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Ruby libraries and applications are distributed via a packaging format called a gem. RubyGems.org has been the central hosting service for gems since about 2010. This article is part one of a two-part series on the RubyGems.org takeover by Ruby Central. Understanding the history of RubyGems.org, and the contributor community behind it, is vital to making sense of the current power struggle between Ruby Central and members of the Ruby community who have maintained those services and tools for many years.

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There have been many discussions in the free-software community about the role of large language models (LLMs) in software development. For the most part, though, those conversations have focused on whether projects should be accepting code output by those models, and under what conditions. But there are other ways in which these systems might participate in the development process. Chris Mason recently started a discussion on the Kernel Summit discussion list about how these models can be used to review patches, rather than create them.

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Boqun Feng spoke at Kangrejos 2025 about adding a frequently needed API for Rust drivers that need to handle interrupts: interrupt-aware spinlocks. Most drivers will need to communicate information from interrupt handlers to main driver code, and this exchange is frequently synchronized with the use of spinlocks. While his first attempts ran into problems, Feng's ultimate solution could help prevent bugs in C code as well, by tracking the number of nested scopes that have disabled interrupts. The patch set, which contains work from Feng and Lyude Paul, is still under review.

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The 6.18 merge window has come to an end, bringing with it a total of 11,974 non-merge commits, 3,499 of which came in after LWN's first-half summary. The total is a little higher than the 6.17 merge window, which saw 11,404 non-merge commits. There are once again a good number of changes and new features included in this release.

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The Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab concerns itself with many aspects of software licensing, Krzysztof Siewicz said at the beginning of his 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron session. These include supporting projects that are facing licensing challenges, collecting copyright assignments, and addressing GPL violations. In this session, though, there was really only one topic that the audience wanted to know about: the interaction between free-software licensing and large language models (LLMs).

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Debian packagers have a great deal of latitude when it comes to the configuration of the software they package; they may opt, for example, to disable default features in software that they feel are a security hazard. However, packagers are expected to ensure that their packages comply with Debian Policy, regardless of the upstream's preferences. If a packager fails to comply with the policy, the Debian Technical Committee (TC) can step in to override them, which it has done in the case of a recent systemd change that broke several programs that depend on a world-writable /run/lock directory.

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At the Linux Security Summit Europe (LSS EU), Scott Constable and Sebastian Österlund gave a talk on an enhancement to a control-flow integrity (CFI) protection that was added to the kernel several years ago. The "FineIBT: Fine-grain Control-flow Enforcement with Indirect Branch Tracking" mechanism was merged for Linux 6.2 in early 2023 to harden the kernel against CFI attacks of various sorts, but needed some fixes and enhancements more recently. The talk looked at the CFI vulnerability problem, FineIBT, and an enhanced version that is hoped to be able to unify all of the disparate hardware and software mitigations to address both regular and speculative CFI vulnerabilities.

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Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who is working on just that compiler (known as "gccrs"), provided an update on the status of that project and what is coming next.

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Sudden increases in the size of Fedora's initramfs files have prompted the project to fast-track a proposal to increase the default size of the /boot partition for new installs of Fedora 43 and later. The project has also walked back a few changes that have contributed to larger initramfs files, but the ever-increasing size of firmware means that the need for more room is unavoidable. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has approved a last-minute change just before the final freeze for Fedora 43 to increase the default size of the /boot partition from 1GB to 2GB; this will leave plenty of space for kernels and initramfs images if a user is installing from scratch, but it is of no help for users upgrading from Fedora 42.

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