Linux Weekly News

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dropbear, firefox-esr, intel-microcode, net-tools, openafs, thunderbird, and xrdp), Fedora (chromium, micropython, syslog-ng, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (dropbear and openssh), Oracle (.NET 9.0, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, git-lfs, grafana, kernel, and osbuild and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (cargo-c, gimp, iputils-20240905, kernel, libraw, microcode_ctl, openssh, pnpm, python311-cramjam, python311-httptools, python311-jwcrypto, python311-loguru, python311-mechanize, python311-nltk, python311-oauthlib, python311-py7zr, python311-pycapnp, python311-pyspnego, python311-pywayland, python311-suds, python311-treq, python311-ujson, python311-waitress, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionmailer, ruby3.4-rubygem-actiontext, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord, ruby3.4-rubygem-activestorage, ruby3.4-rubygem-fluentd, ruby3.4-rubygem-globalid, ruby3.4-rubygem-jquery-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-kramdown, ruby3.4-rubygem-loofah, ruby3.4-rubygem-multi_xml, ruby3.4-rubygem-puma, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, ruby3.4-rubygem-sprockets, ruby3.4-rubygem-web-console, ruby3.4-rubygem-websocket-extensions, ucode-intel-20250512, and valkey), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-oracle, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

The 6.15-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So while I wish we hadn't had some of the excitement of last week, on the whole it all still looks pretty solid, and unless something strange happens I'll do the final 6.15 release next weekend."

The 6.14.7, 6.12.29, 6.6.91, 6.1.139, and 5.15.183 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems.

The Asahi Linux project, which supports Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, has published a progress report ahead of the 6.15 kernel's release.

We are pleased to announce that our graphics driver userspace API (uAPI) has been merged into the Linux kernel. This major milestone allows us to finally enable OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support for Apple Silicon in upstream Mesa. This is the only time a graphics driver's uAPI has been merged into the kernel independent of the driver itself, which was kindly allowed by the kernel graphics subsystem (DRM) maintainers to facilitate upstream Mesa enablement while the required Rust abstractions make their way upstream. We are grateful for this one-off exception, made possible with close collaboration with the kernel community.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, kernel, kernel-rt, redis:6, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Debian (chromium), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, kernel, and thunderbird), and SUSE (nbdkit, open-vm-tools, and rustup).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a somewhat belated memorial for John Young, the founder of Cryptome.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public's right to know.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release of the Rust language, version 1.87.0 was announced live today at the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands. Notable changes include the addition of anonymous pipes to the standard library and the ability for inline assembly (asm!) to jump to labeled blocks within Rust code.

Leon Romanovsky began his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) by explaining that the improved DMA-mapping API that he has been working on is a group effort. He, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Christoph Hellwig, Jason Gunthorpe, and others are proposing to modernize the API and to "make it more suitable for current kernels". He told the assembled storage and filesystem developers that the progress on the proposal has stalled, but that it was the basis for further work in various areas, so he hoped to find a way to move forward with it.

The Tor project has announced the oniux utility which provides Tor network isolation, using Linux namespaces, for third-party applications.

Namespaces are a powerful feature that gives us the ability to isolate Tor network access of an arbitrary application. We put each application in a network namespace that doesn't provide access to system-wide network interfaces (such as eth0), and instead provides a custom network interface onion0.

This allows us to isolate an arbitrary application over Tor in the most secure way possible software-wise, namely by relying on a security primitive offered by the operating system kernel. Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.

The Tor project cautions that oniux is considered experimental as the software it depends on, such as Arti and onionmasq, are still new.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (open-vm-tools), Fedora (dnsdist), Gentoo (Node.js and Tracker miners), Red Hat (kernel and xdg-utils), SUSE (audiofile, go1.22-openssl, go1.24, grub2, kernel-devel, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and python311-Django), and Ubuntu (ruby-rack).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Home Assistant; YaST; bpfilter; Flatpak; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Screen security; Guix on Codeberg; Postgres I/O; GNOME executive director; Nextcloud blog; Podman 5.5.0; OSL sustainability; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.

Version 5.5.0 of the Podman container-management tool has been released. Notable features include the addition of a podman machine cp command to copy files into a running Podman VM, a podman artifact extract command to copy contents of an OCI artifact to disk, and a --mount=artifact option to mount OCI artifacts into containers. See the release announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

From servers in a data center to desktop computers, many devices communicating on a network will eventually have to filter network traffic, whether it's for security or performance reasons. As a result, this is a domain where a lot of work is put into improving performance: a tiny performance improvement can have considerable gains. Bpfilter is a project that allows for packet filtering to easily be done with BPF, which can be faster than other mechanisms.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (emacs, firefox, gnutls, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, osbuild-composer, python39:3.9, and thunderbird), Arch Linux (screen), Debian (varnish), Fedora (chromium), Gentoo (Atop, FreeType, and Spidermonkey), Mageia (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk and postgresql15, postgresql13), Oracle (389-ds-base, emacs, firefox, kernel, libsoup, libtiff, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, python39:3.9, qemu-kvm, ruby, ruby:3.1, ruby:3.3, and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, avahi, buildah, corosync, delve and golang, exiv2, expat, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, git, grafana, gvisor-tap-vsock, java-21-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, libarchive, libjpeg-turbo, libsoup, libsoup3, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nginx:1.22, nginx:1.24, nodejs22, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, perl, php, php:8.2, php:8.3, podman, python-jinja2, redis, redis:7, rhc, ruby:2.5, skopeo, sqlite, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat9, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, xterm, xz, yelp, and yggdrasil), Slackware (screen), SUSE (apparmor, dirmngr, gimp, golang-github-prometheus-node_exporter, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-21-openj9, libxmp-devel, python311-Django4, rabbitmq-server313, rke2, and transfig), and Ubuntu (abseil and open-vm-tools).

BPF arenas are areas of memory where the verifier can safely relax its checking of pointers, allowing programmers to write arbitrary data structures in BPF. Emil Tsalapatis reported on how his team has used arenas in writing sched_ext schedulers at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. His biggest complaint was about the fact that kernel pointers can't be stored in BPF arenas — something that the BPF developers hope to address, although there are some implementation problems that must be sorted out first.

Nextcloud provides an open-source collaboration platform called Nextcloud Hub, which includes file-sharing and syncing features. The company has written a blog post explaining that Google has revoked a critical permission from the Nextcloud Files app for Android that allows it to sync files to Nextcloud Hub.

Google is stating security concerns as a reason for revoking the permission. This is hard to believe for us. Nextcloud has had this feature since its inception in 2016, and we have never heard about any security concerns from Google about it. Moreover, several Big Tech apps as well as Google's own still have this. What we think: Google owning the platform means they can and are giving themselves preferential treatment.

Despite multiple appeals since mid-2024, Google has refused to reinstate the permission, blocking automated Nextcloud file uploads for millions of users.

The Nextcloud app available via F-Droid does not have this limitation, but the post notes that that is not an option for many users.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libeconf and rubygems), Fedora (libxmp), Gentoo (glibc), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, libxslt, and virtuoso-opensource), SUSE (augeas, git-lfs, kanidm, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (linux-lts-xenial).

The SUSE Security Team has published an article detailing several security issues it has uncovered with GNU Screen. This includes a local root exploit when Screen is shipped setuid-root, as it is in some Linux and BSD distributions. The security team also reports problems in coordinating disclosure with the upstream Screen project.

We are not satisfied with how this coordinated disclosure developed, and we will try to be more attentive to such problematic situations early on in the future. This experience also sheds light on the overall situation of Screen upstream. It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility. We hope this publication can help to draw attention to this and to improve this situation in the future.

The article includes a table of operating systems, screen versions, and which vulnerabilities they may be affected by.