Brief items

A decade of Rustls

Joe Birr-Pixton has written a blog post reflecting on a decade of the Rustls TLS-library project and looking ahead to the upcoming 0.24 release and an eventual 1.0 release.

Rustls began with a first commit on May 2, 2016. Progress was quick: a month later, on June 5, it could interoperate with most sites on the web. The first release, 0.1.0, followed on August 27, 2016 – less than four months after the first commit.

[...] From the 0.1.0 release, the project moved through a long series of releases over the following eight years, building out functionality, hardening and refining the API. That sequence of release lines culminated in 0.23, released on February 29, 2024.

The 0.23 release line has been a stable one: in the time since, it has seen 43 non-breaking releases. That stability didn't come with stagnation. The 0.23 line delivered a wide range of important features, including a FIPS-certified cryptography option, certificate compression, Encrypted ClientHello, post-quantum cryptography, and performance improvements.

Comments (11 posted)

Security quote of the week

The Internet works at pretty close to the speed of light. You can register a .uk domain and a minute later it's accessible from the other side of the planet. Brilliant for users who want to quickly launch a website. Also brilliant for abusers who want to launch a spam campaign.

By the time enough people have reported the scammers' domain as suspicious, it is too late. In the time it takes for a registrar to disable the domain, or for its name to make its way to the Safe Browsing List, a million messages have already been sent and enough people have handed over their details.

We're told that "the purpose of a system is what it does". At the moment, the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate.

— Terence Eden

Comments (13 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 7.3-rc2, released on September 7. Linus said:

This didn't *feel* like a particularly busy rc2, but it clearly was. rc2 is usually the quietest time when people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to start finding bugs. But not this time - this is a "full fat" rc release. [...]

Nothing looks particularly odd, even if the rc2 timing is a bit unusual. It might be just random, but we'll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that's really the cause or not, it's an easy thing to blame ;)

This release has seen 15,882 non-merge changesets from 2,546 developers, 561 of whom were first-time kernel contributors. The release history looks like:

RC	Date	Commits
v7.3-rc1	2026-08-30	16267	16267
v7.3-rc2	2026-09-06	681	681

See the LWN KSDB v7.3 page for a lot more details.

Stable updates: 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 were released on September 7.

The 7.2.5 and 6.18.51 updates are in the review process; they are due on September 11.

Comments (none posted)

Asahi Linux now supports M3-series Macs

The Asahi Linux project has announced that support for Apple's M3-series chips has been added to the Asahi installer.

Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months. Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now.

See the blog post for other current limitations of M3 support.

Comments (3 posted)

Buildroot 2026.08 released

Version 2026.08 of the Buildroot embedded Linux system builder has been released. Buildroot 2026.08 includes nearly 1,000 changes from 100 contributors; some of the notable changes include support for Linux 7.1.x, Binutils 2.46.1, GCC 16.2.0, glibc 2.44, as well as adding the M68K and IBM Power 10/11 architectures.

Comments (2 posted)

Grml 2026.09 released

Version 2026.09, code-named "Hättiwaritätti", of the Debian-based Grml live Linux distribution for system administrators has been released. It is based on packages from the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release. Notable changes include an update to the Linux 7.1.8 kernel, support for booting from exfat-formatted USB devices, and an update to GNU Screen 5.0.1.

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Audacity 4.0 released

Version 4.0 of the Audacity audio editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include a rewritten interface using Qt, ability to save user-interface layouts as "Workspaces", improvements in working with audio clips, and a new .aup4 project format.

The release is not fully feature-compatible with the Audacity 3.x series; see the compatibility notes for a list of missing features.

Comments (10 posted)

Jellyfin 12.0 released

Version 12 of the Jellyfin media-management system has been released. Notable changes include database performance improvements, an upgrade to FFmpeg 8.1 for media transcoding, as well as better handling of book and comic media. See the release notes for the web client and server for a full list of changes.

Comments (1 posted)

LibreOffice Base survey results

Heiko Tietze has published a blog post summarizing the results of a recent survey about the use of LibreOffice's database application, Base. 455 people participated in the survey, including more than 330 who use Base on Linux, with use cases ranging from maintaining records of personal media such as CDs or DVDs to use enterprise-resource planning (ERP) and finance. Of course, users had many ideas how to improve the application:

The majority asks for improvements to the user interface with less clutter and a more attractive design. The workflow and user experience should become either simplified or more powerful, depending on the expertise and the scenario. For example, an elaborate search function is something that many people expect. [...]

Almost the same number of answers requests bug fixes, improvements to stability, and better performance. Issues with queries, forms, and reports were mentioned equally often. In this regard, many replies suggest to remove the Java dependencies.

Comments (12 posted)

Development quote of the week

Anyone who claims to understand RF [radio frequency] is lying to you, doesn't actually understand RF, or is lying to themselves.

I debated if I should have this be my cold open or not, since I feel like what I'm saying here could easily be read as meaning the opposite of what I actually mean here. I don't mean to say "you will never understand this because it's magic", I'm trying to say "no one understands it, so learn as much as you can".

I feel like I now know enough that RF is basically just witchcraft. There's a lot of crystals that those holding the obscure knowledge can use along with rods of specific lengths of specific materials to channel EM [electromagnetic] fields using earth ground to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the world by sending out specific vibrations through space. Is the resonance of your equipment slightly off? No worries, you can tune it by changing how much electricity you capture in a capacitor made with an electrolyte fluid.

— Paul Tagliamonte

Comments (none posted)