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[$] Extending the time-slice-extension discussion
Time-slice extension is a proposed scheduler feature that would allow a user-space process to request to not be preempted for a short period while it executes a critical section. It is an idea that has been circulating for years, but efforts to implement it became more serious in February of this year. The latest developer to make an attempt at time-slice extension is Thomas Gleixner, who has posted a new patch set with a reworked API. Chances are good that this implementation is close to what will actually be adopted by the kernel.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 18, 2025
Posted Sep 18, 2025 0:06 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 18, 2025 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Fighting human trafficking; End of 10; Link tags; Healthy subsystem communities; New kernel tools; Rust and Carbon; Typst.
- Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement
Typst is a program for document typesetting. It is especially well-suited to technical material incorporating elements such as mathematics, tables, and floating figures. It produces high-quality results, comparable to the gold standard, LaTeX, with a simpler markup system and easier customization, all while compiling documents more quickly. Typst is free software, Apache-2.0 licensed, and is written in Rust.
[$] Providing support for Windows 10 refugees
In October, consumer versions of Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates. Many users who would ordinarily move to the next version are blocked by Windows 11's hardware requirements unless they are willing to buy a newer PC. The "End of 10" campaign is an effort to convince those users to switch to Linux rather than sticking with an end-of-life operating system or buying a new Windows system. At Akademy 2025, Dr. Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Bettina Louis, Carolina Silva Rodé, and Nicole Teale discussed their work on the campaign, its progress so far, and what's next.
[$] Comparing Rust to Carbon
Safe, ergonomic interoperability between Rust and C/C++ was a popular topic at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Chandler Carruth gave a presentation about the different approaches to interoperability in Rust and Carbon, the experimental "(C++)++" language. His ultimate conclusion was that while Rust's ability to interface with other languages is expanding over time, it wouldn't offer a complete solution to C++ interoperability anytime soon — and so there is room for Carbon to take a different approach to incrementally upgrading existing C++ projects. His slides are available for readers wishing to study his example code in more detail.
[$] Fighting human trafficking with self-contained applications
Brooke Deuson is the developer behind Trafficking Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that produces free software to help law enforcement combat human trafficking. She is a survivor of human trafficking herself. She spoke at RustConf 2025 about her mission, and why she chose to write her anti-trafficking software in Rust. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with Rust's lifetime-analysis-based memory-safety — instead, her choice was motivated by the difficulty she faces getting police departments to actually use her software. The fact that Rust is statically linked and capable of cross compilation by default makes deploying Rust software in those environments easier.
[$] New kernel tools: wprobes, KStackWatch, and KFuzzTest
The kernel runs in a special environment that makes it difficult to use many of the development tools that are available to user-space developers. Kernel developers often respond by simply doing without, but the truth is that they need good tools as much as anybody else. Three new tools for the tracking down of bugs have recently landed on the linux-kernel mailing list; here is an overview.
[$] Creating a healthy kernel subsystem community
Creating welcoming communities within open-source projects is a recurring topic at conferences; those projects rely on contributions from others, so making them welcome is important. The kernel has, rather infamously over the years, been an oft-cited example of an unwelcoming project, though there have been (and are) multiple efforts to change that with varying degrees of success. Hans de Goede talked about such efforts within his corner of the kernel project in a talk (YouTube video) at Open Source Summit Europe.
[$] A policy for Link tags
The Git source-code management system stores a lot of information about changes to code — but it does not hold everything that might be of interest to a developer who needs to investigate a specific change in the future. Commits in a repository are the end result of a (sometimes extended) discussion; often, that discussion will result in changes to the code that are not explained in the changelog. For some years now, many maintainers have followed the convention of applying a Link tag to commits that points back to the mailing-list posting of the change. Linus Torvalds has been expressing his dislike for this convention for a while, though, and its time appears to be coming to an end.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 11, 2025
Posted Sep 11, 2025 0:19 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 11, 2025 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Space Grade Linux; KDE's new distribution; Rug pulls and forks; Dependency tracker; Kernel configuration; Framework 12 laptop.
- Briefs: npm security; high-memory; Anaconda WebUI; OpenSUSE bcachefs; 32-bit Firefox; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Rust 1.90.0 released
Version 1.90.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include switching to the LLD linker by default, the addition of support for workspace publishing to cargo, and the usual set of stabilized APIs.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnutls, mysql:8.4, opentelemetry-collector, and python-cryptography), Debian (nextcloud-desktop), Fedora (chromium, firefox, forgejo, gitleaks, kernel, kernel-headers, lemonldap-ng, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, and python-pip), Red Hat (firefox and libxml2), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (avahi, bluez, cups, curl, firefox-esr, gdk-pixbuf, gstreamer, java-1_8_0-ibm, krb5, net-tools, podman, raptor, sevctl, tkimg, ucode-intel, and vim), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, and linux-gcp-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14).
Bluefin LTS released
The Universal Blue project has announced the release of Bluefin LTS, an image-based distribution similar to Bluefin that uses CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL instead of Fedora as its base:
Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation. [...]
Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligently working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense.
Tails 7.0 released
Version
7.0 of the Tails portable
operating system has been released. This is the first version of Tails
based on Linux 6.12.43, Debian 13
("trixie") and GNOME 48. It uses ztsd instead of
xz to compress the USB and ISO images to deliver a
faster start time on most computers. The release is dedicated to the memory of Lunar, "a
traveling companion for Tails, a Tor volunteer, Free Software hacker,
and community organizer
":
Lunar has always been by our side throughout Tails' history. From the first baby steps of the project that eventually became Tails, to the merge with Tor, he's provided sensible technical suggestions, out-of-the-box product design ideas, outreach support, and caring organizational advice.
Outside of Tor, Lunar worked on highly successful Free Software projects such as the Debian project, the Linux distribution on which Tails is based, and the Reproducible Builds project, which helps us verify the integrity of Tails releases.
See the changelog for a full list of fixes, upgraded applications, and removals. LWN covered Tails Project team leader intrigeri's DebConf25 talk in July.
GNOME 49 released
Version 49 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. Changes include new default video (Showtime) and PDF-viewing (Papers) applications, a number of calendar improvements, and updates to the Web, Maps, and Software applications.
Jackson: tag2upload in the first month of forky
Ian Jackson has published a blog post summarizing the tag2upload service's first month of handling uploads for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release:
We announced tag2upload's open beta in mid-July. That was in the middle of the the freeze for trixie, so usage was fairly light until the forky floodgates opened.
Since then the service has successfully performed 637 uploads, of which 420 were in the last 32 days. That's an average of about 13 per day. For comparison, during the first half of September up to today there have been 2475 uploads to unstable. That's about 176/day.
So, tag2upload is already handling around 7.5% of uploads. This is very gratifying for a service which is advertised as still being in beta!
LWN covered tag2upload in July 2024.
Libxml2 2.15.0 released
Version 2.15.0 of libxml2 has been released. Notable changes include the disabling of Python bindings by default, using Doxygen to generate API documentation, as well as bringing HTML serialization and handling of character encodings more in line with the HTML5 specification.
Nick Wellnhofer has also announced that he is stepping down as libxml2 maintainer, and Iván Chavero has volunteered to take over. LWN covered libxml2 in June.
Systemd v258 released
Systemd v258 has been released with a long list of new features and changes; slice units now have basic workload management features, quotas for tmpfs have been added, the "systemctl start" command now has a verbose (-v) option, and more. This release also, finally, completely removes support for control groups v1 support. LWN covered some of systemd v258's features and changes in August.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, and podman), Debian (node-sha.js), Fedora (firefox, kea, and perl-JSON-XS), Mageia (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk), Oracle (kernel, libarchive, podman, and python-cryptography), Red Hat (multiple packages, mysql:8.4, and python3.11), SUSE (expat, java-1_8_0-ibm, krb5, libavif, net-tools, nginx, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, onefetch, pcp, rabbitmq-server313, raptor, and vim), and Ubuntu (libyang2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, and python-xmltodict).
Firefox 143.0 released
Version 143.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include the ability to pin tabs by dragging them to the edge, previews in the camera permissions dialog, improved fingerprinting protection, and (optional) automatic deletion of files downloaded in private browsing mode.