Linux Weekly News

Version 6.0 ("Excalibur") of the systemd-averse Devuan distribution has been released. It is based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), and includes some of the significant changes from that release, including the merged /usr hierarchy. See the release notes for details.

The kernel's namespaces feature is, among other things, a key part of the implementation of containers. Like much in the kernel, though, the namespace API evolved over time; there was no design at the outset. As a result, this API has some rough edges and missing features. Christian Brauner is working to straighten out the namespace situation somewhat with this daunting 72-part patch series that, among other things, adds a new system call to allow user space to query the namespaces present on the system.

Joel Severin has announced the availability of his port of the Linux kernel to WebAssembly; one can go to this page and watch it boot in a browser.

Wasm is similar to every other arch in Linux, but also different. One important difference is that there is no way to suspend execution of a task. There is a way around this though: Linux supports up to 8k CPUs (or possibly more...). We can just spin up a new CPU dedicated to each user task (process/thread) and never preempt it

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (ruby-rack, strongswan, ublock-origin, and wordpress), Fedora (firefox, kea, openapi-python-client, openbao, python-uv-build, qt5-qtbase, ruby, ruff, rust-astral-tokio-tar, rust-attribute-derive, rust-attribute-derive-macro, rust-backon, rust-collection_literals, rust-get-size-derive2, rust-get-size2, rust-interpolator, rust-manyhow, rust-manyhow-macros, rust-proc-macro-utils, rust-quote-use, rust-quote-use-macros, rust-reqsign, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-reqsign-command-execute-tokio, rust-reqsign-core, rust-reqsign-file-read-tokio, rust-reqsign-http-send-reqwest, rust-tikv-jemalloc-sys, rust-tikv-jemallocator, samba, skopeo, sssd, Thunar, unbound, uv, vgrep, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (bind, libtiff, sope, and transfig), Oracle (compat-libtiff3, kernel, libtiff, redis, redis:6, and redis:7), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libssh, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (bind, chromedriver, chromium, colord, coreboot-utils, git-bug, ImageMagick, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-21-openj9, java-25-openj9, kea, libmozjs-115-0, libmozjs-140-0, libssh, libtiff-devel-32bit, nodejs18, ongres-scram, poppler, python311-starlette, rav1e, squid, strongswan, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (linux-gcp-6.14 and linux-hwe-6.8).

Linus has released 6.18-rc4 for testing. "Last week in fact felt *so* calm that I was surprised to notice that rc4 isn't really smaller than usual: all the stats look very normal, both in number of changes and where the changes are."

The relatively small 6.17.7, 6.12.57, and 6.6.116 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Julian Andres Klode has announced that the Debian APT package-management tool will acquire "hard Rust dependencies sometime after May 2026. "If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port."

The idea of automatic syntax-aware merging in version-control systems goes back to 2005 or earlier, but initial implementations were often language-specific and slow. Mergiraf is a merge-conflict resolver that uses a generic algorithm plus a small amount of language-specific knowledge to solve conflicts that Git's default strategy cannot. The project's contributors have been working on the tool for just under a year, but it already supports 33 languages, including C, Python, Rust, and even SystemVerilog.