernel, libpng, libpng15, nginx, opencryptoki, perl-IO-Compress, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (chromium, gdcm, incus, libhtml-parser-perl, lxd, openvpn, tor, and xorg-server), Fedora (chromium, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, krita, ldns, libssh2, liferea, lighttpd, mariadb10.11, mariadb11.8, moby-engine, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, openbao, pacemaker, pgadmin4, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-jupyter-server, python-mistune, python-postorius, python-pydantic-settings, python3-docs, python3.14, thunderbird, tigervnc, tinyproxy, and util-linux), Mageia (krb5), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, fence-agents, firefox, frr, frr10, glib2, glibc, gnutls, golang, kernel, libpng, libpng15, libreoffice, libxml2, libxslt, mod_http2, mysql:8.4, nginx:1.26, openssl, php:8.3, podman, postgresql-jdbc, python3.14, redis, rsync, thunderbird, tomcat, valkey, and vim), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), and SUSE (agama-web-ui, asn1c, assimp, assimp-devel, aws-iam-authenticator, calibre, clamav, corepack24, dovecot22, exiv2, frr, giflib, glances-common, google-osconfig-agent, GraphicsMagick, gvim, haproxy, hydra, ImageMagick, jupyter-nbclassic, kernel, libsoup, libsoup2, libssh2-1, nano, NetworkManager-applet-openvpn, nodejs22, openbabel, opensc, openssl-3, pacemaker, python, python-base, python-doc, python311-pdm, python311-py7zr, python311-pypdf, python36, tar, trivy, util-linux, xen, and xtrabackup).
Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc1
The 7.2-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus said: "So two weeks have passed, and the merge window is
closed. Things look reasonably normal for this release (knock wood).
"
Three stable kernel updates
The 7.1.2, 7.0.14, and 6.18.37 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively small number of important fixes. Note that 7.0.14 is the end of the 7.0.x series.
Lots of stories about systemd v261
Lennart Poettering has posted a list of Mastodon posts about the changes in the systemd v261 release. The Mastodon format makes the reading harder, but there is a lot of useful information there.