Brief items

Security quotes of the week

Again, discernment is everything when it comes to getting useful work out of a chatbot. If you don't know anything about my work and you ask a chatbot to explain it to you, you will likely be badly misled. If you are familiar with my work and you ask a chatbot for the best examples where I explain a given subject, you may get a good answer, and if you get a bad one, you'll know it.

— Cory Doctorow

As a researcher I've also been spending a lot of time with models, talking through various ideas. I don't think I will surprise anyone when I say that they're obviously getting better, even over the course of the past few months. While I don't have Mythos and $100k to spend, I have been able to query at least one new advanced unreleased model, and I also have received some surprising new "results" to questions that I've been interested in for a few years.

Which brings me to the real problem: just because a model spits out an apparent new result, this does not mean the result is real. Even if models are good at producing real results, they're much better at producing results that look real but are misleading. This can be enormously frustrating, and often means that human attention is more necessary than ever.

— Matthew Green comments on the recent cryptographic results from Anthropic

Comments (none posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 7.2-rc5, released on July 26. Linus said: "So it's a bit too big for my liking, but nothing in there strikes me as particularly strange or scary".

This release has seen 15,256 non-merge changesets from 2,452 developers, 526 of whom were first-time kernel contributors. The release history looks like:

RC	Date	Commits
v7.2-rc1	2026-06-28	14395	14395
v7.2-rc2	2026-07-05	433	433
v7.2-rc3	2026-07-12	475	475
v7.2-rc4	2026-07-19	557	557
v7.2-rc5	2026-07-26	611	611

See the LWN KSDB v7.2 page for a lot more details.

Stable updates: the massive 7.1.5, 6.18.40, 6.12.97, 6.6.145, 6.1.178, 5.15.212, and 5.10.261 updates were released on July 24. The single-fix 6.12.98 release came out on July 25; 6.12.99, 6.6.146, and 6.1.179 (also with a single regression fix) followed on July 29.

Comments (none posted)

Mourning Dan Williams

I have just received the shocking news that Dan Williams, a longtime, high-profile kernel developer, has passed away. I knew him primarily through his long service on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board; he was always a strong, thoughtful, and intelligent presence. Dan will be deeply missed.

There is a support effort underway for Dan's family as they come to terms with this loss.

Comments (21 posted)

In remembrance of Dan Williams

On July 21, the kernel community lost Dan Williams, one of its most beloved contributors. Dave Hansen and Thomas Gleixner, both of whom worked with Williams extensively, have written an obituary and allowed LWN to publish it. He will be deeply missed, but he has left us with a lot to remember him by.

Full Story (comments: 9)

Quotes of the week

Patch authors are expected to proactively look into the AI-generated reviews and handle such feedback as any other kind of review: either debate it or address it. In both cases a reply on the mailing list is expected.

Authors are strongly encouraged to run LLM reviews on the posted patches in advance of the actual post. Large series triggering a significant amount of AI-generated feedback will likely get little attention from maintainers and reviewers.

— Paolo Abeni updates policy for the networking subsystem

Back when Linux ran on an abacus, I added __GFP_NOFAIL because four or five sites (file systems) were infinitely looping on alloc_pages until it succeeded. I figured we should move this operation into the page allocator so we could easily find those sites and fix them to Not Do That.

I made it very clear (changelog and code comments) that no new code should use __GFP_NOFAIL. How did that work out?

    hp2:/usr/src/linux-7.2-rc4> grep -r __GFP_NOFAIL | wc -l
    241

So much lameness!

— Andrew Morton

I'll also be up front about the fact that this patchset is based entirely on LLM predicted code. I review it all and correct any errors, issues, concerns, etc immediately as each new hunk of code is predicted by the LLM to prevent errors from compounding and multiplying. Thus the code ends up the way I'd write it manually, not the way an unchecked LLM would vibe code it. Mistakes in the code are mine, not a result of an LLM being used to predict the code I'd write faster than I can write it myself.

— Dave Chinner

Comments (14 posted)

A Debian general resolution on LLM usage

The Debian project is considering a general resolution on the use of large language models in the creation of the distribution. There are three alternatives to consider: a total ban on LLM usage, rejecting LLMs "as far as practical", or explicitly allowing LLM usage subject to a set of conditions. The discussion period has just begun; the beginning of the voting period does not yet appear to have been set. Those who want to look over the discussion ahead of the inevitable LWN article can find it over here.

Comments (150 posted)

De Vlieger: The Fedora 45 sausage factory

Fedora contributor Simon de Vlieger has published a blog post with a walkthrough of how the project turns source code and packages into the final release that users install on their systems.

It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.

The walkthrough describes how the Fedora 'sausage' is created as of Fedora 45, things change all the time; I hope to have time to update this document every cycle or every few cycles of Fedora releases so there's both history and people can find up to date information.

Comments (5 posted)

Distributions quote of the week

I have never been known to endorse performance art, sarcasm, or ironic communication that makes a point. I only approve of proposals and specifications that are sincere and well-meaning, like RFC 3514 or RFC 2324.

— Christine Lemmer-Webber

Comments (1 posted)

Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

The Codeberg forge has adopted a pair of new policies, promising not to use hosted projects to train LLMs and, more controversially, banning the hosting of LLM-generated software. The site's blog describes and justifies these policies.

Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of a prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. We are a place for people to collaborate and improve software together. Within this context, the recent votes can be understood as a reconfirmation of those principles: As we want to center on human collaboration, we will not actively support or engage in the creation of LLMs and will not put our limited resources to use for storing single-use software that would pollute our FLOSS commons.

Comments (88 posted)

GCC steering committee announces AI policy

The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI contributions policy recommended by the GCC AI policy working group.

The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any "legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content". It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is "around 15 lines of code and/or text" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.

The policy does not forbid use of LLMs for research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting, patch review, etc. as long as the output is not included in contributions. The committee says that it expects the policy will evolve and will be revisited periodically.

Comments (109 posted)

GNU Binutils 2.47 released

Version 2.47 of GNU Binutils has been released. In addition to the usual bug fixes there are some notable new features in this release including added support for a number of RISC-V standard extensions, a command-line option (-M annotate) which displays the symbol for undefined instructions for AArch64, and more. The 32-bit s390 target has been deprecated with this release.

Comments (none posted)

GNU C Library 2.44 released

Version 2.44 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include a new /etc/tunables.conf file for the system-wide setting of tunable parameters, a new tunable to control the use of transparent huge pages for read-only executable segments, a number of math-function improvements, a handful of security fixes, and more.

Comments (5 posted)

Home Assistant Device Database public preview

The Open Home Foundation, which governs the Home Assistant home-automation project, has announced the "public preview" of its Device Database:

Providing a public, open way to browse the anonymous, aggregated device data we collect was always part of the plan, and this preview is our first step toward it.

You can already use it to search and filter devices to see aggregated community insights, starting with a deliberately focused set of specifics, such as whether a device requires an internet connection, and which protocols and integrations it works with. We've kept that initial scope narrow on purpose, giving us a solid foundation we can build on together with you, our community, as the database grows.

LWN looked at Home Assistant in May 2025.

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Wayfire 0.11 released

Version 0.11 of the wlroots-based Wayfire Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include better fractional scaling, per-output ICC profiles, support for additional Wayland protocols, and more.

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Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 registration open

Registration is now open for the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, to be held October 5 to 7 in Prague, Czechia. Tickets to this event tend to sell out quickly, so interested attendees probably should not procrastinate.

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