Version2025.9 of the Home Assistant home automation system has been released.Changes include a new experimental dashboard that is eventually meant tobecome the default, a number of tile-card improvements, a reworkedautomation editor, several new integrations, and more.
Version25.08 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has beenreleased. Notable changes include xwayland-satelliteintegration, modal exit confirmation, and the introduction of basicsupport for screen readers:
Version12.4 of Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Beyond Linux From Scratch(BLFS) have been released. LFSprovides step-by-step instructions on building a customized Linuxsystem entirely from source, and BLFS helps to extend an LFSinstallation into a more usable system. Notable changes in thisrelease include updates to GNU Binutils 2.45, GCC 15.2, GNU C Library(glibc) 2.42, and Linux 6.15.1. See the Changelogfor all updates since 12.3.
The Linux kernel has to handle many different sources of data that should notbe trusted: user space, network connections, and removable storage, to name afew. The kernel has to remain secure even if one of these sends garbled (ormalicious) data. Benno Lossin has been working on an API for kernel Rust codethat makes it harder to accidentally make decisions based on data from user space. That workis now on itsfourth revision, and Lossin has asked kernel developers to experiment withit and see where problems remain, making this a good time to look at the proposed API.
During the opening of RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington,the Rust Foundation announced a new initiative to provide financial and administrative support to open-source Rust projects. The first project to benefit from the new Rust Innovation Lab isRustls, an implementation of TLS in Rust. The foundation welcomes inquiries from other projects. Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, Executive Director of the Rust Foundation said:
Cary Coutant has announceda draft for version 4.3 of theExecutable and Linking Format (ELF) object file format. Thespecification was formerly part of the Unix SystemV Release 4 (SVR4) gABI document:
As a rule, if a package is shipped with a Debian release, users cancount on it being available, and updated, for the entirelife of the release. If package foo is included in the stablerelease-currently Debian13("trixie")-a user canreasonably expect that it will continue to be available with securitybackports as long as that release is supported, though it may not beincluded in Debian14 ("forky"). However, it is likely that theGuix package manager will soonbe removed from the repositories for Debian13 andDebian12 ("bookworm", also called oldstable).
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, mod_http2, postgresql, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9), Debian (libsndfile), Mageia (ceph, glibc, and golang), Oracle (postgresql and python39:3.9), Red Hat (aide, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), SUSE (git, govulncheck-vulndb, jetty-minimal, nginx, python-future, and ruby2.5), and Ubuntu (imagemagick).
Arnd Bergmann started his OpenSource Summit Europe 2025 talk with a clear statement of position: 32-bitsystems are obsolete when it comes to use in any sort of new products. Theonly reason to work with them at this point is when there is existinghardware and software to support. Since Bergmann is the overall maintainerfor architecture support in the kernel, he is frequently asked whether32-bit support can be removed. So, he concluded, the time has come to talkmore about that possibility.
Linus has released 6.17-rc4 for testing."So it all looks fairly good.Please do keep testing, and we'll get 6.17 out in a timely manner andin good shape."
Linus Torvalds has quietly changedthe maintainer status of bcachefs to "externally maintained",indicating that further changes are unlikely to enter the mainline anytimesoon. This change also suggests, though, that the immediate removal ofbcachefs from the mainline kernel is not in the cards.
Keynote sessions at Open Source Summit events tend not to allow much time fordetailed talks, and the 2025 OpenSource Summit Europe did not diverge from that pattern. Even so,Daniel Stenberg, the maintainer of the curlproject, managed to cram a lot into the 15minutes given to him.Like the maintainers of many other projects, Stenberg is feeling somestress, and the problems appear to be getting worse over time.
The next release of systemd has been percolating for an unusuallylong time. Systemd releases are usually about six months apart, butv257 came out inDecember2024, and v258 just now seems to be nearing the finishline; the third release candidate for v258 was published onAugust20 (releasenotes). Now is a good time to dig in and take a look at some ofthe new features, enhancements, and removals coming soon tosystemd. These include new workload-management features, a concept formultiple home-directory environments, and the final, once-and-for-allremoval of support for controlgroups version1.
Attendees at EuroPython had the chance to preview part ofPython: The Documentary during akeynote panel. The full film, created by CultRepo, is now available on YouTube:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.4, 6.12.44, 6.6.103, 6.1.149, 5.15.190, 5.10.241, and 5.4.297 stable Linux kernels. Each onecontains important fixes.
The GNOME project, which recently celebrated its28th birthday, has never had a formal technical governance; progresshas been driven by individuals and groups that advocated for-and workedtoward-a particular goal in an ad hoc fashion. Longtime GNOME contributorEmmanuele Bassi would like to see that change by adding cross-project teamsand a steering committee for the project; to that end, he gave a talk (YouTubevideo) at GUADEC 2025in late July on his idea to establish some technical governance for theproject. He also put together a blogpost with his notes from the talk. The audience reaction wasfavorable, so he has followed up on the GNOME discussion forum with an RFC ongovernance to try to move the effort along.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (aide, firefox, kernel, and mod_http2), Debian (chromium and unbound), Fedora (mod_auth_openidc), Oracle (fence-agents and kernel), SUSE (ignition, jetty-minimal, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, matrix-synapse, postgresql13, postgresql15, postgresql16, and postgresql17), and Ubuntu (kernel).
Alyssa Rosenzweig has written a blog postabout her work to help ship a "great driver" for the Apple M1GPU that supports OpenGL, Vulkan, and enables gaming with Proton.
The ExtensibleStylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) language is used by webbrowsers to style XML content to make it easily readable; XSLT is part of theHTML livingstandard that is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application TechnologyWorking Group (WHATWG). Only a small fraction of web sites servecontent that requires web browsers to support XSLT, in part becausemajor browser implementations have neglected the technology over the past 25years. Now, it seems, they would like to rid themselves of itentirely. A planto disable XSLT in Blink (Chrome's rendering engine) and a pull request bya Google Chrome developer to remove mentions of the specification fromthe HTML standard have been met with opposition, but arguments infavor of XSLT have proven ineffective.
The GhostBSD project has released version 25.02 of theFreeBSD-based desktop operating system. This release brings GhostBSDup to date with FreeBSD14.3,includes enhancements for the Software Station package managementapplication, and introduces an "OS X-like" desktop environmentbased on GNUstep called Gershwin:
The Internet is a wonderful thing; it allows anybody to look upinformation of interest. Included in all of that is the history of thefree-software development community; how we got to where we are says a lotabout why things are the way they are and what might come next. So thetakeover of Groklaw rings a loud alarm; we have been reminded that historystored on the Internet is an ephemeral thing and cannot be expected toremain available forever.
Shadow stacks are a control-flow-integrity feature designed to defendagainst exploits that manipulate a thread's call stack. The kernel firstgained support for hardware-implemented shadowstacks, for the x86 architecture, in the 6.6 release; 64-bit Armsupport followed in 6.13. This feature does not give user space muchcontrol over the allocation of shadow stacks for new threads, though; a patchseries from Mark Brown may, after many attempts, finally be aboutto change that situation.
In July 2024,Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit TLS certificate authority (CA),announcedthat it would be ending support for theonline certificate status protocol(OCSP), which is used to determine when a server's signing certificate has beenrevoked. This prevents a compromised key from being used to impersonate a webserver.The organization cited privacy concerns, and recommended that peoplerely oncertificate revocation lists (CRLs)instead. On August6, Let's Encryptfollowed through and disabled its OCSP service. This poses aproblem for Linux systems that must now rely on CRLs because, unlike on otheroperating systems, there is no standardized way for Linux programs to share aCRL cache.
The Linux Foundation, in cooperation with a couple of other groups, has announcedthe publication on the intersection of businesses and commercialopen-source software (deemed "COSS"). Everything, it seems, is great, andCOSS companies make a lot of money for their investors.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and tomcat9), Debian (iperf3, mupdf, qemu, thunderbird, and unbound), Fedora (glab, kubernetes1.31, kubernetes1.32, kubernetes1.33, and toolbox), Oracle (kernel and tomcat9), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, and squid), SUSE (abseil-cpp-devel, aide, flake-pilot, gdk-pixbuf, glibc, go-sendxmpp, ImageMagick, jetty-annotations, jupyter-bqplot-jupyterlab, libtiff-devel-32bit, pam, pdns-recursor, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord, rust-keylime, terragrunt, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-azure and linux-azure-fips).
Linus has released 6.17-rc3 (called"3.17-rc3" in the email, but the tag in the repository is correct) fortesting. "Anyway, things seem fairly normal for this phase in therelease cycle, nothing stands out. Please keep testing,"
The 6.16.3 stable kernel update has beenreleased. It contains a set of ext4 filesystem fixes that are probably agood thing for any 6.16 ext4 user to have.
The Microdotweb framework is quite small, as its name would imply; it supports bothstandard CPython and MicroPython,so it can be used on systems ranging from internet-of-things (IoT) devicesall the way up to large, cloudy servers. It was developed by MiguelGrinberg, who gave a presentation about it at EuroPython2025. His namemay sound familiar from his well-known FlaskMega-Tutorial, which has introduced many to the Flask lightweight Python-basedweb framework. It should come as no surprise, then, that Microdot isinspired by its rather larger cousin, so Flask enthusiasts will find muchto like in Microdot-and will come up to speed quickly should their needs turntoward smaller systems.
The restartable sequences feature, whichwas added to the 4.18 kernel in 2018, exists to enable better performancein certain types of threaded applications. While there are users forrestartable sequences, they tend to be relatively specialized code; this isnot a tool that most application developers reach for. Over time, though,the use of restartable sequences has grown, and it looks to grow further asthe feature is tied to new capabilities provided by the kernel. Asrestartable sequences become less of a niche feature, though, some problemshave turned up; fixing one of them may involve an ABI change visible inuser space.
The Zig project hasannounced version 0.15.1 of the language. The release, much like thelast one, includes incremental progress toward the goal of completely dropping LLVM and improving compile time, as well as a handful of breaking changes as the language team wrestles with past API design. The biggest change this time around is to the standard library Reader and Writer interfaces, which have been completely rearranged in the name of performance and reducing unneeded copies.
Tobias Heider has writtenan article that explains changes that are coming for Ubuntu's genericArm64 desktop ISO images in the 25.10 release. The current solution,Heider says, depends on GRUB features that are unavailable in secureboot mode and require adding device-specific logic to multiplepackages. The new solution, called stubble,is derived from systemd-stub:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.2, 6.15.11, and 6.12.43 stable kernels. He notes thatthis is the last release in the 6.15.y series, and recommends thatusers move to the 6.16.y kernel branch at this time.
Ken Jin welcomed EuroPython2025 attendees tohis talk entitled "Building a new tail-calling interpreter for Python", butnoted that the title really should be: "Measuring the performance ofcompilers and interpreters is really hard". Jin's efforts to switch the CPython interpreter to use tail calls,which can be optimized as regular jumps,initially seemed to produce an almost miraculous performance improvement.As his modified title suggests, the actual improvementwas rather smaller; there is still some performance improvement andthere are other benefits from the change.
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