Linux Weekly News

DebugFS is the kernel's anything-goes, no-rules interface: whenever a kernel developer needs quick access to internal details of the kernel to debug a problem, or to implement an experimental control interface, they can expose them via DebugFS. This is possible because DebugFS is not subject to the normal rules for user-space-interface stability, nor to the rules about exposing sensitive kernel information. Supporting DebugFS in Rust drivers is an important step toward being able to debug real drivers on real hardware. Matthew Maurer spoke at Kangrejos 2025 about his recently merged DebugFS bindings for Rust.

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released. As usual, this release includes a long list of changes; see the changelog for all of the details.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, and mod_http2), SUSE (ffmpeg-4, kernel, libqt5-qtbase, protobuf, python-ldap, and python313), and Ubuntu (erlang, ffmpeg, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.14, linux-azure-nvidia-6.14, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle-5.4, and linux-realtime-6.14).

Version 9.0.0 of the Valkey distributed key-value database has been released. Notable features of this release include Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support, new filters for client commands, multi-database support for cluster mode and much more. See the Valkey 9.0.0 RC1 release notes for a full list of new features in this major release.

According to a recent blog post, this release includes major improvements to performance and scaling of Valkey clusters to more than 2,000 nodes and one billion requests per second. Valkey began as a fork of the Redis key-value database in March 2024, but has evolved separately since then.

The Git source-code management system is a foundational tool upon which much of the free-software community is based. For many people, Git simply works, though perhaps in quirky ways, so the activity of its development community may not often appear on their radar. There is a lot happening in the Git world at the moment, though, as the project works toward a 3.0 release sometime in 2026. Topics of interest in the Git community include the SHA-256 transition, the introduction of code written in Rust, and how the project should view contributions created with the assistance of large language models.

Version 8.8.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released. "This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency". Changes include an import/export feature for tag hierarchies, focus-point visualization for some camera models, automatic use of the monitor color profile, and a background-blur tool.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libssh, and perl-JSON-XS), Debian (ark and libphp-adodb), Fedora (chromium and gi-docgen), Mageia (quictls), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, httpd, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, microcode_ctl, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (go1.24, go1.25, krb5, python-ldap, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, and python-ldap).

In September, a group of long-time maintainers of Ruby packaging tools projects had their GitHub privileges revoked by nonprofit corporation Ruby Central in what many people are calling a hostile takeover. Ruby Central and its board members have issued several public statements that have, so far, failed to satisfy many in the Ruby community. In response, some of the former contributors to RubyGems are working on an alternative service called gem.coop. On October 17, ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler repositories was handed over to the Ruby core team, even though those projects had never been part of core Ruby previously. The takeover and subsequent events have raised a number of questions in the Ruby community.

Importing modules in Python is ubiquitous; most Python programs start with at least a few import statements. But the performance impact of those imports can be large—and may be entirely wasted effort if the symbols imported end up being unused. There are multiple ways to lazily import modules, including one in the standard library, but none of them are part of the Python language itself. That may soon change, if the recently proposed PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") is approved.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, incus, lxd, pgagent, svgpp, and sysstat), Fedora (chromium, complyctl, fetchmail, firefox, mbedtls, mingw-binutils, mingw-python3, mingw-qt5-qtsvg, mingw-qt6-qtsvg, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, runc, and suricata), Mageia (expat), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, qt5-qtbase, and qt6-qtbase), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (chromium, coredns, ctdb, firefox, kernel, libexslt0, libpoppler-cpp2, ollama, openssl-1_1, pam, samba, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (samba).

The 6.18-rc2 kernel prepatch is out.

End result: rc2 is on the bigger side, and we still have some of the remaining regressions outstanding, but we should be making slow progress. It's fairly early days yet, so I'm not very worried. Things on the whole look fairly normal.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.4 6.12.54 6.6.113 6.1.157, and 5.15.195 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes; users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.

The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler. Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"):

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

Ruby Central has also issued a statement.

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.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and libssh), Debian (firefox-esr and pgpool2), Mageia (varnish & lighttpd), Red Hat (python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, and python39:3.9), SUSE (expat, gstreamer-plugins-rs, kernel, openssl1, pgadmin4, python311-ldap, and squid), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10 and mupdf).

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.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and libsoup3), Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (httpd), Oracle (cups, ImageMagick, kernel, and vim), Red Hat (libssh), Slackware (samba), SUSE (alloy, exim, firefox-esr, ImageMagick, kernel, libcryptopp-devel, libQt6Svg6, libsoup-3_0-0, libtiff-devel-32bit, lsd, python3-gi-docgen, python311-Authlib, qt6-base, samba, and squid), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, linux-oracle-6.8, redict, redis, samba, and subversion).

Version 13.0 of the Forgejo software forge has been released. Notable changes in this release include content moderation features, ability to require 2FA for users or administrators, and a migration feature for Pagure repositories. The last will be useful for Fedora's move to Forgejo as its new git forge. See the release notes for all changes in 13.0.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: LLMs and copyright; Systemd packaging in Debian; Gccrs; FineIBT; 6.18 Merge window; Interrupt-aware spinlocks; Fedora's /boot.
• Briefs: Linux 6.18-rc1; Librephone; LMDE 7; Ubuntu 25.10; Firefox 144.0; Julia 1.12; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

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.