Linux Weekly News

One of the dominant themes of 2026 has been the debate within development projects about the terms under which LLM-written contributions should be accepted — if, indeed, they should be accepted at all. The Git project has not been immune to this trend; the topic was discussed at the recent Git Contributor's Summit. In this case, the path to a resolution may be somewhat circuitous; the project, which has never been governed as a democracy, is considering adopting a voting process as a way of bringing the discussion to an acceptable conclusion.

Linus Torvalds has released the 7.4-rc2 prepatch and it will come as no surprise that it is a large one ("a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1"). Much of the size was made up of some automated Coccinelle updates that were spread out all over the tree; once those are factored out, the rest looks fairly normal: When masking that noise out from the diffstat, the shape of it changes - not spread out over thousands of files any more. But it does not look unusual: a third is drivers (gpu, networking and sound account for most of it, but there's a bit of everything), another third is networking and bpf, and the final third is "the rest" (mostly filesystems, mm, arch updates).

And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes. I think I'll stop repeating that, and we can just take it for granted. But this time around Alexei [Starovoitov] claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true.

Version 2026.10 of the OpenIndiana operating system has been released. OpenIndiana is based on Illumos, which in turn was based on OpenSolaris after Oracle discontinued it.

Notable changes in this release include UEFI framebuffer support for the live image, updates to many applications and development tools, as well as the inclusion of new applications such as TeX Live 2026, the Foliate ebook reader, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cjose, kernel, libreoffice, rsync, ruby3.3, telegram-desktop, vim, and zlib), Fedora (bind, composer, copyparty, dnf5, elixir, fasterxml-oss-parent, gnome-remote-desktop, goose, jackson-annotations, jackson-bom, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, jackson-modules-base, jackson-parent, java-21-openjdk, java-21-openjdk-portable, jupyterlab, kryoptic, luksmeta, mingw-cfitsio, mingw-expat, mingw-freetype, mingw-glib-networking, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-qt5-qtbase, mingw-qt5-qtdeclarative, mingw-qt5-qtwebkit, mingw-qt6-qtbase, mtools, NetworkManager-l2tp, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-js-challenge, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, nodejs-pnpm12, pcre2, perl-Spreadsheet-XLSX, pie, python-boto3, python-botocore, python-joserfc, python-jupyter-builder, python-jupyterlab-server, python-jupytext, python-nbdime, python-notebook, python-s3transfer, python3.12, rccl, rsync, rust-blake2b_simd, rust-blake3, rust-constant_time_eq, rust-lzma-rust2, rust-ppmd-rust, rust-regorus, rust-sccache, rust-totp-rs, rust-typed-path, rust-zip, rust-zip0.6, rust-zip2, sofia-sip, suricata, wordpress, and xen), Mageia (gimp, python-gitpython, and suricata), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (bind, brotli, ca-certificates-mozilla, chromedriver, containerized-data-importer1.65-api, corepack24, docker-compose, flatpak, fuse-overlayfs, git-lfs, gitoxide, go1.27, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, gotosocial, kubevirt1.8, kubevirt1.8-container-disk, kubevirt1.9-container-disk, libmariadbd-devel, libntpc1, libopenscap33, libsndfile-devel, libspice-server-devel, libtirpc-devel, matomo, mihomo, mozilla-nss, nano, nmap, nodejs22, perl-Mozilla-CA, python-Brotli, python-CairoSVG, python-certifi, python313-Pillow, rsyslog, stgit, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (python-tornado).

The Asahi Linux developers have put out a new report on their progress toward a Linux distribution for Apple devices.

Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Lennart Poettering, Michael Vogt, and Joaquim Rocha have put together a detailed overview of what the Amutable Operating System (AOS) and associated infrastructure will look like.

The image-based OS approach enables us to enforce some very strict but powerful security properties, which elevate the security posture of the system substantially above traditional Linux systems. Specifically, let's highlight seven major essential security properties of AOS here:

1. No Shell + No SSH + No Language Interpreters. By default AOS does not install a UNIX shell, nor makes remote access via SSH available on the nodes. Moreover, we do not install any of the usual language interpreters (Python, Perl, …) by default. For most nodes a shell or interpreted language support is not required and it removes a whole class of attacks.
2. Signed Images Only. On AOS only images that come with Verity data signed by a signing key listed in the Verity keyring may be activated.
3. [...]

Videos from the 2026 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) are now available on YouTube. XDC was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 28-30.

When a computer hibernates, the kernel writes the contents of memory to disk and then shuts the system down. Resuming from hibernation involves reading that data back into memory, and then having the kernel pick up where it left off. Unfortunately, the kernel does not have any way to know that the data it is reading back has not been tampered with, which is why lockdown, an optional kernel feature that attempts to prevent modifications to the running kernel, disables hibernation. Matthew Garrett, who has been working on lockdown for many years, has shared a patch set that aims to fix this problem. His solution must also protect against downgrade attacks (where an attacker reboots the computer with an older kernel version to bypass new protections), which complicates the implementation.

Hot on the heels of the previous two stable kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.3.3, 6.18.62, 6.12.116, 6.6.162, 6.1.192, 5.15.225, and 5.10.274 stable kernels. Each one only contains fixes for three use-after-free vulnerabilities announced today by the Xen security team.

Two of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) for the entire Xen host machine with possible information leakage (CVE-2026-100080, CVE-2026-100082), and one may allow privilege escalation as well as a DoS of the host machine (CVE-2026-100081). Users should, of course, upgrade if they are using Xen.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.3.2 and 6.18.61 stable kernels. Each contains quite a few changes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cockpit-files, container-tools:rhel8, delve, gcc-toolset-12-binutils, gimp:2.8, glibc, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, libfastjson, mariadb:10.3, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, mysql:8.0, php:8.0, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, squid:4, tang, tesseract, thunderbird, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Debian (chromium, ntfs-3g, puppet-agent, and trapperkeeper-authorization-clojure), Fedora (freerdp, goose, gpsd, hatch, perl-HTTP-Headers-ActionPack, perl-MIME-tools, perl-Plack, perl-Starman, proftpd, python-mistune, ruby-build, rust-crypto-bigint, rust-ctutils, rust-elliptic-curve, rust-num-bigint, rust-num-bigint0.4, rust-num-modular, rust-num-modular0.6, rust-num-prime, rust-zmij, rust-zstd, rust-zstd-safe, rust-zstd-safe7, rust-zstd-sys, rust-zstd0.13, scribus, sofia-sip, tailscale, tor, and wordpress), Oracle (cockpit-files, delve, firefox, gimp:2.8, kernel, and osbuild-composer), Red Hat (delve, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, ignition, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, python-pillow, and yggdrasil), Slackware (openssh), SUSE (bind, brotli, cpupower, expat, fuse-overlayfs, go1.26, google-guest-agent, helm, ibus-typing-booster, kernel, kyverno, libmodplug-devel, librsvg, libX11, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, owntone, parted, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-Text-CSV_XS, php8, python-Brotli, regclient, roundcubemail, rsyslog, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, frr, haproxy, linux-nvidia-7.0, linux-nvidia-bos, linux-nvidia-tegra, and nginx).

User namespaces are a key part of the kernel's toolkit for assembling containers; processes within a user namespace can appear to have full root access to the system while gaining no extra privileges in the wider system. At least, that is the intent. In practice, keeping privilege contained within a user namespace has often turned out to be difficult. As an example, consider this small patch series from Josef Bacik, which is intended to address some situations where a process within a user namespace can elevate the privileges of processes outside of it.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dpdk, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, mysql:8.0, php:7.4, php:8.0, qt5, ruby:2.7, ruby:3.0, tesseract, webkit2gtk3, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (imagemagick, puppet-agent, symfony, trapperkeeper-authorization-clojure, and xen), Fedora (3proxy, bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, curl, dhcpcd, erlang-jose, forgejo, freetype, laszip, libical, libmongocrypt, markdownlint-cli2, mongo-c-driver, openbao, pipx, python-boto3, python-botocore, python-crate-ingredients, python-lxml-html-clean, python3.11, python3.13, python3.14, python3.15, roundcubemail, rply, ruby-build, rust-app-store-connect, rust-qemu-rdp, rust-redlib, scribus, and valkey), Mageia (minetest, python-pypdf, stunnel, znc, and zvbi), Oracle (.NET 10.0, bind, brotli, cockpit, dpdk, fence-agents, freerdp, gimp, glibc, grafana, gvfs, host-metering, kernel, python-dns, qemu-kvm, raptor2, tesseract, webkit2gtk3, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (grafana and pcs), Slackware (rsync), SUSE (amazon-cloudwatch-agent, apache2, aws-efs-utils, brotli, cephfs, coredns, cramfs-tools, firefox-esr, fuse-overlayfs, ghostscript, GraphicsMagick, libpolkit-agent-1-0-128, libsoup, nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed, perl-Dancer2, python-PyJWT, python313-joserfc, rsyslog, switcheroo, trivy, valkey, vexctl, and xdg-desktop-portal), and Ubuntu (apt, libphp-adodb, net-snmp, pillow, squid, and twisted).

Version 10.6p2 of OpenSSH has been released with a workaround for a critical vulnerability that affects Linux systems that use musl libc with PAM disabled, such as Alpine Linux. OpenSSH developer Damien Miller said:

If you operate a Linux system that uses musl libc without PAM (Alpine Linux is one example) then stop reading and set PasswordAuthentication=no or disable SSH for these systems IMMEDIATELY.

This vulnerability does not exist on non-Linux systems, Linux/glibc systems and Linux systems that use PAM for password authentication.

We consider the root cause of this bug to be outside OpenSSH itself, but we're in a good position to deliver a mitigation quickly.

The Alpine Linux project has announced that it will be backporting the OpenSSH fix "all the way back to Alpine 3.16", which was released in May 2022.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel cells; Debian LLM reviews; glibc system-call wrappers; Binder in Rust; Kernel CVE flood; Fedora KDE and X11 removal; 7.4 merge window part two; Portable Python.
• Briefs: MTCP RCE; Bash security; XCPE botnet; Bazzite 45; Fedora 45; openSUSE Leap 16.1; Tor Browser 16.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The KDE Project announced, in 2025, that Plasma 6.7 would be the last version of the desktop environment that would support X11 sessions. Those who keep up with KDE's announcements no doubt expected it when Plasma 6.8 dropped X11 support as promised. What seems to have come as a surprise, at least to a number of Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop users, is that the Fedora 44 release—which shipped in April with Plasma 6.6—received an update to Plasma 6.8 that swept away the X11 session without much warning. Despite the surprise, it is gone for good: the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has voted against a request to revert the update for Fedora 44 and the just-released Fedora 45.

Version 45 of Bazzite, the image-based gaming distribution based on Fedora Linux, has been released. Notable changes in this release include a rebase to Fedora 45, updated Open Gaming Collective (OGC) kernels, support for Logitech TrueWheel devices, and more.

LWN covered Bazzite in December 2025.

A basic Python script is portable: it can be copied between machines with little concern about compatibility. A script that depends on third-party packages requires quite a bit more care and consideration, however. In 2023, PEP 723 ("Inline script metadata") introduced a standard for declaring a Python script's dependencies inside the script itself. Several third-party tools can now automatically install and manage those dependencies, but there is still little official support for this standard within Python itself.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cockpit, dpdk, fence-agents, firefox, freerdp, gimp, opentelemetry-collector, python-dns, qemu-kvm, and raptor2), Debian (apt and squid), Fedora (ags, apptainer, chromium, fractal, mingw-harfbuzz, mingw-qt5-qtwebkit, mingw-qt6-qt5compat, python-mistune, python3-docs, python3.14, python3.9, rubygem-gist, rust-app-store-connect, rust-qemu-rdp, rust-redlib, and selenium-manager), Mageia (java-latest-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, timezone), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, bind9.16, cockpit, firefox, freerdp, gcc, ghostscript, glibc, grafana, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, kernel-uek, libXi, pipewire, pki-deps:10.6, podman, python-jwt, python-pillow, python-pyasn1, qt5-qtbase, thunderbird, tomcat, util-linux, and wireshark), Red Hat (dnsmasq, fence-agents, freerdp, pki-core:10.6, and thunderbird), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, aom-tools, apache2, brotli, cadvisor, chromium, cups, curl, distribution-registry, eog, gh, go-containerregistry, google-guest-agent, gvfs, haproxy, hauler, helm3, kernel, libBasicUsageEnvironment2, libcdio, libinstpatch-1_0-2, libosmocore, libreoffice, libX11, nodejs22, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, openssh, parted, perl-DBI, perl-mime-tools, python-pypdf, rootlesskit, rqlite, rsyslog, sssd, tomcat10, warewulf4, and xen), and Ubuntu (apt-cacher, bind9, bitlbee, cakephp, deluge, dmitry, e17, feh, gnome-shell, golang-github-gin-contrib-cors, gvfs, haproxy, jabberd2, libmspack, libnet-easytcp-perl, libphp-swiftmailer, libsoup2.4, libsoup3, libuser, pcre2, rear, ruby-rack, ruby-sprockets, rxvt-unicode, shapelib, sogo, vips, and yaws).

The openSUSE project has announced the release of openSUSE Leap 16.1. The release is notable for allowing both traditional installations and immutable images with transactional updates. While immutable images had previously been available for Leap Micro, they are now available across all platforms that Leap supports, including servers, desktops, and virtual machines.

"Leap's image gives the best of both for traditional and immutable users, and we expect that Tumbleweed will follow when Agama becomes the default installer for Tumbleweed as well." said Leap release manager Lubos Kocman. "The Leap Micro experience people relied on is still here, but now it shares the same release, the same life cycle and the same maintenance updates as the rest of Leap, so users only have to pick the mode that fits their workload."