Linux Weekly News

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.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.2, 6.16.12, 6.12.52, and 6.6.111 stable kernels. They each contain a relatively small set of important fixes. In addition: "Note, this is the LAST 6.16.y kernel release, this branch is now end-of-life. Please move to the 6.17.y branch at this point in time."

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-libtiff3, iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, and vim), Debian (asterisk, ghostscript, kernel, linux-6.1, and tiff), Fedora (cef, chromium, cri-o1.31, cri-o1.32, cri-o1.33, cri-o1.34, docker-buildx, log4cxx, mingw-poppler, openssl, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-socketio, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, skopeo, and valkey), Mageia (open-vm-tools), Red Hat (compat-libtiff3, kernel, kernel-rt, vim, and webkit2gtk3), and SUSE (distrobuilder, docker-stable, expat, forgejo, forgejo-longterm, gitea-tea, go1.25, haproxy, headscale, open-vm-tools, openssl-3, podman, podofo, ruby3.4-rubygem-rack, and weblate).

Linus has released 6.18-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle. "This was one of the good merge windows where I didn't end up having to bisect any particular problem on [any] of the machines I was testing. Let's hope that success mostly translates to the bigger picture too."

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.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis and valkey), Fedora (docker-buildkit, ibus-bamboo, pgadmin4, webkitgtk, and wordpress), Mageia (kernel-linus, kmod-virtualbox & kmod-xtables-addons, and microcode), Oracle (compat-libtiff3 and udisks2), Red Hat (rsync), Slackware (python3), SUSE (chromium, cJSON, digger-cli, glow, go1.24, go1.25, go1.25-openssl, grafana, libexslt0, libruby3_4-3_4, pgadmin4, python311-python-socketio, and squid), and Ubuntu (dpdk, libhtp, vim, and webkit2gtk).

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.

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.

Ubuntu 25.10, "Questing Quokka", has been released. This release includes Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, GCC 15, Python 3.13.7, Rust 1.85, and more. This release also features Rust-based implementations of sudo and coreutils; LWN covered the switch to the Rust-based tools in March. The 25.10 version of Ubuntu flavors Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu have also been released.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnutls, kernel, kernel-rt, and open-vm-tools), Debian (chromium, python-django, and redis), Fedora (chromium, insight, mirrorlist-server, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, rust-maxminddb, rust-prometheus, rust-prometheus_exporter, rust-protobuf, rust-protobuf-codegen, rust-protobuf-parse, rust-protobuf-support, turbo-attack, and yarnpkg), Oracle (iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, redis, and valkey), Red Hat (perl-File-Find-Rule and perl-File-Find-Rule-Perl), SUSE (expat, ImageMagick, matrix-synapse, python-xmltodict, redis, redis7, and valkey), and Ubuntu (fort-validator and imagemagick).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.
• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Firefox has long had support for multiple profiles to store personal information such as bookmarks, passwords, and user preferences. However, Firefox did not make profiles particularly discoverable or easy to manage. That is about to change; Mozilla has announced that it is launching a profile-management feature that will make it easier to create and switch between profiles. According to the support page for the feature, it will be rolled out to users gradually beginning on October 14.

The Rust for Linux project has been good for Rust, Tyler Mandry, one of the co-leads of Rust's language-design team, said. He gave a talk at Kangrejos 2025 covering upcoming Rust language features and thanking the Rust for Linux developers for helping drive them forward. Afterward, Benno Lossin and Xiangfei Ding went into more detail about their work on the three most important language features for kernel development: field projections, in-place initialization, and arbitrary self types.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (apptainer, civetweb, mod_http2, openssl, pandoc, and pandoc-cli), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, and podman), SUSE (cairo, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, gstreamer-plugins-rs, libxslt, logback, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python-xmltodict, and rubygem-puma), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux-aws-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-gke, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, and linux-raspi).

Version 3.14.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of changes this time around, including official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more; see the announcement for details.

Paul McKenney gave a remote presentation at Kangrejos 2025 following up on the talk he gave last year about the lifetime-end-pointer-zapping problem: certain common patterns for multithreaded code are technically undefined behavior, and changes to the C and C++ specifications will be needed to correct that. Those changes could also impact code that uses unsafe Rust, such as the kernel's Rust bindings. Progress on the problem has been slow, but McKenney believes that a solution is near at hand.

Systemd v258 was released on September 17 after more than nine months of development. LWN has already covered some of the features and changes being readied for v258 before it was final. Now that the release is out, it is time to look at more of what came in v258, including a sandbox shell, new boot options, service-level disk quotas, and enhancements to systemd-resolved.

Taylor Blau has posted an extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor's Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on Google Docs for those who prefer that format.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (kernel, open-vm-tools, and postgresql), SUSE (chromedriver and chromium), and Ubuntu (haproxy and pam-u2f).

Version 2025.10 of the U-Boot boot loader has been released with new features, including Python tooling improvements, cleanups for implicit header inclusions, better support for numerous Arm platforms, support for new RISC-V platforms, better documentation, and more. Maintainer Tom Rini also reports on some project news: As I mentioned with the v2025.07 release, I was looking for a few people to step up and help with the overall organization and management of the project. To that end, Peter Robinson and Neil Armstrong have stepped up and have been helping me. This has been part of the process for the project to join up under the Software Freedom Conservancy's (SFC) umbrella and have a legal entity that can help the project work with other legal entities on things like donations.