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.
The F-Droid project has announcedthe release of F-Droid2.0, which is a complete redesign of the officialapp. Notable changes in the release include making it easier to discover andinstall applications, more useful app categories, improved search, andmuch more.
Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a member of a group of researchers from Graz University of Technology, has announced therelease of research into file-notification attacks that would allow spying onuser activity on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The group has published a paper withdetails on the research as well as a web sitewith demonstrations of the vulnerabilities.On Linux, an attacker can use inotifywatch tomonitor a directory to conduct an inter-keystroke timing attack-even ifthey do not have read access to the files within a directory. The group alsodiscovered a method to conduct a UI-redressattack (or "clickjacking" attack) onKDE5 and KDE6 by monitoring /usr/bin/pkexec to detect when Polkit spawns an authenticationprompt. An attacker could draw a fake password window on top of the real windowto collect a user's credentials.Both of these flaws are still present today,though the Linux kernel did partially mitigate the issue with afix that was included in the 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.65,and 6.18.3 kernels shipped in January. See the web site for more information anda mitigation to prevent password-prompt windows from losing focus.
Many of the transmissions sent over the radio spectrum canbe decoded with a relatively cheap hardware dongle. Thomas Eckert presented atRustConf 2026 in Montreal about his hobby:decoding radio transmissions with Rust.In his presentation, hecovered all of the math necessary to get started withsoftware-defined radio,and gave demonstrations of listening to AM and FM radio, as well as decodingtransmissions fromaircraft transponders. His slides and example code areavailable on GitHub.
After a two-year hiatus, LWN's Jonathan Corbet presented an updated editionof his KernelReport at the KernelRecipes conference. Corbet looked at what is happening in the kernelcommunity, how it's dealing with a period of accelerated change, and wherethings might go in the future. Video of the talk isavailable on YouTube for those who'd like to tune in.
Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX)for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convinceopen-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus,pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy2026, KDE's annual developerconference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimedat convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design.
Systemd v262 has been released. Some of the notable new features include theability to build systemd as a single statically linked binary for smallcontainers, support for the kernel coredump socket protocol introduced withLinux6.17, addition of OpenSSL4 support, and many other changes. Seethe releasenotes for a full list of changes.
The Radicle peer-to-peercode-collaboration project has disclosedtwo critical vulnerabilities in the network protocol used by Radiclenodes. The first flaw is that the network protocol used by Radicle "does notgive the confidentiality it was expected to give", which allows anyone whocan observe the network between two nodes to read the data exchanged. The secondis that peer authentication is broken and allows impersonation, so an attackercan spoof their Node ID and read private repositories they should not be able toread.
A criticalvulnerability has been discovered in WordPress's get_page_template()function for page-template resolution that could allow remote-code execution(RCE) by an unauthenticated attacker, in some limited circumstances. The projecthas provided an update for the most recent branch of WordPress, as well asbackports of the fix for branches back to 4.7. See thevulnerability report for the conditions required for an RCE attack to be successful.The vulnerability alsoaffects the ClassicPress fork ofWordPress, though a security update has not been provided for that projectyet. LWN covered ClassicPress in2024. Users of either content-management system should update soon.
Pierre-Emmanuel Patry and Arthur Cohen gave a talk atRustConf2026 on thestatus of the Rust frontend for GCC (gccrs), with a particular eye toward thegoal ofcompiling the Linux kernel. Patry gave a follow-up talk for a morekernel-focused audience atKangrejos the next week, which Cohen could not attend. Thegccrs project ismaking good progress overall, but it will still be some time until the compileris usable.
The open-source consulting firm Igalia has put out anannouncement celebrating 25 years of working on upstream FOSS projectsfor its clients. The list of projects the company has worked on is rathereye-opening: WebKit, mobile-browser rendering (on Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, andTizen), the Linux kernel (CPU and GPU scheduling), 3D graphics drivers, theOrca screen reader, GStreamer, and lots more. Beyond that, the company, which is aworker-owned cooperative, does its work in ways that benefit the communityas well as its clients:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.2.7,6.18.53, and 6.12.111 stable kernels. As is usual these days, they arequite large; also no surprise is that they provide many important fixesthroughout the kernel tree. Users of those kernels are advised to update.
NetBSD has long had support forrunning Linux binaries via its kernel-level compat_linuxfeature, but test coverage for it was less complete than some mighthope. In order to provide better testing for compat_linux,Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant Henrique Brito opted to workon enabling the Linux TestProject (LTP) test suite to compile and run on NetBSD. At EuroBSDCon2026, Brito'smentor, Stephen Borrill, provided a report on the project, and thestatus of LTP on NetBSD. The work has already resulted in some minorfixes, and a good list of additional problems to solve.
Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'".
The Git source-code management system isat the core of development processes worldwide, so changes, especiallyincompatible changes, are of great interest to the developers involved.The Git 2.56 release, which can be expected around the end of September, iscurrently available in release-candidate form. Itis not the most earth-shaking of releases, but the one that follows, whichmight be the long-awaited Git 3.0, may well be.
The io_uringsubsystem is all about asynchronous execution; applications count on itto not block - unless explicitly requested to. Within io_uring, maintainingthe "never blocks" guarantee has sometimes been a challenge, given thatmany paths in the kernel were never designed for asynchronous execution.This problem has been worked around, but at a significant cost toperformance. Now, io_uring maintainer Jens Axboe has posted an RFC patch setwith a somewhat radical (and potentially scary) solution to the problem.
Version 51 of the GNOME desktopenvironment has been released. The list of changes includes a number ofperformance improvements, offline data and better transit information inthe Maps application, a new interface for the file previewer, and more.
LWN.net