Security updates have been issued by Debian (containerd, mako, and xen), Fedora (forgejo, nextcloud, openbao, rclone, restic, and tigervnc), Oracle (firefox, kernel, libtiff, libxml2, and postgresql), SUSE (libecpg6, lightdm-kde-greeter, python-cbor2, python-mistralclient-doc, python315, and python39), and Ubuntu (kdeconnect, linux, linux-aws, linux-realtime, python-django, and unbound).
FreeBSD15.0 has been released. Notable changes in this release include a newmethod for installingthe base system using the pkg package manager, an updateto OpenZFS2.4.0-rc4,native support for the inotify(2)interface, and the addition of Open Container Initiative (OCI) imagesto FreeBSD's release artifacts. See the releasenotes for a full list of changes, hardwarenotes for supported hardware, and check the erratabefore installing or upgrading.
The designers of theZig programming language have been working to find asuitable design for asynchronous code for some time.Zig is a carefully minimalist language, and itsinitial design forasynchronous I/O did not fit well with its otherfeatures. Now, the project hasannounced (in a Zig SHOWTIME video) a new approach to asynchronous I/O thatpromises to solve thefunction coloring problem, and allows writing code that will executecorrectly using either synchronous or asynchronous I/O.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (gnutls, libpng, mingw-python3, python-spotipy, source-to-image, unbound, and webkitgtk), Mageia (libpng), SUSE (bash-git-prompt, gitea-tea, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, openssh, python, and shadowsocks-v2ray-plugin, v2ray-core), and Ubuntu (binutils, openjdk-17-crac, openjdk-21-crac, and openjdk-25-crac).
There are many possible programmer mistakes that are not caught by theminimal checks specified by the C language; among those is passing an arrayof the wrong size to a function. A recent attempt to add some safetyaround array parameters within the crypto layer involved the use of someclever tricks, but it turns out that clever tricks are unnecessary in thiscase. There is an obscure C feature that can cause this checking tohappen, and it is already in use in a few places within the kernel.
Linus Torvalds releasedthe 6.18 kernel as expected on November30, closing the last fulldevelopment cycle of 2025. It was another busy cycle, featuring a recordnumber of developers. The time has come for a look at where the code camefrom for this kernel release, but also for the year-long long-term-supportcycle which has also reached its conclusion with this release.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.10, 6.12.60, and 6.6.118 stable kernels. As usual, eachcontains a number of important fixes throughout the tree. Users areadvised to upgrade.
Version25.11 of the NixOS distribution has been released. "The 25.11release was made possible due to the efforts of 2742 contributors, whoauthored 59430 commits since the previous release". Changes include7,002 new packages, GNOME49, LLVM21, a new COSMIC desktopenvironment beta, firewalld support, and more; see therelease notes for details.
AlmaLinux 10.1 has been released. Inaddition to providing binary compatibility with Red Hat EnterpriseLinux (RHEL)10.1, the most notable feature in AlmaLinux10.1 isthe addition of supportfor Btrfs, which is not available in RHEL:
It is rarely newsworthy when a project or package picks up a newdependency. However, changes in a core tool like Debian's Advanced PackageTool (APT) can have far-reaching effects. For example, JulianAndres Klode's declarationthat APT would require Rust in May 2026 means that a few of Debian'sunofficial ports must either acquire a working Rust toolchain ordepend on an old version of APT. This has raised several questionswithin the project, particularly about the ability of a singlemaintainer to make changes that have widespread impact.
The Racket programming languageproject has released Racketversion 9.0. Racket is a descendant of Scheme, so it is part of the Lisp family of languages. The headline feature in the release is parallelthreads, which adds to the concurrency tools in the language: "WhileRacket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism viafutures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition."Other new features include the black-boxwrapper to prevent the compiler from optimizing calculations away, the decompile-linkletfunction to map linkletsback to an s-expression, theaddition of Weibulldistributions to the math library, and more.
Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists,is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, butthere has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP798 ("Unpacking inComprehensions") was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In earlyNovember, the steering council acceptedthe PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python3.15 inOctober2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is aninconsistency that has been apparent for a while-to the point that some Python programmersassume that it is already present in the language.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang), Debian (webkit2gtk), Oracle (expat and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (chromium, grub2, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, imagemagick, and libcupsfilters).
In July, Collabora announcedthe Rust-based TyrGPU driver for Arm MaliGPUs. Daniel Almeida has posted an updateon progress with a prototype of the driver running on a Rock 5B boardwith the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip:
BPF allows programs uploaded from user space to be run, safely, within thekernel. The io_uring subsystem, too, can be thought of as a way of loadingprograms in the kernel, though the programs in question are mostly asequence of I/O-related system calls. It has sometimes seemed inevitablethat io_uring would, like many other parts of the kernel, gain BPFcapabilities as a way of providing more flexibility to user space. Thathas not yet happened, but there are currently two patch sets underconsideration that take different approaches to the problem.
The Linux kernelsupports a large number of architectures.Not all of those are supported by Linux distributions, but Debian does supportmany of them, officially or unofficially. On October 26, Bastian Blankopened a discussion about the minimum version of these architecturesthat Debian should support: in particular, raising the de-facto minimumversions in the next Debian release ("forky"). Thread participants were generally in favor ofkeeping support for older architecture variants, but didn't reach a firmconclusion.
In mid-October, the Xubuntudownload site was compromised and had directed users to a maliciouszip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. ElizabethK. Joseph has publisheda postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breachin the future:
Recordings from the GStreamerConference 2025, held in London in late October, are nowavailable on the GStreamer Conferences Archive site. Includes theGStreamerState of the Union talk by Tim-Philipp Muller, Stateof MPEG 2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) by Edward Hervey, and manyothers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (pdfminer), Fedora (chromium and firefox), Mageia (bubblewrap, flatpak, cups-filters, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, and squid), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (gimp, itextpdf, kernel, thunderbird, and unbound), and Ubuntu (lasso).
Version5.0 of the Blender animation system has been released. Notableimprovements include improved color management, HDR capabilities, anda new storyboarding template. See the releasenotes for a lengthy list of new features and changes, and the bugfixespage for the 588 commits that fixed bugs in Blender 4.5 or older.
There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changingthe list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries forsome versions of those architectures.Ubuntu introduced architecture variants, Fedoraconsidered dropping support for i686 butreversed course after some pushback, and Debian developershave discussed raising its architecture baseline for the upcomingDebian 14("forky").Linux supports a large number of architectures, and it's not alwaysclear where or by whom they are used. With increasing concerns about diminishing support for legacyarchitectures, it's a good time to look at the overall state of architecturesupport on Linux.
The Homebrew project is anopen-source package-management system that comes with a repository ofuseful packages for Linux and macOS. Even though Linux distributionshave their own package management and repositories, Homebrew is oftenused to obtain software that is not available in a distribution's repositoryor to install more current versions of projects than are availablefrom long-term-support (LTS) distributions. Homebrew 5.0.0,released on November 12, 2025, expanded Linux support to include64-bit Arm packages in addition to x86_64, and turned on concurrentdownloads by default to speed up package downloads.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libwebsockets), Fedora (chromium and fvwm3), Mageia (apache, firefox, and postgresql13, postgresql15), Oracle (idm:DL1), Red Hat (bind, bind9.18, firefox, and openssl), SUSE (alloy, ghostscript, and openssl-1_0_0), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg and freeglut).
Version 2.52.0 of the Gitsource-code management system has been released. Changes include a newlast-modified command to find the closest ancestor commit thattouched one or more paths, a couple of git refs improvements, anew git repo command for obtaining information about therepository itself, and more. See the announcement and thisGitHub blog entry for more information.
For better or for worse, the NUMA node is the abstraction used by thekernel to keep track of different types of memory. How that abstraction isused, though, is still an active area of development. Two patch setsfocused on this problem are currently under review; one addresses theperennial problem of promoting heavily used folios from slower to fastermemory, while the other aims to improve the kernel's handling of nodescontaining special memory installed for a specific purpose.
Linus has released 6.18-rc6 for testing."So we have a slightly larger rc6 than usual, but I think it's just therandom noise and a result of pull request timings rather than due to anyissues with the release. But I guess we have a couple of weeks remaining tofind out."
One of the many objectives of the LinuxKernel Self-Protection Project (KSPP), which just completed ten years ofwork, is to ensure that all array references can be bounds-checked,even in the case of flexible array members, the size of which is not knownat compile time. One of the most challenging flexible array members in thekernel is not even declared as such. Almost exactly one year ago, LWN looked at the effort to increase safety aroundthe networking subsystem's heavily used sockaddr structure. Oneyear later, Kees Cook is still looking for a way to bring this work to aclose.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.8 and 6.12.58 stable kernels. Each contains animportant set of fixes. Users are advised to upgrade.
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