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Longtime LWN readers will have encountered the concept of "stable pages" before; it was first covered here nearly 15 years ago. For the most part, the problem that stable pages were meant to solve — preventing errors when user space modifies a buffer that is under I/O — has been dealt with. But recent discussions show that there is one area where problems remain: direct I/O. There is some disagreement, though, over whether those problems are the result of user-space bugs and how much of a performance price should be paid to address them.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and libtiff), Debian (kernel, libarchive, rust-sudo-rs, and squid), Fedora (chromium, dotnet8.0, forgejo, ruby, and webkitgtk), Oracle (bind, bind9.18, kernel, kernel-uek*, libtiff, and runc), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, and kernel-rt), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (buildah, colord, containerd, kernel, lasso, libsoup, micropython, ongres-scram, openssh, proxy-helm, uyuni-tools, python-pdfminer.six, qatengine, qatlib, regclient, and runc), and Ubuntu (raptor and raptor2).

Nitrux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's Unstable (sid) branch with additional packages pulled in from Ubuntu LTS repositories. Nitrux strives to be a distribution suitable for laptops and desktop computers. Its main desktop environment is NX Desktop, a KDE Plasma desktop enhanced with "plasmoids" to create a special blend of aesthetics and functionality. The project also focuses on using redistributable, portable applications using the AppImage format. Registration with an e-mail address was required to download this distribution, however public downloads have been available since mid-2020.

Version:next-20251112 (linux-next) Released:2025-11-12

Blade OS is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch. It uses the GNOME desktop. The distribution's main features include a pre-configured desktop with useful applications pre-installed, the Calamares system installer, out-of-the-box support for Flatpak packages, and beginner-friendly documentation on the project's website.

Firefox 145 has been released. Notable changes in this release include note-taking features for PDFs viewed in Firefox, enhanced privacy protections, and the ability to access and manage passwords in the sidebar. This release also drops support for 32-bit Linux systems.

Tails is an unusual Linux distribution developed by the Tor Project; it is designed to help users work around internet censorship and avoid surveillance. It is a "portable" operating system that is meant to be run from a USB stick or ISO image and to leave no trace on the computer it was run on. Tails routes connections to the internet over the Tor network and includes a selection of applications and tools suited to working with sensitive documents, communicating securely, and preserving users' anonymity. The tradeoff, of course, is that Tails is less convenient and requires users to learn a new set of tools to avoid compromising their own security and anonymity. Tails 7.1 was released in October, and it seemed like as good a time as any to take it for a spin.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, expat, kernel, osbuild-composer, qt6-qtsvg, runc, valkey, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (incus), Fedora (cef and dotnet8.0), Mageia (strongswan), Red Hat (fence-agents and python-requests), SUSE (chromium, colord, erlang26, java-1_8_0-openjdk, libsoup, python-django, thunderbird, tiff, and warewulf4), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode and rust-sudo-rs).

SparkyLinux is a lightweight, fast and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customised Enlightenment and LXDE desktops. It has been built on the "testing" branch of Debian GNU/Linux.

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.

Version:next-20251111 (linux-next) Released:2025-11-11

Version 2.0.0 of public-inbox, the mail archiving system behind lore.kernel.org and LWN's email archive, has been released. "This release includes several new features and fixes; mostly around improved integration between inboxes and coderepos for solver. Portability and reliability is also improved, especially in the internal process management of lei."

Volumio (formerly RaspyFi) is a Debian-based distribution originally made for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, but later expanded to other embedded devices, including CuBox, BeagleBone Black and UDOO. It aims to fully integrate Music Player Daemon, an open-source music player server, into the current Debian releases and to optimise it for Audiophile-quality music playback. Volumio also makes it simple to play music library directly from a USB storage device or from any network-attached storage and it also enables users to listen to web-based radio stations from Spotify, Last.fm and SoundCloud. Starting in October 2014 the project no longer provided a complete Linux distribution; instead it develops Volumio as a music player application only which it makes available for various platforms. The Volumio distribution resumed development in 2016 and is available for x86 computers as well as several ARM devices.

When programs written in BPF (the kernel's hot-loadable virtual-machine bytecode) call kernel functions (kfuncs), it may be useful for those functions to have additional information about the context in which those BPF programs are executing. Rather than requiring it to supply that information, it would be convenient to let the BPF verifier pass that information to the called function automatically. That is already possible, but a recent patch set from Ihor Solodrai would make it more ergonomic. It allows kernel developers to specify that a kfunc should be passed additional parameters inferred by the verifier, invisibly to the BPF program. The discussion included concerns that Solodrai's implementation was unnecessarily complex, however.

Version 9.0.0 of pytest has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of subtests, native support for TOML configuration files, and a new strict mode. See the changelog for a complete list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (galera and mariadb, kernel, kernel-rt, mingw-libtiff, redis:7, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, bpfman, chromium, dolphin-emu, dotnet9.0, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, kea, libnbd, luksmeta, python-cloudpickle, python-pydantic, python-pydantic-core, python-uv-build, ruby, ruff, rust-get-size-derive2, rust-get-size2, rust-regex, rust-regex-automata, rust-reqsign, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-reqsign-command-execute-tokio, rust-reqsign-core, rust-reqsign-file-read-tokio, rust-reqsign-http-send-reqwest, singularity-ce, uv, xen, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (libxml2, libxslt, opencontainers-runc, and xen), Oracle (bind, galera and mariadb, libsoup, linux-firmware, mariadb:10.5, mingw-libtiff, osbuild-composer, qt5-qt3d, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (chromium, erlang, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openj9, opentofu, python-djangorestframework-simplejwt, python311-Django, python315, squid, thunderbird, tiff, tomcat, tomcat11, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-fips, linux-hwe-6.14, and linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-raspi).

Version:next-20251110 (linux-next) Released:2025-11-10

DESERT OS Linux is a Russian desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the Xfce desktop. It supports Pacstall, a package manager inspired by Arch's AUR and capable of creating native Ubuntu DEB packages from source and binary packages, git repositories, AppImage apps, release artifacts and non-Ubuntu DEB packages. The distribution also offers out-of-the box support for Flatpak packages.

The 6.18-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "In other words: it all looks just the way I like it at this point: small and boring."

Tribblix is a general-purpose operating system derived from OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana and illumos. The base kernel and commands come from illumos, with everything else rebuilt from scratch. It is a traditional system where software is distributed as SVR4 packages and lightweight window managers are preferred over heavy desktop environments. Xfce is the primary desktop option, with MATE, Enlightenment and various window managers also available for installation. While Tribblix inherits many of the key illumos technologies, such as ZFS, zones, DTrace and SMF, it uses its own build and packaging system.