Feed aggregator

Version:6.1.173 (longterm) Released:2026-05-15 Source:linux-6.1.173.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.173.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.173

Version:5.15.207 (longterm) Released:2026-05-15 Source:linux-5.15.207.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.207.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.207

Version:5.10.256 (longterm) Released:2026-05-15 Source:linux-5.10.256.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.256.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.256

Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, Mageia is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.

The kernel's control-group subsystem works well for resource management, Chris Li said at the beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Control groups work less well for other use cases, though. He was there to present his proposed enhancement, called "policy groups", that would address some of the shortcomings that he has encountered. A consensus on how this feature should look still seems distant, though.

Essora Eos is a set of desktop Linux distributions based on Devuan, featuring the JWM or Openbox window managers or the KDE Plasma or LXDE desktop environments. It uses the OpenRC init system and the Xlibre display server. The distribution aims to be clean, minimal, fast and customisable, with only the essential tools installed by default. Essora Eos uses the Calamares system installer and provides a custom graphical configuration utility called "Essora Control Centre".

In back-to-back sessions at the start of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (which spilled over into a third slot), the atomic-buffered-writes feature was discussed. In the first session, Pankaj Raghav and Andres Freund set the stage with an introduction to the problem, along with a use case for its solution: the PostgreSQL database system. In the second, Ojaswin Mujoo described a potential way forward for the feature using an approach based on writethrough, which effectively means that the kernel immediately writes the data to disk instead of waiting for writeback from the page cache to occur. As might be expected, there was quite a bit of discussion among the assembled filesystems and storage developers during the combined sessions for those tracks.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 stable kernels. These kernels do not include a patch for the Fragnesia local-privilege-escalation exploit that came to light on May 13, but do include many other important fixes throughout the tree. Users are, as always, advised to upgrade.

Version:7.0.7 (stable) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-7.0.7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.0.7.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.0.7

Version:6.18.30 (longterm) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-6.18.30.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.30.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.30

Version:6.12.88 (longterm) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-6.12.88.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.88.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.88

The kernel's reverse-mapping machinery is charged with locating the page-table entries that refer to a given page in memory. The reverse mapping of anonymous pages is handled differently than for file-backed pages. The kernel's implementation of reverse mapping for anonymous pages is, according to Lorenzo Stoakes in his proposal for a memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, "a very broken abstraction", due to its complexity. It also has some performance problems. Stoakes was there to present, in raw form, a proposed replacement that he calls a "COW context".

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, jq, and yggdrasil), Debian (nghttp2 and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freerdp, GitPython, kernel, kernel-headers, krb5, nano, nix, nodejs20, php, python-click, python-django5, SDL2_image, and xen), Mageia (dnsmasq, flatpak, kernel, kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, perl-XML-LibXML, and redis), SUSE (dnsmasq, firefox, jupyter-jupyterlab, kernel, krb5, libvinylapi3, log4j, Mesa, mozjs60, NetworkManager, OpenImageIO, python-Mako, python-Pillow, and python39), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq and nginx).

SmartOS is an open-source UNIX-like operating system based on illumos, a community fork of OpenSolaris. It features four technologies - ZFS (a combined file system and logical volume manager), DTrace (a dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems), Zones (a lightweight virtualisation solution), KVM and bhyve (two full virtualisation solutions for running a variety of guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, BSD and Plan9). SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Fedora AI; Forgejo "carrot" disclosure; memory-management maintainership; huge THPs; mshare; 64KB base pages; DAMON; direct map.
• Briefs: Dirty Frag; Fragnesia; Mythos and curl; killswitch; Debian reproducible builds; KDE investment; Quotes ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

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.

Luberri Linux is a desktop-oriented distribution based on Linux Mint, with Cinnamon as the preferred desktop. It is localised into the Basque language and is primarily intended for the Basque-speaking users, although it supports the Spanish language as well. Luberri Linux is especially appropriate for use in educational institutions as it includes five years of support, regular updates, integration with Active Directory on Windows, and a vast range of applications suitable for learning varied subjects, such as typing, chemistry, geography, mathematics, programming, or mind and concept maps.

Aurora is a Fedora Silverblue-based Linux distribution with the goal of being a general-purpose workstation. It uses the KDE Plasma desktop. Like Fedora Silverblue, Aurora's root filesystem is immutable (read-only), which makes the system more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Updates, upgrades and rollbacks to a previous image are available via the rpm-ostree utility. The distribution also features Flatpak applications and Toolbox containers.

A push by Red Hat employees to create a Fedora "AI Developer Desktop" with support for out-of-tree kernel drivers and AI toolkits has been met with objections from some long-time members of the Fedora community. After more than a month of sometimes heated discussion, the Fedora Council had voted to approve the initiative; however, a last-minute change to vote against the proposal by council member Justin Wheeler has (at least temporarily) sent it back to the drawing board.

Sam James has sent an announcement to the OSS Security mailing list about another local-privilege-escalation (LPE) exploit in the same class as Dirty Frag, called "Fragnesia". From the disclosure:

This is a separate bug in the ESP/XFRM from dirtyfrag which has received its own patch. However, it is in the same surface and the mitigation is the same as for dirtyfrag.

It abuses a logic bug in the Linux XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem to achieve arbitrary byte writes into the kernel page cache of read-only files, without requiring any race condition.

James noted that there is a patch in the works, but it has not yet been pulled into Linus Torvalds's tree nor into any of the stable kernels. A proof of concept exploit is also available.