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Huge pages can improve performance by increasing translation lookaside buffer (TLB) utilization and reducing memory-management overhead. Transparent huge pages (THPs) are supposed to make huge-page usage, well, transparent, Nico Pache said at the beginning of his session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. That transparency has never worked as well as many would like; he has been working on improvements to make it easier for applications to use huge pages on Linux systems. A following session, led by David Hildenbrand, was focused on how THPs could be taken away from processes that are not using them fully.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (postorius and spip), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, linux-firmware, tor, and unbound), Mageia (ffmpeg, nginx, perl-Imager, and tigervnc, x11-server, x11-server-xwayland), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (buildah, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, gvisor-tap-vsock, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, podman, rhc, rhc-worker-playbook, skopeo, and yggdrasil), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, assimp, azure-storage-azcopy, busybox, firefox, gnutls, graphicsmagick, helm, kernel, leancrypto, libpng16, libppsdocument4_0-6, libsndfile, mcphost, nano, nginx, perl-http-tiny, perl-XML-LibXML, python-urllib3, python-urllib3_1, python311-ocrmypdf, python312, rclone, rsync, xen, and xz), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, nltk, simpleeval, and vim).

In a plenary session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, the state of patch review using large language models (LLMs) was discussed. It is a topic that has been swirling around in the kernel community for much of the year. The plenary, which was led by Roman Gushchin, Chris Mason, Josef Bacik, and Sasha Levin, resulted in a quite bit of discussion, so much that a second filesystem-track-only (though others surely sat in) slot was used to continue it later in the day.

Voyager Live is an Xubuntu-based distribution and live DVD showcasing the Xfce desktop environment. Its features include the Avant Window Navigator or AWN (a dock-like navigation bar), Conky (a program which displays useful information on the desktop), and over 300 photographs and animations that can be used as desktop backgrounds. The project also develops several other editions of Voyager Live - a "GE" edition with GNOME Shell, a "GS" variant for Gamers, and a separately-maintained flavour based on Debian's "stable" branch.

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) published a news item on May 18 about its response to violations of the AGPLv3 by Bambu Lab in its 3D printers. The company has not provided the source code to its modifications to a 3D "slicer" program that was released under the AGPLv3 and it has also threatened Paweł Jarczak who created a fork of a different slicer (Orca Slicer) released under AGPLv3 in order to interoperate with his Bambu printer. Based on that, the SFC has created the baltobu project aimed at reverse-engineering and reimplementing the Bambu code while also hosting the Orca Slicer fork. Bambu has behaved badly for years and made multiple, provably false public statements regarding the AGPLv3 and its requirements. The recent aggressive behavior toward Paweł Jarczak was a last straw for us: we have decided to launch a multi-pronged effort that will assist consumers and users in the short-term, and also work toward a long-term strategy to improve the software right to repair for all 3D printer consumers.

Version:next-20260525 (linux-next) Released:2026-05-25

Legacy OS (formerly TEENpup Linux) is a distribution based on antiX (prior to 2023 the distribution was based on Puppy Linux). Although the original concept was to create a flavour of Puppy Linux with more applications and a more appealing desktop aimed at teenage users, Legacy OS has now grown to become a general purpose distribution. It comes with a large number of applications, browser plugins and media codecs as standard software. Each new release of Legacy OS is about providing a lot of software which will work smoothly on older computers (about a decade in age).

Joshua Hahn began his session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit by saying that the memory controller for control groups is intended to provide resource allocation, accounting, and protection from interference by other tasks. But it was not really designed for tiered-memory systems; he is looking for a way to improve that situation.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (atril, evince, gnutls28, haproxy, haveged, jq, kernel, krb5, libgcrypt20, nodejs, and thunderbird), Fedora (aw-server-rust, awatcher, bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, composer, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, evince, firefox, httpd, kernel, nodejs-aw-webui, nss, perl-Apache-Session-Browseable, pie, python-pulp-glue, python-requests, and python3.15), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (apptainer, chromium, cockpit, dnsmasq, google-guest-agent, hauler, iproute2, jfrog-cli, kernel, libecpg6, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, mcphost, oci-cli, perl-YAML-Syck, python-lxml, python-urllib3, python311-impacket, rqlite, rsync, util-linux, and xz), and Ubuntu (evince, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-6.17, node-path-to-regexp, and rclone).

Linus Torvalds does not enjoy giving talks, but he does consent to the occasional on-stage conversation with Dirk Hohndel at Linux Foundation events. The pair held the 30th of their fire-less fireside chats during a keynote session on May 20, at the 2026 Open Source Summit North America. Topics included 3D printing, guitar pedals, the recent 7.1-rc4 release of the kernel, and Torvalds's complicated relationship with AI tooling.

Ubuntu Sway Remix is an unofficial Ubuntu remix featuring the popular Sway tiling compositor. It is intended for Linux beginners who are interested in the keyboard-oriented interface of tiling window managers and also for advanced Linux users who want a powerful, user-friendly and minimalistic desktop. The distribution contains many popular console-based tools along with graphical applications to meet the needs of most users. Ubuntu Sway Remix uses the Calamares installer, removes support for Ubuntu's snap packages, and offers a separate edition for the latest range of the Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

Founded in 2014 by Oliver Pinter and Shawn Webb, HardenedBSD is a security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD. The HardenedBSD Project is implementing many exploit mitigation and security technologies on top of FreeBSD. The project started with Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) as an initial focal point and is now implementing further exploit mitigation techniques.

MX Linux, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch, is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. Using Xfce as the default desktop (with separate KDE Plasma and Fluxbox editions also available), it is a mid-weight operating system designed to combine an elegant and efficient desktop with simple configuration, high stability, solid performance and medium-sized footprint.

The 7.1-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Quoth Linus:

I'm not entirely happy about it - most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drivers, which obviously makes it all less scary, but at the same time I'm really not convinced the churn is worth it at rc5 time. These things are "fixes", sure, but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they'd be better off in a linux-next tree and get merged during the merge window.

So I think I'll start being a bit more hardnosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game. We are supposed to look for *regressions*. Non-critical fixes to long-standing issues are simply not appropriate for this late in the release cycle.

End result: this is too big, and this is the heads-up that I'll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren't that important. And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review.

Rhino Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution which offers a rolling-release upgrade approach. The distribution uses a customised Xfce desktop environment. Rhino features a custom meta package manager which unifies Deb, Pacstall and Flatpak software management.

Version:7.1-rc5 (mainline) Released:2026-05-24 Source:linux-7.1-rc5.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

Cerberix Linux is a security-focused Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It boots into a simple text-mode installation program that requires an internet connection. It then installs a firewall, intrusion detection and VPN tooling softare, as well as a customised Xfce desktop. The distribution includes varios system-hardening software and tools, such as nftables firewall, fail2ban with sane jails, AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) file integrity monitoring, WireGuard tooling, and a curated set of kernel sysctl tweaks. Cerberix Linux also integrates Cerberix Shield that watches the system tray and flags and anomalies, and Cerberix Connect which pairs with the firewall appliance for dashboard visibility.

MagOS Linux is a Russian desktop-oriented distribution based on ROSA, a distribution that was forked from Mandriva Linux in 2011. It uses the RPM package management. MagOS Linux comes with KDE Plasma desktop by default, but it also ships the lightweight LXQt desktop for older and low-specification computers. Besides the standard upstream packages from ROSA, the project also provides its own RPM package repository (with various network and NVIDIA display drivers), as well as separate modules (in XZM format) with extra hardware drivers, server tools, MATE desktop, Wine emulator, Java software and additional web browsers, including Chromium and Yandex.

Live Raizo is a live Linux distribution based on Debian "Stable". It's purpose is to experiment with system administration on simulated networks and real devices; it contains simulators of networks and systems (GNS3, QEmu, Docker, VPCS) and also Debian virtual machines already integrated into GNS3. Live Raizo also includes tools to interact with real devices, such as minicom, Putty, Wireshark, as well as DHCP, DNS, FTP, TFTP and SSH servers. The distribution uses the Fluxbox window manager and can optionally be installed to a hard drive.

TitalcruiseOS is a desktop Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch and featuring a heavily customised GNOME desktop. It aims to deliver low-latency performance and comprehensive software compatibility for system administrators, developers and power users alike. Its GNOME desktop is enhanced with a curated selection of native extensions and utility tools. TitalcruiseOS comes pre-configured with deployment and virtualization capabilities, including a full Docker CE environment, Podman tools, Flatpak integration via Flatseal, and pre-installed Android SDK platform utilities for mobile device maintenance.