Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 7.1-rc4, released on May 17. Linus said:

Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting: the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools. People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying "that was already fixed a week/month ago" and pointing to the public discussion.

Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we're making it clear that AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved - and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports.

(He is referring to this pull request with patches from Willy Tarreau defining what constitutes a security bug and responsible ways to use AI to find bugs).

This development cycle has brought in 13,963 non-merge changesets from 2,217 developers, 417 of whom are first-time kernel contributors. The release history looks like:

RC	Date	Commits
v7.1-rc1	2026-04-26	13963	13963
v7.1-rc2	2026-05-03	475	475
v7.1-rc3	2026-05-10	584	584
v7.1-rc4	2026-05-17	428	428

See the LWN KSDB 7.1 page for lots more details.

Stable updates have, once again, not been in short supply. 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 were released on May 14, 7.0.8, 6.18.31, 6.12.89, 6.6.139, 6.1.173, 5.15.207, and 5.10.256 on May 15, and 7.0.9, 6.18.32, 6.12.90, and 6.6.140 on May 17.

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Quote of the week

It should also be noted that Intel's zero-day bot was (a) closed source, and (b) was sending its test regression reports with the linux-kernel mailing list cc'ed, and no one really complained because it was so useful, and if Intel was willing to use very expensive hardware in their data center to contribute reports, so long as the reports were useful and the false-positive noise was low enough, we decided to be grateful and not worry (too much) about the fact that Intel's zero-day bot was closed source. (There was indeed some grumbling in the bar at Plumbers, of course. :-)

In my opinion, we should be doing the same for Sashiko, and that's the decision which the ext4 developers have made --- at least for ext4 patches.

— Ted Ts'o

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Distributions quote of the week

Until further notice, it's probably just a good idea to assume there will be an urgent #fedora kernel security update every day.

— Adam Williamson

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Firefox 151.0 released

Version 151.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Significant changes include the ability to clear and restart a private-browsing session, better fingerprinting protection, control over the apparent location when using the Firefox VPN, and more.

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pgBackRest will continue

In April, David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for PostgreSQL, announced that he had archived the project and it would no longer be maintained due to lack of sponsorship. On May 18, he announced that a number of sponsors have stepped forward to ensure its continued development:

Over the last few weeks, a coalition of sponsors has come together to fund ongoing development. Their support means the project is no longer reliant on a single sponsor, giving pgBackRest the stability it needs for the long term.

[...] I'm looking forward to getting back to work. There are features and optimizations in the pipeline that I'm excited to share in upcoming releases. Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible, and thank you to the community for your patience and support during this transition.

Thanks to Paul Wise for the tip.

Comments (1 posted)

RIP Peter G. Neumann

We have received word that Peter G. Neumann, who, among many other things, ran the RISKS Digest for decades, has passed away. He will be much missed.

Update: the New York Times has published an obituary of Dr. Neumann.

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