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Al Viro does not often stray outside of the core virtual filesystem area; when he does, it is usually worthy of note. Recently, he wandered into memory management with this patch series to the slab allocator and some of its users. Kernel developers will often put considerable effort into small optimizations, but it is still interesting to look at just how much effort has gone toward the purpose of avoiding a single pointer dereference in some memory-allocation hot paths.

We have recently noticed that email from LWN.net seems to be blocked by MXroute. Unfortunately, the company also does not seem to have a way for non-customers to report problems in mail delivery, so we have no good way to get ourselves unblocked.

As a result, readers who have subscribed to an LWN mailing list from a domain hosted with MXroute will probably not receive our mailings. We have not yet unsubscribed addresses that are being blocked by MXroute, but will soon if the problem persists. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience; it is unfortunate that it is becoming so difficult to send legitimate email as a small business.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, gnupg2, and mongo-c-driver), Fedora (firefox, gpsd, linux-firmware, and seamonkey), Mageia (net-snmp), Oracle (kernel, podman, postgresql16, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (libpq, net-snmp, and transfig), Slackware (libpng and mozilla), SUSE (avahi, bluez, capstone, curl, dpdk, firefox, firefox-esr, fluidsynth, glib2, kernel, kernel-devel, libmicrohttpd, libpcap, libpng16, libsoup, libsoup-3_0-0, libtasn1, libvirt, mcphost, openvswitch, ovmf, podman, poppler, python-tornado6, python311, qemu, rsync, and valkey), and Ubuntu (erlang, klibc, libpng1.6, and ruby-rack).

EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The project aims to be a spiritual successor to Antergos, providing an easy setup and a pre-configured desktop environment on an Arch base. EndeavourOS offers both off-line and on-line install options. The off-line installer, Calamares, uses the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The on-line installer can install optional software components, including most popular desktop environments.

KDE neon is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution and live DVD featuring the latest KDE Plasma desktop and other KDE community software. Besides the installable DVD image, the project provides a rapidly-evolving software repository with all the latest KDE software. Two editions of the product are available - a "User" edition, designed for those interested in checking out the latest KDE software as it gets released, and a "Developer's" edition, created as a platform for testing cutting-edge KDE applications.

The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. To achieve this, Incognito uses the Tor network to make Internet traffic very hard to trace.

Version:next-20260115 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-15

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: SFC v. VIZIO; GPLv2 requirements; Debian and GTK 2; OpenZL; kernel scheduler QoS; Rust concurrent data access; Asciinema.
• Briefs: OpenSSL and Python; LSFMM+BPF 2026; Fedora elections; Gentoo retrospective; EU lawmaking; Git data model; Firefox 147; Radicle 1.6.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Paul Kehrer and Alex Gaynor, maintainers of the Python cryptography module, have put out some strongly worded criticism of OpenSSL. It comes from a talk they gave at the OpenSSL conference in October 2025 (YouTube video). The post goes into a lot of detail about the problems with the OpenSSL code base and testing, which has led the cryptography team to reconsider using the library. "The mistakes we see in OpenSSL's development have become so significant that we believe substantial changes are required — either to OpenSSL, or to our reliance on it." They go further in the conclusion: First, we will no longer require OpenSSL implementations for new functionality. Where we deem it desirable, we will add new APIs that are only on LibreSSL/BoringSSL/AWS-LC. Concretely, we expect to add ML-KEM and ML-DSA APIs that are only available with LibreSSL/BoringSSL/AWS-LC, and not with OpenSSL.

Second, we currently statically link a copy of OpenSSL in our wheels (binary artifacts). We are beginning the process of looking into what would be required to change our wheels to link against one of the OpenSSL forks.

If we are able to successfully switch to one of OpenSSL's forks for our binary wheels, we will begin considering the circumstances under which we would drop support for OpenSSL entirely.

CentOS as a group is a community of open source contributors and users which started in 2003 and has been sponsored by Red Hat since 2014. CentOS Linux versions up to CentOS Linux 8 are 100% compatible rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution requirements. In 2020 it was announced CentOS Linux is being discontinued and replaced with CentOS Stream, a developer-focused distribution which acts as a middle-stream between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Mabox Linux is a Manjaro-based rolling-release distribution. It features the Openbox window manager as its default user interface and provides a welcome screen with access to utilities which add additional software to the operating system.

Lossless data compression is an important tool for reducing the storage requirements of the world's ever-growing data sets. Yann Collet developed the LZ4 algorithm and designed the Zstandard (or Zstd) algorithm; he came to the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo to talk about where data compression goes from here. It turns out that we have reached a point where general-purpose algorithms are only going to provide limited improvement; for significant increases in compression, while keeping computation costs within reason for data-center use, turning to format-specific techniques will be needed.

The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.

Version 1.6.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for systemd credentials, use of Rust's clap crate for parsing command-line arguments, and more. LWN covered the project in March 2024.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (sssd), Debian (linux-6.1 and python-parsl), Fedora (chezmoi, complyctl, composer, and firefox), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (buildah, libpq, podman, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), SUSE (avahi, curl, ffmpeg-4, ffmpeg-7, firefox, istioctl, k6, kubelogin, libmicrohttpd, libpcap-devel, libpng16, libtasn1-6-32bit, matio, ovmf, python-tornado6, python311-Authlib, and teleport), and Ubuntu (angular.js, python-urllib3, and webkit2gtk).

Manjaro Linux is a fast, user-friendly, desktop-oriented operating system based on Arch Linux. Key features include intuitive installation process, automatic hardware detection, stable rolling-release model, ability to install multiple kernels, special Bash scripts for managing graphics drivers and extensive desktop configurability. Manjaro Linux offers Xfce as the core desktop options, as well as KDE, GNOME and a minimalist Net edition for more advanced users. Community-supported desktop flavours are also available.

Slimbook OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution customised for the Slimbook line of Linux computers assembled in Spain. It offers a choice of GNOME or KDE Plasma desktops on a single ISO image which also includes some custom extensions and utilities. The distribution provides its own repositories for some software, prioritising DEB and Flatpak packages over Ubuntu's snap options. Some of the other interesting features of Slimbook OS include touchpad gestures (enabled by default), Slimbook service notifications, window tiling, the Terminator terminal emulator, a Ulauncher application for fast searching, and a day/night mode switcher.

TROMjaro is a Manjaro-based Linux distribution with a customised Xfce desktop. Compared to its parent, TROMjaro offers several user-friendly utilities, such as Layout Switcher with six different layouts or Theme Switcher with several accent colours. It also provides various enhancements, including the integration of the Chaotic-AUR repository with pre-built binary packages, a selection of custom wallpapers and icon packs, and extra configuration options in Settings Manager. The distribution comes with support for AppImage files and a heavily-tweaked Firefox browser with custom add-ons.

Version:next-20260114 (linux-next) Released:2026-01-14

TUXEDO OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed in Germany by TUXEDO Computers GmbH, designed and optimised for the company's own range of Linux-friendly personal computers and notebooks. The distribution uses KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. Some of the differences between Ubuntu and TUXEDO OS include custom boot menu, the TUXEDO Control Centre, Calamares installer, availability of the Lutris open gaming platform, preference for the PipeWire audio daemon (over PulseAudio), removal of Ubuntu's snap daemon and snap packages, and various other tweaks and enhancements.