Linux Weekly News

Version 1.0.0 of Mission Center, a system-monitoring application, has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of SMART data for SATA and NVMe devices, display of per-process network usage, as well as a redesigned Apps Page that provides more information about applications and processes. Mission Center's backend application for obtaining system data has been renamed from the Gatherer to Magpie, and is now available as a standalone executable and libraries that can be used by other applications.

Linux systems can have large filesystems; trying to keep up with the stream of fanotify filesystem-monitoring notifications for them can be a struggle. Fanotify is one of a few ways to monitor accesses to filesystems provided by the kernel. Song Liu led a discussion on how to improve in-kernel filtering of fanotify events to a joint session of the filesystem and BPF tracks at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He wants to combine the best parts of a few different approaches to efficiently filter filesystem events.

In a combined filesystem and memory-management session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Joanne Koong led a discussion on improving the writeback performance for the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) layer. Writeback is how data that is written to the filesystem is actually flushed to the disk; it is the process of writing dirty pages from the page cache to storage. The current FUSE implementation allocates unmovable memory, then copies the dirty data to it before initiating writeback, which is slow; Koong wanted to change that behavior. Since the session, she has posted a patch set that has been applied by FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium and kappanhang), Red Hat (osbuild-composer and thunderbird), SUSE (chromedriver), and Ubuntu (c-ares, corosync, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-24, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

AUTOSEL is a tool that is used to find kernel patches that should be considered for backporting into the stable releases. Sasha Levin has announced a new and completely rewritten version of AUTOSEL for those who would like to play with it.

Unlike the previous version that relied on word statistics and older neural network techniques, AUTOSEL leverages modern large language models and embedding technology to provide significantly more accurate recommendations.

The disclosure of the Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities created a lot of pain for kernel developers (and many others). That pain was especially acutely felt in the BPF community. While an attacker might have to painfully search the kernel code base for exploitable code, an attacker using BPF can simply write and load their own speculation gadgets, which is a much more efficient way of operating. The BPF community reacted by, among other things, disallowing the loading of programs that may include speculation gadgets. Luis Gerhorst would like to change that situation with this patch series that takes a more direct approach to the problem.

The 6.12.27 and 6.1.137 stable kernels have been released to fix build problems in their predecessors. Only those who are having build troubles with 6.12.26 or 6.1.136 need to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ansible, containerd, and vips), Fedora (chromium, java-17-openjdk, nodejs-bash-language-server, nodejs-pnpm, ntpd-rs, redis, rust-hickory-proto, thunderbird, and valkey), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, fcgi, graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, pam, poppler, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox, libsoup, nodejs:20, redis:6, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xmlrpc-c, and yelp), and SUSE (audiofile, ffmpeg, firefox, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libva, libxml2, and thunderbird).

Linus has released 6.15-rc5 for testing. "So it all feels like things are just continuing to go well this release. Let's hope I didn't jinx it by saying so."