The GNOME Project has provided GNOMEOS for some time; until now, theproject only provided a "Nightly" edition that was built from the latest commitsand was aimed solely at GNOME developers. Adrian Vovk has now announcedthe release of GNOMEOSPreview, which is intended for a non-developer audience:
Self-referential structures that can be used without unsafe codehave posed a problem for Rust for years.There are many cases where a self-referential data structure is the elegantalgorithmic choice, but implementing it in accordance with Rust's lifetime rulesis all but impossible. At Kangrejos 2026, Gary Guo presented a clever solutionto the problem in the context of the kernel'spin_init crate, which helps with the creation of immovable data structures,typically for interoperability with C. Guo's changes could help remove most ofthe unsafe code related to lifetimes in theNova driver and, eventually, other Rust components.
The NFS network filesystem protocol has a long history on Unix-likeoperating systems (and beyond). NFS is still evolving, though, andimplementations need to keep up. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, NFS developerJeff Layton gave an overview of recent enhancements to the Linuximplementation, along with some hints for what will be coming in the nearfuture.
The resultsfrom the 2026 election for members of the Linux Foundation TechnicalAdvisory Board (TAB) have been announced. Kees Cook, Dave Hansen, MiguelOjeda, and Shuah Khan have all been re-elected, and Laurent Pinchart willbe joining the board.
Since Android's inception, the kernels it has used have divergedsignificantly from the mainline. While many of those differences have beenresolved over time, and the move to the generickernel image has helped to bring Android closer, current devices stillcarry a lot of out-of-tree changes. The preferred form for such changes isby way of vendorhooks. At the 2026 LinuxPlumbers Conference, Todd Kjos ran a fast-paced session in the Androidtrack to discuss vendor hooks and how they are used.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.11, 6.18.57,6.12.113, 6.6.159, 6.1.190,5.15.223, and 5.10.272 stable kernels. This series includes,among other things, a fix for acritical vulnerability (CVE-2026-99999). Theflaw in skb_checksum_help()would allow an IPv4 packet with bad checksum metadata to "corrupt the networkheader and cause a bunch of mischief" in the words of patch author MichaelS. Tsirkin. As usual, all users are advised to upgrade.
LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems abit trapped in something of a catch-22.At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference(LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying tocollaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace, perf) in the kernel. Thefeedback he has gotten, both over the years and more recently, does notshow a path that would allow him to contribute the 21-year-oldGPLv2-licensed LTTng tracing framework, or, incrementally, features fromit, to the mainline kernel.
At the recently concluded MaintainersSummit, Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large languagemodel to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he hasnow postedthat series for review.
Version 6.8 ofthe KDE Plasma desktop has beenreleased. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30thanniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing theproject:
After much deliberation, the GCC project recently came up with a policy on the use of largelanguage models for development of the compiler suite. It is somewhatrestrictive, but still leaves room for LLMs in the development process. Atthe 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron,Jeff Law and Kyrill Tkachov discussed how these tools have been useful forthem.
KDELinux, the KDE Project's secondstab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana"at the Akademy conference in 2024 byHarald Sitter. Nate Graham announcedthe first alpha-quality release during Akademy2025. Graham and Sitterpaired up at Akademy2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the distribution toaddress user feedback, and discuss some of the problems that still need to bedealt with. KDE Linux is still not-quite-ready for prime time, but Graham hopesthat it will be suitable for widespread use soon-for an undefined value of"soon".
The Lix and Nix projects have jointlydisclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privilegesto root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. "All systems that builduntrusted derivations are affected." Releases with fixes from each projectare available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcementfor more details on the vulnerabilities.
Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it cancorrectly model a program's needs. TheRust for Linux project has worked toprovide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C codein the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about apatchseries implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait forrepresenting objects that are allocated in C code, but which Rust code is responsiblefor cleaning up (if not necessarily deallocating) when it is done with them.He hoped to finally reach a consensus on the patch series, after months ofdiscussion on the mailing list.
PostgreSQL coreteam member Peter Eisentraut has written a blogpost reflecting on the "unusually high number of features" that havebeen taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL19 release since the beta periodbegan.
Asterinas is a project to builda new operating-system kernel in Rust; it was covered here in 2025. Version0.19.0 of the Asterinas kernel has been released; changes include a newgraphics subsystem capable of running X.org, "minimal but usable"64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.
The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issuesthat are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event wasscheduled for October8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussionthere was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and their effect on thedevelopment community, but some time was also found to talk about securitybugs and long-term succession planning.
The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. According to Linus: "As always, I would have preferred to see a smallerrc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delaythe final release. So that's still set for next weekend unlesssomething new comes up."One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecationof the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at thebeginning of 2028.
Version3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changesin this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types,the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, packagestart-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimentalJIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and thechangelogfor a full list of changes.
While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood ofvulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reportsfrom happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is theterm for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flowof control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Kees Cookpresented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFIfor the kernel.
At the 2026 All Systems Go!conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jdrzejewski-Szmekdelivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of thesystemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by amaintainer round table where Boccassi, Jdrzejewski-Szmek, Daan DeMeyer, andproject leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size,health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)
Let'sEncrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions ofsites, has announced thatit will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February10,2027:
Toma edovi is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads thegoals team, which helpsorganize the Rust project'soverall goals, including making sure that the peoplewho have agreed to work on one have the support they need.At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processesaimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how theproject organizes, tracks, and amends goals.TheRust for Linux projecthas inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an insideview of the process might be helpful.
The kernel's swap layer has undergone somesignificant changes over the course of the last year and a number oflongstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has notyet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swapcache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highlyinefficient resource use. There are two competing solutions for thisproblem, neither of which has, as yet, reached readiness for merging; alengthy discussion on possible paths forward shows ongoing disagreementover the best path forward.
Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustcpattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he hasnoticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult toautomatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling.The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessinginternal information from the Rust compiler.
The extensible scheduler class, whichenables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burstof innovation in this area; theLAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulersto emerge. Though it was originally designedfor gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grown to serveother types of workloads as well. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Changwoo Minand Gavin Guo presented an overview of this scheduler and how it hasevolved over time.
Python's randomand secretsmodules both include utilities for obtaining random values, but only one of them is suitable for generating passwords and security tokens.For much of Python's history, random was used for passwords and tokens anyway, despite documentation that called it unsuitable for cryptography.In 2015, Python's core team debated whether to fix that misuse by making random secure by default.Instead, in 2016, Python 3.6 added a second module: secrets. Therandom module is still misused at times, so it is instructiveto look into how the random-number modules should be used.
Chromium, the open-sourceupstream project for Google's Chrome web browser, is the browser of choice formany Linux users. It has also gained a reputation as being difficult for Linux distributions topackage and build: Chromium has a complex build system, the project bundlesmany of its dependencies, and it has frequent releases. All of that, plus usercomplaints, has led the maintainers of the Gentoo Chromiumpackage to give up on trying to maintain the package.
Version 10.6 of OpenSSHhas been released. The announcement notes that the OpenSSH team has beenreceiving a large number of AI-assisted security bug reports. "We very muchwelcome these reports, especially when combined with human triage, analysis,test-cases and particularly when accompanied by proposed fixes". As aresult, the project expects to be making more frequent releases to get updatesto users more quickly rather than batching the bug fixes until the next plannedrelease.Notable changes in this release include enabling the hybrid post-quantumssh-mldsa44-ed25519 signature algorithm, addition of a -p option for sftp's lmkdir/mkdir commands, as wellas disabling the LZ77 dictionary coder in ssh and sshd to mitigate side-channelleaks (which will result in reduced effectiveness of the Compressionoption). The scp-R option, whichallows copies between two remote hosts, is being deprecated due to securityrisks; the option will be ignored in the future. See the announcement for fulldetails of all changes and bug fixes.
The Rust Foundation has posted therecordings fromRustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada.Photos of the event are also available. LWN coveredfour talks from RustConf this year.
Patch review has long been one of the limiting constraints for the kernelproject (and most others); there just aren't enough people to properlyreview all of the code that is submitted for inclusion. The Sashikosystem, which uses a large language model (LLM) to generate reviewsautomatically, offers the prospect of some relief, and has already becomean important part of the kernel's development process. At the 2026 editionof Kernel Recipes, RomanGushchin, the maintainer of Sashiko, provided an overview of howthe system works and what is being done to improve it.
Version3.0 of the MusicBrainz Picardtag editor has been released. "This release brings many changes, including anupgrade to Qt6, a completely new plugin system, several improvements to the userinterface, cover art processing, [International Standard RecordingCode(ISRC)] submission and many more."LWN covered Picard inApril.
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