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.
The Linux FromScratch (LFS) project provides step-by-step instructions onbuilding a customized Linux system entirely from source. Historically,the project has provided separate SystemV and systemd editions,which gave users a choice of init systems. Bruce Dubbs has announcedthe project will no longer produce the SystemV version:
The first installment in this seriesintroduced several data structures in the kernel's swap subsystem anddescribed work to replace some of those with a new "swap table" structure.The work did not stop there, though; there is more modernization of theswap subsystem queued for an upcoming development cycle, and even more formultiple kernel releases after that. Once that work is done, the swapsubsystem will be both simpler and faster than it is now.
The robustfutex kernel API is a way for a user-space program to ensure that thelocks it holds are properly cleaned up when it exits. But the API suffersfrom a number of different problems, as Andre Almeida described in a session in the"Gaming onLinux" microconference at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo.He had some ideas for a new API that would solve many of those problems,which he wanted to discuss with attendees; there is adifficult-to-trigger race condition that he wanted to talk about too.
Creating an ebook in EPUB format is easy,for certain values of "easy". All one really needs is a text editor, a few command-line utilities; also needed is a workingknowledge of XHTML, CSS, along with an understanding of the format'sstructure and required boilerplate. Creatinga well-formatted and attractive ebook is a bit harder. However, it can bemade easier with an application custom-made for the purpose. Sigil is an EPUB editor thatprovides the tooling authors and publishers may be looking for.
Theteam behindTyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest toproduce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of theyear, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racinggame) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Our prototype was a jointeffort between Arm, Collabora, and Google; it ran well for the durationof the event, and the performance was more than adequate for players.Thankfully, we picked up steam at precisely the right moment: DaveAirlie justannounced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystemis only "about a year away" from disallowing new drivers written in Cand requiring the use of Rust. Now it is time to lay out apossible roadmap for 2026 in order to upstream all of this work.
Version 2.53.0 of the Gitsource-code management system has been released. Changes includedocumentation for the Git data model, the ability to choose the diffalgorithm to use with git blame, a new white-space error class,and more; see the announcement for details.
The kernel's swap subsystem is a complex and often unloved beast. It isalso a critical component in the memory-management subsystem and has asignificant impact on the performance of the system as a whole. At the2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, KairuiSong outlined a plan to simplify andoptimize the kernel's swap code. A first installmentof that work, written with help from Chris Li, was merged for the 6.18release. This article will catch up with the 6.18 work, setting the stagefor a future look at the changes that are yet to be merged.
A few years ago, the only way to compile Rust code was using the rustc compilerwith LLVM as a backend. Since then, several projects, includingMutabah's Rust Compiler (mrustc), GCC's Rustsupport (gccrs),rust_codegen_gcc, andCranelift have made enormous progresson diversifying Rust's compiler implementations. The most recent such project,Eurydice, has amore ambitious goal: converting Rust code to clean C code. This is especiallyuseful in high-assurance software, where existing verification and compliancetools expect C. Until such tools can be updated to work with Rust, Eurydice couldprovide a smoother transition for these projects, as well as a stepping-stonefor environments that have a C compiler but no working Rust compiler. Eurydicehas been used to compile some post-quantum-cryptography routines from Rust to C,for example.
Daniel Stenberg, the recipient of last year's Award for Excellence in OpenSource from the European Open Source Academy, presentedthat award to this year's recipient: Greg Kroah-Hartman.
The extensible scheduler class (sched_ext)allows the installation of a custom CPU scheduler built as a set of BPFprograms. Its merging for the 6.12 kernel release moved the kernel awayfrom the "one scheduler fits all" approach that had been taken until then;now any system can have its own scheduler optimized for its workloads.Within any given machine, though, it's still "one scheduler fits all"; onlyone scheduler can be loaded for the system as a whole. The sched_extsub-scheduler patch series from Tejun Heo aims to change that situationby allowing multiple CPU schedulers to run on a single system.
We have received the sad news that Didier Spaier, maintainer of theblind-friendly Slackware-based Slint distribution, has recently passedaway. Philippe Delavalade, who posted the announcement to theSlint mailing list, said:
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announcedthat it will not be holding the 2026 spring board election. Instead,it will be creating a working group to "review and improve OSI'sboard member selection process" and provide recommendations bySeptember2026:
Phones running Linux are ubiquitous these days and it has been that waysince Android started working toward dominance in the smartphone market.Unfortunately, Android has slowly increased its freedom-unfriendliness andhas become something of a privacy nightmare. In a talk entitled "We needan open-source phone OS" at OpenSource Summit Japan 2025, Luca Weiss described the smartphone landscapeand gave an overview of postmarketOS as an alternative Linuxoperating system for mobile handsets.
Creating fair governance models for open-source projects is noteasy; defining criteria for participants to receive membership andvoting rights is a particularly thorny problem for projects that haveelections for representative bodies. The FedoraCouncil, the project's top-level governance body, is wrestlingwith that conundrum now. This was triggered by a Fedora special-interestgroup (SIG) granting temporary membership to at least one person for thesole purpose of allowing them to vote in the most recent FedoraEngineering Steering Council (FESCo) election. That opened a large canof worms about what it means to be a contributor and how contributorscan be identified for voting purposes.
GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O'Donell has announcedthat the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hostedat the Linux Foundation.