Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendarand alarm program Remind, hasannouncedthe release of TheBook of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-stepguide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensiveremind(1)man page. The book is free to download.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (gegl, inetutils, libvpx, nova, and python-django), Fedora (azure-cli, chromium, microcode_ctl, python-azure-core, python3.14, and roundcubemail), Red Hat (grafana and osbuild-composer), SUSE (apptainer, dnsdist, istioctl, libsoup, openCryptoki, python-nltk, python311, python313, rclone, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libvpx, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, and linux-intel-iotg).
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.19.3, 6.18.13, 6.12.74, 6.6.127, 6.1.164, 5.15.201, and 5.10.251 stable kernels. As usual, eachincludes important fixes and users are advised to upgrade.
The kernel's unloved but performance-critical swapping subsystem has beenundergoing multiple rounds of improvement in recent times. Recent articleshave described the addition of the swaptable as a new way of representing the state of the swap cache, and the removal of the swap map as the way oftracking swap space. Work in this area is not done, though; this series fromNhat Pham addresses a number of swap-related problems by replacing thenew swap table structures with a single, virtual swap space.
Douglas DeMaio has announcedthat Jeff Mahoney's new governanceproposal for openSUSE, which was published in January,is moving forward. The new structure would have three governancebodies: a new technical steering committee (TSC), a community and marketing committee (CMC), as well as the existing openSUSEboard.
The "More Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification" (AccECN) mechanism isdefined by thisRFC draft. The Linux kernel has been gaining support for AccECN withTCP over the last few releases; the 7.0 release will enable it by defaultfor general use. AccECN is a subtle change to how TCP works, but it hasthe potential to improve how traffic flows over both public and privatenetworks.
Adam Harvey, on behalf of the crates.ioteam has published a blogpost to inform users of a change in their practice of publishinginformation about malicious Rust crates:
Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have beenrapidly pervading all aspects of open-source development. Manydevelopers are embracing LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pullrequests, as well as fabricated bug and securityreports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks thateffectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming anopen-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemeda bit too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happenedrecently after a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.
Version6.6.0 of KDE's Plasma desktop environment has beenreleased. Notable additions in this release include the ability tocreate global themes for Plasma, an "extract text" feature in the Spectacle screenshotutility, accessibility improvements, and a new on-screen keyboard. Seethe changelogfor a full list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.The release is dedicated to the memory of Bjorn Balazs, a KDEcontributor who passed away in September 2025. "Bjorn's drive tohelp people achieve the privacy and control over technology that hebelieved they deserved is the stuff FLOSS legends are made of."
In December 2025, Canonical announced a plan todevelop a universal Public Key Infrastructure called upki. Jon Seager has publishedan update about the project with instructions on trying itout.
The curl project has found AI-powered tools to be a mixed bag whenit comes to security reports. At FOSDEM2026, curl creator andlead developer Daniel Stenberg used his keynote session to discuss hisexperience receiving a slew of low-quality reports and, at the sametime, realizing that large language model (LLM) tools can sometimesfind flaws that other tools have missed.
Greg-Kroah Hartman has released the 6.19.2, 6.18.12, 6.12.73, and 6.6.126 stable kernels. These kernelseach contain a single change; Kroah-Hartman has reverted oneproblematic commit that prevents some systems from booting. "If thelast stable release worked just fine, no need to upgrade."
At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo, Stephen Brennan gave apresentation on the debuginfoformat, which contains the symbols and other information needed fordebugging, along with some alternatives. Debuginfo files are large and, hebelieves, are a bit scary to customers because of the "debug" in their name.By rethinking debuginfo and the tools that use it, he hopes thatfree-software developers "can add new, interesting capabilities to toolsthat we are already using or build new interesting tools".
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.19.1, 6.18.11, 6.12.72, and 6.6.125 stable kernels. As always, eachcontains important fixes throughout the tree; users of these kernelsare advised to upgrade.
Version 9.2 of theVim text editor has been released. "Vim 9.2 brings significantenhancements to the Vim9 scripting language, improved diff mode,comprehensive completion features, and platform-specific improvementsincluding experimental Wayland support." Also included is a newinteractive tutor mode.
The merge window for Linux 7.0 has opened, and with itcomes a number of interesting improvements and enhancements. At the time ofwriting, there have been 7,695 non-merge commits accepted. The 7.0 release isnot special,according to the kernel's versioning scheme - just the releasethat comes after 6.19. Humans love symbolism and round numbers, though, so itmay feel like something of a milestone.
At FOSDEM 2026 PetyaKangalova, a senior tech partnership and engagement manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMapTeam (HOT) spoke about howthe project helps people map their surroundings to assist indisaster response and humanitarian aid. The project hasdeveloped a stack of technology to help volunteers collectively map anarea and add in local knowledge metadata. "One of the core thingsthat we believe is that when we speak about disaster response orpeople having access to data is that they really need accessibletechnology that's free and open for anyone to use."
Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots - a problem that we havewritten about before, and which has slowlyramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not goneuncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working oninventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways;iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designedto make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is tomake running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address theproblem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.
Transient devices pose a special challenge for an operating-system kernel.They can disappear at any time, leaving behind kernel data structures thatno longer refer to an existing device, but which may still be in use byunknown kernel code. Managing the resulting lifecycle issues hasfrustrated kernel developers for years. In September 2025, the revocable resource-management patch seriesfrom Tzung-Bi Shih appeared to offer a partial solution to this problem.Since then, though, other problems have arisen, and the planned merging ofthis series into the 7.0 release has been called off.
Reinhard Tartler of Debian's new DFSG,Licensing & New Packages Team, or simply "DFSG Team", has announcedthat the team is now operational and is deploying new tooling toimprove the NEW queue experience for Debian developers andmaintainers.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.71 stable kernel. He writes,"All users of the 6.12 kernel series that had issues with 6.12.69or 6.12.70 should upgrade, as some regressions are fixedhere."
Version 6.17 of the Linuxmanual-page collection has been released. Along with a long list ofupdates to the man pages themselves, it includes some new utility programsof interest.
Git is ubiquitous; in the last two decades, the version-controlsystem has truly achieved world domination. Almost every developeruses it and the vast majority of open-source projects are hosted inGit repositories. That does not mean, however, that it isperfect. Patrick Steinhardt used his main-track session at FOSDEM 2026to discuss some of its shortcomings and how they are beingaddressed to prepare Git for the next decade.
The postmarketOS projecthas publisheda recap from FOSDEM2026, including the FOSS onMobile devroom, and a summary of its post-FOSDEMhackathon. This includes decisions on governance and the project'sAI policy:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has unleashed six new stable kernels: 6.18.10, 6.6.124, 6.12.70, 6.1.163, 5.15.200, and 5.10.250. Each one contains importantfixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Matthias Clasen has published a short summary of the GTK hackfest held prior to FOSDEM2026. Topics includediscussions on unstable APIs, a decision to bump the C runtimerequirement to C11 in the next development cycle, limiting changes inGTK3 to crash and build fixes, as well as the state ofaccessibility:
Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at the NLnet Foundation, used his keynoteat FOSDEM to sound warnings forthe community for free and open-source (FOSS) software; in particular, hetalked about the threats posed by geopolitical politics, dangerousallies, and large language models (LLMs). His talk was a mix ofobservations and suggestions that pertain to FOSS in general and toEurope in particular as geopolitical tensions have mounted in recentmonths.
Linus Torvalds releasedthe 6.19 kernel on February8, as expected. This developmentcycle brought 14,344 non-merge changesets into the mainline, making it thebusiest release since 6.16 in July 2025. As usual, we have put together aset of statistics on where these changes come from, along with a quick lookat how long new kernel developers stay around.
Version3.0 of the Offpunkoffline-first, command-line web, Gemini, andGopherbrowser has been released. Notable changes in this release includeintegration of the unmerdifylibrary to "remove cruft" from web sites, the xkcdpunkstandalone tool for viewing xkcdcomics in the terminal, and a cookies command to enablebrowsing web sites (such as LWN.net) while being logged in.
Linus has released the 6.19 kernel."No big surprises anywhere last week, so 6.19 is out as expected - justas the US prepares to come to a complete standstill later todaywatching the latest batch of televised commercials."The most significant changes in 6.19 includeinitial support for Intel's linearaddress-space separation feature,support for ArmMemory system resource Partitioning And Monitoring,the listns() system call,a reworked restartable-sequencesimplementation,support for large block sizes in the ext4filesystem,some networking changes for improvedmemory safety,the live update orchestrator,and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part1, part2) and the KernelNewbies 6.19 page fordetails.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.9, 6.12.69, 6.6.123, 6.1.162, 5.15.199, and 5.10.249 stable kernels. As always, eachcontains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised toupgrade.
Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a set of techniques that make it more difficult forattackers to hijack indirect jumps to exploit a system. The Linux kernel hassupported forward-edge CFI (which protects indirect function calls)since 2020, with the most recent implementationof the feature introduced in 2022. Thatversion avoids the overhead introduced by the earlier approach by using acompiler flag (-fsanitize=kcfi) that is present in Clang but not inGCC. Now, Kees Cook hasa patch set adding that support to GCC that looks likely to land in GCC17.
LWN.net