Linux Weekly News

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.

At the time of writing, there have been 9,099 commits in the 6.18 merge window, 8,475 non-merges and 624 merges. The changes so far include core-kernel, graphics, and networking work, among others. There are no big surprises, but several items that were discussed at this year's LFSMM+BPF Summit have now been merged.