Dee Harris has published a summaryof the recent "fireside chat" featuring Creative Commons founders HalAbelson, Lawrence (Larry) Lessig, Molly Van Houweling, and Glenn OtisBrown. The chat was to mark the 25th anniversaryof Creative Commons and included a look back at its history aswell as a look at the landscape today:
Lisp-like languages have historically led the world in metaprogramming andflexibility. While many modern languages have adopted the idea of macros,Lisp-like languages such asRacket have continued pushing the envelope,attempting to make macros as easy as possible to incorporate into everydayprograms. On the other hand, Lisp's minimal, parenthesis-based syntax can be hardto adapt to - to the point that Lisp is sometimes said to standfor "Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses".Rhombus is a new programminglanguage that aims to have the best of both worlds, marrying Racket'smetaprogramming capabilities to a simple Python-like syntax and reasonablestandard-library defaults.
Git maintainer Junio Hamano has announcedGit2.55.0, which has non-merge commits from 100 people; 33 ofthose are first-time contributors to the project. LWN recently covered some ofthe noteworthy changes in 2.55, including new features for theexperimental "git history" command, addition of the Git fsmonitordaemon for Linux systems, and more.
Linus Torvalds released 7.2-rc1and closed the 7.2 merge window on June28; by that time, 13,412non-merge commits had found their way into the mainline. That makes thisthe busiest merge window since the 6.7 development cycle in 2024 (15,418commits, including 2,800 for the entire bcachefs development history).Just under half of those commits arrived after LWN's summary of the first half of the mergewindow was written. As usual, the commits in the latter part of themerge window were more heavily focused on fixes, but there were still a lotof new features and significant changes merged as well.
The xsnowapplication, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and otherpleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obviouschannel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainerseems to have included a political protest in the program: anEaster egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should beremoved from the Debian xsnowpackage, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbidsuch a feature outright.
Mageia 10 has beenreleased with the 6.18 Linux kernel, DNF5.4.0, RPM4.20.1,and an increase in hardware requirements for x8632-bit systems; users nowneed a CPU with SSE2 features. See the releasenotes for a full list of updates, and the errata pagefor known problems.
The 7.2-rc1 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. Linus said: "So two weeks have passed, and the merge window isclosed. Things look reasonably normal for this release (knock wood)."
The7.1.2,7.0.14, and6.18.37stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively smallnumber of important fixes. Note that 7.0.14 is the end of the 7.0.x series.
The Power Managementand Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by thehistorical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As hasbecome traditional, the presenters at that event have since writtensummaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made availableto LWN for publication. The third day's sessions covered a wide range oftopics, including GPU affinity, profile-guided scheduling,paravirtualization scheduling, quality of service, and more.
Writeback is the process of ensuring that dirty pages or folios in the pagecache are flushed to the disk, so that changes to those files are madepersistent. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Jeff Layton wanted todiscuss whether the writeback operation should be initiated earlier than itis today. The consensus seemed to be that it should be done earlier, butthe path toward making that happen was less clear.
Lennart Poettering has posted alist of Mastodon posts about the changes in the systemd v261 release.The Mastodon format makes the reading harder, but there is a lot of usefulinformation there.
The Git v2.55.0-rc2testing release appeared on June23, suggesting that the final Git2.55 release can be expected in the near future. While this Git updatelacks radical new features, it does include a number of improvements thatregular Git users will appreciate, including commands to easily edit thecommit history, more formatting options, fsmonitor support for Linux, andmore.
The Linux Foundation, in aletter co-signed by a large range of organizations and companies, hasannounced the launch of "Akrites", a project to fast-track vulnerabilityfixes into projects.
MinIO is a popular object-storage server that offered compatibility with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)API. In December 2025, the company behind the project (also named MinIO)announcedthat the project was in maintenance mode and would not accept new changes; itwas archivedcompletely in February 2026. MinIO users have been hunting for alternativessince then, but the array of choices can be baffling. While many other projectsaim to fill the space, their strengths and areas of focus tend to vary. Two ofthe alternatives-Ceph and Garage-are particularly compelling,and both offer solid S3 compatibility.
Version 6.0.0 of the Podmancontainer-management tool has been released. Notable new featuresinclude the ability to set multiple static IP addresses forcontainers, improvements in network isolation that make Podman morecompatible with Docker, changes to the way Quadletcommands function, many new options for many existing podmancommands, and arewrite of Podman's configuration file handling. There are manybreaking changes; see the releasenotes for a full list of all new features, changes, and bug fixes.
There is a lot of work going into eliminating exploitable bugs from thekernel and preventing the addition of new ones. Even if this work ismaximally successful, though, there is no chance that the kernel will befree of these bugs anytime soon. Thus, there is also ongoing interest inhardening the kernel to make the existing bugs more difficult to exploit.The upcoming 7.2 kernel release will include a change to how dynamicallyallocated structures are placed in memory to make them harder to overwrite,while a project to randomize structure layout at boot time has a ratherlonger timeline.
Compromised accounts are one of the most common ways that attackerscan sneak malware into the open-source supply chain. One way toreduce account compromise is for projects to require two-factorauthentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA), but that iseasier said than done. However, Fedora is currently discussing putting2FA requirements in place soon, following an an alleged accountcompromise that led to an AI agent causing a number of problemsfor the project. After some discussion, Fedora will begin by requiringpackagers in the "provenpackager"group to enable 2FA within the next three months or so.
BPF arenas are areas of memory (potentially shared with user space)where programs have free reign to build theirown data structures, unburdened by the verifier's bounds checks. Many of thosedata structures are potentially usable in multiple programs. Emil Tsalapatisbrought his work on libarena, a library containing generic utilities for use inBPF arenas, to the 2026Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPFSummit. Although the library is already available as part of the kernel, itis still in its early stages and he has more work planned.
The Power Managementand Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by thehistorical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As hasbecome traditional, the presenters at that event have since writtensummaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made availableto LWN for publication. The second day's sessions covered a wide range oftopics, including device frequency scaling, using time-slice duration forCPU selection, scheduling domains on multi-cluster Arm systems, the LAVDscheduler, and more.
Alexis Lothore has been working to add support for the kernel's memory-accesschecker,KASAN, to just-in-time-compiled BPF code. He spoke about that work atthe 2026Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.KASAN support is needed, he said, to help catch bugs in the BPF just-in-time (JIT)compiler. KASAN is a great tool for catching memory-management problems in thekernel, but only in code that can be monitored by it.
The GIMP project reports thatGNOME contributor "balooii" has worked to package GIMP0.54.1-released in 1996-as a Flatpak that will build andrun on modern 64-bit Linux systems. This is a Motif-basedversion, and the same version that was usedby Larry Ewing to create Tux.While not likely to be useful for serious graphics work today, itshould be interesting for users who would like to see what a30-year-old version of GIMP was capable of.
Probably the biggest change for Python over the last five years or so isthe advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language, which removes theglobal interpreter lock (GIL) and allows multiple threads to run inparallel in the interpreter. At PyConUS 2026, held in Long Beach, California in mid-May, longtime CPythoncore developer (and current steering council member) Thomas Wouters gave atalk about the feature. He looked at the motivation behind the GIL-removalefforts, some history,the current status of the free-threaded interpreter, and provided aprediction on where it all leads.
The Power Managementand Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, which still goes by thehistorical acronym OSPM, was held in Cambridge, UK, in mid-April. As hasbecome traditional, the presenters at that event have since writtensummaries of their sessions, and this work has kindly been made availableto LWN for publication. The first day's sessions covered a wide range oftopics, including idle-state selection, user-space schedulers withsched_ext, lock-holder preemption, and much more.
Systemd v261 has been released with a long list of changes, including a newcloud "Instance Metadata Service" (IMDS) subsystem, "boot secret"functionality for use on systems that lack a physical TPM, as well assupport for the kernel's Live Update Orchestration (LUO) / KexecHandover (KHO) systems when they are present and enabled. See therelease notes for the full list of changes.
BPF programs can be used to extend many aspects the Linux kernel, butBPF programs must run to completion in the same context that they began.Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi is working on changing that byallowing BPF programs to be expressed as coroutines. He spoke about his work atthe 2026Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. Whilestill experimental, the change promises to make long-running BPF taskssignificantly easier to write.
The Arch User Repository (AUR) hasbeen subjected to a sustained attack recently. The attacker, or attackers, havespun up a series of new accounts then used them to adopt orphanedpackages and push malicious updates that would install malware on users' systems.It is unclear how many users were compromised in the attack, but the maintainerswere playing Whac-A-Mole for several days to respond to each newly compromisedpackage. The project has turnedoff the AUR's new-user registration, for now, but it is unclear what its long-term response will be or if the AUR can be secured without major changes toits existing collaboration model.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.1, 7.0.13, 6.18.36, 6.12.94, 6.6.143, 6.1.176, 5.15.210, and 5.10.259 stable kernels. As usual, eachcontains important fixes. Users are advised to upgrade.
The Software FreedomConservancy (SFC) has announcedthe release of its recommendationsfor using LLM-backed generative AI systems for FOSScontributions. The recommendations were created by the SFC andvolunteers from the free-software community.
The 7.2 merge window started with the 7.1kernel release on June14. As of this writing, just over 7,000non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline for the next kernelrelease. Many of the core subsystems have been pulled at this point,meaning that most of the changes that can be expected in 7.2 have now comeinto focus.
How can cloud providers efficiently supply durable virtual block devices? RemoteDirect Memory Access (RDMA) provides a way for servers in a cluster to sharechunks of memory, but there still needs to be a protocol that operates on top ofRDMA to provide the guarantees expected of a block device. The kernel's RDMA transportlibrary (RTRS) provides a way to send messages via RDMA. Ipresented about twonew components built on top of RTRS at the 2026LinuxStorage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit: Reliable Multicastover RTRS (RMR) and Block device over RMR (BRMR). These modules, which Iam working on with Jia Li, could be a way for cloud providers toexpose durable block devices with as little overhead as possible. To accomplishthat, however, we need some discussion and feedback from the community beforesending the modules upstream.
The resultsare in for Fedora's F44 election cycle for seats on the FedoraCouncil, Fedora EngineeringSteering Committee, FedoraMindshare Committee, and EPELSteering Committee.Miro Hronok and Aleksandra Fedorova have wonseats on the council. Neal Gompa, Fabio Valentini, Michel Lind,Maxwell G, and Simon de Vlieger have been elected to FESCo. SamyakJain, Akashdeep Dhar, Luis Bazan, and Mat Holmes have all been electedto the Mindshare Committee. The four candidates for the EPELcommittee, Carl George, Diego Hererra, Jonathan Wright, and TroyDawson were all automatically elected as there were an equal number ofcandidates and seats open. Congratulations to all the winners.
The Python Software Foundation blog has a postwith a summary of the security-related content at PyCon US 2026 with links toslides from important sessions. The recordings will be published tothe PyCon US channel onYouTube, and the post will be updated with links to those videos asthey are made available.
Jan Kara has been workingon cleaning up how bufferheads are used by some kernel filesystems. In a shortfilesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, he gave an update onthat work and where it is headed. Topics included generic infrastructureto track buffer heads for metadata, a buffer-head cleanup for the Amigafilesystem, and some planned locking fixes.
Version2.0 of the FairScan document-scanning app for Android has beenreleased. The headline feature for this release is the addition ofoptical-character-recognition (OCR) support using Tesseract to produce PDFswith searchable text from scans. FairScan developer Pierre-YvesNicolas has written a detailedblog about adding the feature and explaining why it had not been addedpreviously.
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