Welcome to LWN.net
LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information, and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities.
[$] KDE Linux at two
KDE Linux, the KDE Project's second stab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana" at the Akademy conference in 2024 by Harald Sitter. Nate Graham announced the first alpha-quality release during Akademy 2025. Graham and Sitter paired up at Akademy 2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the distribution to address user feedback, and discuss some of the problems that still need to be dealt with. KDE Linux is still not-quite-ready for prime time, but Graham hopes that it will be suitable for widespread use soon—for an undefined value of "soon".
[$] Owning C types from Rust code
Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it can correctly model a program's needs. The Rust for Linux project has worked to provide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C code in the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about a patch series implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait for representing objects that are allocated in C code, but which Rust code is responsible for 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 of discussion on the mailing list.
[$] The 2026 Maintainers Summit
The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and their effect on the development community, but some time was also found to talk about security bugs and long-term succession planning.
[$] Adding kernel control-flow-integrity checking to GCC
While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended paths. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Kees Cook presented his changes to the GCC compiler suite to support forward-edge CFI for the kernel.
[$] The state of systemd: 2026 edition
At the 2026 All Systems Go! conference, systemd maintainers Luca Boccassi and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek delivered the traditional "state of the project" session with an overview of the systemd project's accomplishments in the past year. That was followed by a maintainer round table where Boccassi, Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Daan De Meyer, and project leader Lennart Poettering fielded questions about systemd's size, health, and if it might replace Kubernetes. (It will not.)
[$] An update on Rust's project goals
Tomáš Šedovič is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team, which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals, including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes aimed at ensuring that the Rust for Linux developers were aware of how the project organizes, tracks, and amends goals. The Rust for Linux project has inspired several current project goals, so he thought that getting an inside view of the process might be helpful.
[$] The [vx]swap showdown
The kernel's swap layer has undergone some significant changes over the course of the last year and a number of longstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has not yet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swap cache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highly inefficient resource use. There are two competing solutions for this problem, neither of which has, as yet, reached readiness for merging; a lengthy discussion on possible paths forward shows ongoing disagreement over the best path forward.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 8, 2026
Posted Oct 8, 2026 0:22 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 8, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Kernel bugs; Gentoo's Chromium package; Rust smart pointers; Sashiko; Charon; LAVD scheduler; Python random-number modules.
- Briefs: OpenSSH 10.6; RustConf recordings; Rust 1.99.0; Picard 3.0; Zig 0.17; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Analyzing Rust programs with Charon
Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustc pattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he has noticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult to automatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling. The Charon project aims to fix that by providing a stable API for accessing internal information from the Rust compiler.
[$] Evolving the LAVD scheduler from gaming to servers
The extensible scheduler class, which enables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burst of innovation in this area; the LAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulers to emerge. Though it was originally designed for gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grown to serve other types of workloads as well. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Changwoo Min and Gavin Guo presented an overview of this scheduler and how it has evolved over time.
Nix and Lix local root-privilege-escalation vulnerabilities
The Lix and Nix projects have jointly
disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges
to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. "All systems that build
untrusted derivations are affected.
" Releases with fixes from each project
are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement
for more details on the vulnerabilities.
Eisentraut: The reverts will continue until morale improves
PostgreSQL core
team member Peter Eisentraut has written a blog
post reflecting on the "unusually high number of features
" that have
been taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period
began.
Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was also a long tail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases. In past times, many of these would not have surfaced until much later and we would have fixed them bit by bit over the subsequent five years. But with LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time. Most if not all of the affected reverted features were written a long time ago when LLM-assisted code review was not as useful as it is now, meaning that the effective quality bar has been raised after the time the feature was written and committed. Unless the capabilities of LLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situation should sort itself out for future development cycles.
A corollary of that is that, at least for the most part, as far as I can tell, this situation is not due to "vibe coding". This code was written well before that was a possibility.
LWN covered the unusually large number of bug fixes required for PostgreSQL 19 features in September.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, curl, emacs, environment-modules, flatpak, flatpak-builder, gd, glibc, kernel, libxml2, pcre2, and rsyslog), Debian (chromium, keystone, libgit2, librsvg, nagios4, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (baresip, bcm283x-firmware, curl, flare-im, GitPython, iperf3, kernel, libebml, libmatroska, libre, mkvtoolnix, python-mkdocs-rss-plugin, radicale, uboot-tools, and xiphos), Mageia (antlr4-project, cjose, cups, firefox, nss, golang, libextractor, nginx, ntfs-3g, openvpn, perl-DBI, perl-Imager, polkit, rsync, strongswan, thunderbird, tor, ugrep, vlc, and wireshark), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, cjose, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, curl, dovecot, emacs, flatpak, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs:22, tftp, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, gcc13, gcc48, ghostscript, go1.26, go1.27, helm, libpng16, librsvg, libsoup, libX11, libXi, python, python-anyio, python-Django, python-PyJWT, python-tornado6, python-urllib3, python310, python313-bugzilla, python313-cmarkgfm, python313-colander, python313-configobj, python313-confluent-kafka, python313-django-registration, python313-ecdsa, python313-httptools, python313-imagecodecs, python313-impacket, terraform-provider-aws, terraform-provider-azurerm, terraform-provider-external, terraform-provider-google, terraform-provider-helm, terraform-provider-kubernetes, terraform-provid, thunderbird, unbound, virtiofsd, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, and libx11).
Asterinas 0.19.0 released
Asterinas is a project to build
a new operating-system kernel in Rust; it was covered here in 2025. Version
0.19.0 of the Asterinas kernel has been released; changes include a new
graphics subsystem capable of running X.org, "minimal but usable
"
64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.
LineageOS 24 released
The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0.
We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone.
On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of developers, maintainers, contributors, and users who have kept so many devices alive along the way.
[...] We've been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17's release in June. Android 17's first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17's code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We're early this year!
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, curl, dogtag-pki, dovecot, emacs, glibc, kernel, openssl, python3.12, python3.14, and sssd), Debian (chromium, ghostscript, tor, and vips), Fedora (kernel, libical, markdownlint-cli2, openbao, openvpn, php-getid3, python3.10, python3.11, and python3.13), Mageia (capnproto, chirp, flatpak, freetype2, hamlib, mingw-pcre2, pcre2, openssl, tomcat, tomcat-native, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Oracle (bind, cjose, dogtag-pki, dovecot, firefox, kernel, nodejs:24, openssl, pki-core:10.6, python3.12, python3.14, ruby:2.5, rust-sequoia-sq, sssd, and tftp), Red Hat (libxml2), Slackware (mutt), SUSE (apache-sshd, bind, ccache, chromium, cpp13, dash, expat, fetchmail, flatpak, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, system-user-grafana, incus, libpng16-16, libsoup, logback, openssh8.4, perl-DBI, php8, python3-paramiko, python312, python313-asyncpg, python313-azure-identity, python313-Babel, python313-Beaker, python313-bjoern, python313-black, python313-Brotli, python313-CairoSVG, python313-Flask-Cors, python313-FontTools, python313-Jinja2, python313-jwcrypto, python313-MechanicalSoup, python313-oauthlib, python313-PyJWT, python313-PyMySQL, python313-PyYAML, python313-virtualenv, python313-XStatic-jquery-ui, qemu, rsyslog, shadowsocks-rust, squid, stunnel, swtpm, trivy, unbound, wpa_supplicant, and yast2-users), and Ubuntu (libdbi-perl).
Kernel prepatch 7.3-rc7
The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. According to Linus: "As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller
rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay
the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless
something new comes up.
"
One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.
Stable kernels 7.2.10 and 6.18.56
The 7.2.10 and 6.18.56 stable kernels have been released. Each contains another several hundred important fixes.
Python 3.15 released
Version 3.15 of the Python programming language has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of the sentinel and frozendict built-in types, the use of UTF-8 encoding by default, package start-up configuration files, as well as improvements in the experimental JIT compiler. See the "What's new in Python 3.15" article for an in-depth look at new features in this release, and the changelog for a full list of changes.
Let's Encrypt moving to 64-day certificate lifetimes in 2027
Let's Encrypt, the nonprofit that provides free TLS certificates for millions of sites, has announced that it will be moving to certificates with 64-day lifetimes on February 10, 2027:
This means that any certificate we issue or renew on and after that date will have a 64 day validity period, and we expect the last 90-day certificate to expire on May 11, 2027. We will not revoke valid certificates as a part of this process.
This is the second stage of Let's Encrypt's plan, announced in 2025, to move to 45-day certificate lifetimes as required by the the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. In 2028, Let's Encrypt will switch to 45-day certificates.