Version3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changesin this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types,the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, packagestart-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimentalJIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and thechangelogfor a full list of changes.
While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood ofvulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reportsfrom happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is theterm for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flowof control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Kees Cookpresented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFIfor the kernel.
At the 2026 All Systems Go!conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jdrzejewski-Szmekdelivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of thesystemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by amaintainer round table where Boccassi, Jdrzejewski-Szmek, Daan DeMeyer, andproject leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size,health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)
Let'sEncrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions ofsites, has announced thatit will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February10,2027:
Toma edovi is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads thegoals team, which helpsorganize the Rust project'soverall goals, including making sure that the peoplewho have agreed to work on one have the support they need.At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processesaimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how theproject organizes, tracks, and amends goals.TheRust for Linux projecthas inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an insideview of the process might be helpful.
The kernel's swap layer has undergone somesignificant changes over the course of the last year and a number oflongstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has notyet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swapcache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highlyinefficient resource use. There are two competing solutions for thisproblem, neither of which has, as yet, reached readiness for merging; alengthy discussion on possible paths forward shows ongoing disagreementover the best path forward.
Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustcpattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he hasnoticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult toautomatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling.The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessinginternal information from the Rust compiler.
The extensible scheduler class, whichenables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burstof innovation in this area; theLAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulersto emerge. Though it was originally designedfor gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grown to serveother types of workloads as well. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Changwoo Minand Gavin Guo presented an overview of this scheduler and how it hasevolved over time.
Python's randomand secretsmodules both include utilities for obtaining random values, but only one of them is suitable for generating passwords and security tokens.For much of Python's history, random was used for passwords and tokens anyway, despite documentation that called it unsuitable for cryptography.In 2015, Python's core team debated whether to fix that misuse by making random secure by default.Instead, in 2016, Python 3.6 added a second module: secrets. Therandom module is still misused at times, so it is instructiveto look into how the random-number modules should be used.
Chromium, the open-sourceupstream project for Google's Chrome web browser, is the browser of choice formany Linux users. It has also gained a reputation as being difficult for Linux distributions topackage and build: Chromium has a complex build system, the project bundlesmany of its dependencies, and it has frequent releases. All of that, plus usercomplaints, has led the maintainers of the Gentoo Chromiumpackage to give up on trying to maintain the package.
Version 10.6 of OpenSSHhas been released. The announcement notes that the OpenSSH team has beenreceiving a large number of AI-assisted security bug reports. "We very muchwelcome these reports, especially when combined with human triage, analysis,test-cases and particularly when accompanied by proposed fixes". As aresult, the project expects to be making more frequent releases to get updatesto users more quickly rather than batching the bug fixes until the next plannedrelease.Notable changes in this release include enabling the hybrid post-quantumssh-mldsa44-ed25519 signature algorithm, addition of a -p option for sftp's lmkdir/mkdir commands, as wellas disabling the LZ77 dictionary coder in ssh and sshd to mitigate side-channelleaks (which will result in reduced effectiveness of the Compressionoption). The scp-R option, whichallows copies between two remote hosts, is being deprecated due to securityrisks; the option will be ignored in the future. See the announcement for fulldetails of all changes and bug fixes.
The Rust Foundation has posted therecordings fromRustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada.Photos of the event are also available. LWN coveredfour talks from RustConf this year.
Patch review has long been one of the limiting constraints for the kernelproject (and most others); there just aren't enough people to properlyreview all of the code that is submitted for inclusion. The Sashikosystem, which uses a large language model (LLM) to generate reviewsautomatically, offers the prospect of some relief, and has already becomean important part of the kernel's development process. At the 2026 editionof Kernel Recipes, RomanGushchin, the maintainer of Sashiko, provided an overview of howthe system works and what is being done to improve it.
Version3.0 of the MusicBrainz Picardtag editor has been released. "This release brings many changes, including anupgrade to Qt6, a completely new plugin system, several improvements to the userinterface, cover art processing, [International Standard RecordingCode(ISRC)] submission and many more."LWN covered Picard inApril.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.9, 6.18.55,6.12.112, 6.6.158, 6.1.189,5.15.222, and 5.10.271 stable kernels. Each contains a largenumber of important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Rust has a number of kinds of smart pointers, both in the standardlibrary and defined by users. Still, some operations that are possible withbuilt-in references are not possible to perform with user-defined smartpointers. Tyler Mandry, lead of the Rust project'slanguage team, spoke atRustConf 2026 about the lengthy effort to change that, and make smart pointersjust as flexible as built-in references.
The Linux TestProject has announced itslatest stable release for September2026. There have been382 patchesfrom41 authors since the May2026release. See the announcement for a list of new tests, changes, andmore.
By now it is no secret that large language models (LLMs) have made it easyfor people to identify security bugs, and that has resulted in a flood ofbug reports to almost every free-software project, including the kernel.At the 2026 edition of KernelRecipes, Greg Kroah-Hartman took the stage to talk about how thekernel's security team is handling this deluge. His core message was"don't panic".
Version1.99.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this timeinclude support for extern "C" variadic functions, theestablishment of functions for obtaining the size and alignment of rawpointers, a number of stabilized APIs, and more.
A lot has happened in the KDEPlasma desktop environment in the last year. Marco Martin, a KDE contributorwho spends most of his time working on Plasma, took the stage at Akademy 2026 in Graz, Austria to givean update on Plasma's major new features, some of the minor-but-interestingones, and a preview of what's coming soon. The biggest upcoming change, droppingX11 support from Plasma, has been well-advertised; but there are also plansafoot to further improve remote-desktop support and more.
The full setof videos from the recently concluded Kernel Recipes conferencehas been posted. Also noteworthy are the associated caricature drawings,by Frank Tizzoni, of attendeesand thespeakers.
The 2026 Python Language Summit was held on July 14 in Krakow, Poland;there is now aseries of reports available on the topics that were discussed there.They include the memory buffer protocol, garbage collection, free-threadedPython, and "Spicycrab".
Sharon Yang is a Chromium developer who worked at Google on the browserand now works on it at Igalia. On the final day of FOSSY 2026, she gave apresentation on her experiences with both of those companies, comparing andcontrasting the ways the each operates and how that affects work on thecode base. She enjoyed working at Google and feels the same about Igalia,so the talk was not aimed at complaints-instead it was meant to give a feelfor two companies that are rather different.
The election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Boardwill be held electronically after the close of the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference. The call forcandidates is open, with a nomination deadline of October7.There are five seats to fill this time, including the one vacated by theunfortunate 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 foran overview of what the TAB does and why membership is rewarding, thenconsider putting in your nomination.
Version157.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. It features"Firefox's biggest visual refresh in years", the ability to usehardware AV1 decoding with WebRTC calls, and a number of fixes.
Christian Legnitto is the maintainer ofrust-gpu andRust CUDA, twolibraries that make it possible to program a computer's graphics processing unit(GPU) from Rust. He isn't satisfied with the current state of GPU support inRust, however. In a talk atRustConf 2026, he explained his vision for how theGPU could become an ordinary compiler target for normal Rust code, without theneed for any special libraries or new ecosystem support. That vision is not yetfully implemented, but he does have a prototype that he is preparing to release.
Andres Freund has a few claims to fame, butchief among them is his many years of work to improve the performance ofthe PostgreSQL relational databasemanagement system. That work requires working with - or around - manyLinux kernel features and behaviors. He put in an appearance at the 2026edition of Kernel Recipesto talk about his experience working with the kernel project, how thekernel could better support applications like PostgreSQL, and someinteresting developments in the PostgreSQL world.
Version 2.56 of the Git distributedversion-control system has been released. It has 748 non-merge commitssince Git 2.55 was released back inJune; those commits came from 104 developers, 39 of whom are first-timecontributors. New features include a safer workflow for conflictresolution, smaller path-walk repacks, a new git history dropsub-command, and much more. LWN looked at Git2.56 recently and the GitHub blog has a lengthylook at 2.56 as well.
As a professor of biomedical engineering, Martin Uecker perhaps does notfit the profile of a typical presenter at Kernel Recipes. He is,however, a longtime Linux user, and works on free software for controllingmagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. He was at the conference totalk about the C programming language, the specific problem of undefinedbehavior in C, and whether it can eventually be made into a memory-safelanguage.
The 7.3-rc5 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. Linus said: "I don't think there's any real pattern to itother than 'big'. But nothing looks particularly alarming, I think thatdespite the diffstat it's just the same old, same old."
Version 18.1 of the GDB interactive debugger has been released. Changesinclude new commands to manipulate the environment of the subprocess, theability to save the command history to a file, support for a couple of newtargets, several Python API additions, and more. See theNEWS file for the complete list.
The Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) isinvesting nearly 1.3 millionin KDE through 2027. At Akademy 2026in Graz, Austria, Nate Graham and Kevin Ottens, two of the contributors whohelped bring in the investment, explained how the funding was secured, providedtips on how projects should approach organizations like STA, and talked abouthow that money will be improving KDE for everyone. In addition to keeping thecommunity informed about the work, the pair hoped to pass on what they have learnedto encourage others to help raise funds for development as well.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.8 and 6.18.54stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree;users are advised to upgrade.
Johannes Schindelin has posted a detailedsummary of the discussions held at the 2026 Git Contributors' Summit.Topics covered include Git3.0, security process, documentation, thepluggable object database, use of LLMs, and more.
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