Brief items [LWN.net]

Kernel development

Kernel release status

The 6.15 kernel is out, having been released on May 25. Linus noted:

So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now.

Significant changes in 6.15 include smarter timer-ID assignment to make checkpoint/restore operations more reliable, the ability to read status information from a pidfd after the process in question has been reaped, the PIDFD_SELF special pidfd value, nested ID-mapped mounts, zero-copy network-data reception via io_uring, The ability to read epoll events via io_uring, resilient queued spinlocks for BPF programs, guard-page enhancements allowing them to be placed in file-backed memory areas and for user space to detect their presence, the once-controversial fwctl subsystem, the optional sealing of some system mappings, and much more.

See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the in-progress KernelNewbies 6.15 page for more information.

Stable updates: 6.14.8, 6.12.30, 6.6.92, 6.1.140, and 5.15.184 were released on May 22.

The 6.14.9 and 6.12.31 updates are in the review process; they are due on May 29.

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Quote of the week

Nova Core is in the infamous position of being the first driver to have been merged with the upstream kernel Linux that is written in Rust and that loads blobs.
We set out to clean it up, and we did, but... we don't speak Rust, so we've broken it in the process. Now, that's not so unconventional, is it? :-)

— "Freedo" releases Linux-libre 6.15-gnu

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Distributions

AlmaLinux OS 10.0 released

Version 10 of the AlmaLinux OS distribution has been released.

The goal of AlmaLinux OS is to support our community, and AlmaLinux OS 10 is the best example of that yet. With an unwavering eye on maintaining compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we have made small improvements to AlmaLinux OS 10 that target specific sections of our userbase.

See the release notes for details.

Comments (8 posted)

Fedora Council overturns FESCo provenpackager decision

The Fedora Council has ruled on the Fedora Engineering Steering Council's (FESCo) decision last year to revoke Peter Robinson's provenpackager status. In a statement published to the fedora-devel-announce mailing list, the council has announced that it has overturned FESCo's decision:

FESCo didn't have a specific policy for dealing with a request to remove Proven Packager rights. In addition, the FESCo process was handled entirely in private. The contributor didn't receive a formal notification or warning from FESCo, and felt blindsided by the official decision when and how it was announced. The Fedora Council would like to extend our sincerest apology on behalf of the Fedora Project to them.

LWN covered the story in December 2024.

Comments (1 posted)

Launchpad mailing lists going away

Canonical's Launchpad software-collaboration platform that is used for Ubuntu development will be shutting down its hosted mailing lists at the end of October. The announcement recommends Discourse or Launchpad Answers as alternatives. Ubuntu's mailing lists are unaffected by the change.

Comments (8 posted)

NixOS 25.05 released

Version 25.05 of the NixOS distribution has been released. Changes include support for the COSMIC desktop environment (reviewed here in August), GNOME 48, a 6.12 kernel, and many new modules; see the release notes for details. (Thanks to Pavel Roskin).

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Development

Home Assistant deprecates the "core" and "supervised" installation modes

Our recent article on Home Assistant observed that the project emphasizes installations using its own Linux distribution or within containers. The project has now made that emphasis rather stronger with this announcement of the deprecation of the "core" and "supervised" installation modes, which allowed Home Assistant to be installed as an ordinary application on a Linux system.

These are advanced installation methods, with only a small percentage of the community opting to use them. If you are using these methods, you can continue to do so (you can even continue to update your system), but in six months time, you will no longer be supported, which I'll explain the impacts of in the next section. References to these installation methods will be removed from our documentation after our next release (2025.6).

Support for 32-bit Arm and x86 architectures has also been deprecated.

Comments (48 posted)

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket

Mozilla has announced that it is shutting down Pocket, a bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla in 2017, this coming July. "Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."

Comments (12 posted)

Development quotes of the week

To link this back to actual Unix history (or something much nearer that), I realized that `bullshit generator' was a reasonable summary of what LLMs do after also realizing that an LLM is pretty much just a much-fancier and better-automated descendant of Mark V Shaney: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney