Posts by LWN (old posts, page 14)

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), Arch Linux (curl, ghostscript, go, konsole, python-django, roundcubemail, and samba), Fedora (aerc, chromium, golang-x-perf, libkrun, python3.11, python3.12, rust-kbs-types, rust-sev, rust-sevctl, valkey, and wireshark), Gentoo (Konsole and sysstat), Oracle (.NET 9.0), Red Hat (bootc, grub2, keylime-agent-rust, python3.12-cryptography, rpm-ostree, rust-bootupd, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, docker, grub2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, less, python-Django, screen, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils and modsecurity-apache).

Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc2

Linus Torvalds has released 6.16-rc2, which is "admittedly even smaller than usual", though rc2 is not uncommonly one of the smaller release candidates.
It may be that people are taking a breather after a fairly sizable merge window, but it might also be seasonal, with Europe starting to see summer vacations... We'll see how this goes.

The diffstat looks somewhat unusual, with a lot of one-liners with both ARC and pincontrol having (presumably independently) ended up doing some unrelated trivial cleanups.

But even that is probably noticeable only because everything else is pretty small. That "everything else" is mostly network drivers (and bluetooth) and bcachefs, with some rust infrastructure and core networking changes thrown in.

[$] CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork

The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both the Android and iOS platforms. In addition to featuring offline maps (generated from OpenStreetMap cartography) and turn-by-turn navigation, it also promises its users greater privacy than proprietary options. However, controversial decisions taken by the project's leaders, feelings of disenfranchisement among contributors, and even accusations of embezzlement have precipitated a divide in the community, leading to a new fork called CoMaps.

Radicle Desktop released

The Radicle peer-to-peer code collaboration project has released Radicle Desktop: a graphical interface designed to simplify more complex parts of using Radicle such as issue management and patch reviews.

Radicle Desktop is not trying to replace your terminal, IDE, or code editor - you already have your preferred tools for code browsing. It won't replace our existing app.radicle.xyz and search.radicle.xyz for finding and exploring projects. It also doesn't run a node for you. Instead, it communicates with your existing Radicle node, supporting your current workflow and encourages gradual adoption.

LWN covered Radicle in March 2024.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, kernel, and mod_security), Fedora (chromium, gh, mingw-icu, nginx-mod-modsecurity, python3.10, python3.9, thunderbird, valkey, and yarnpkg), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, grafana-pcp, kernel, libxml2, mod_security, nodejs:20, and thunderbird), SUSE (audiofile, helm, kubernetes-old, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, libcryptopp, postgresql15, thunderbird, and valkey), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia-tegra-igx).

[$] FAIR package management for WordPress

The last year has been a rocky one for the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg—WordPress co-founder and CEO of WordPress hosting company Automattic—started a messy public spat with WP Engine in September and has proceeded to use his control of the project's WordPress.org infrastructure as weapons against the company, with the community caught in the crossfire. It is not surprising, then, that on June 6 a group of WordPress community participants announced the Federated and Independent Repositories Package Manager (FAIR.pm) project. It is designed to be a decentralized alternative to WordPress.org with a goal of building "public digital infrastructure that is both resilient and fair".

Summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit

The Python Software Foundation blog is carrying a set of detailed summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit:

The Python Language Summit 2025 occurred on May 14th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Core developers and special guests from around the world gathered in one room for an entire day of presentations and discussions about the future of the Python programming language.

Topics covered include making breaking changes less painful, free-threaded Python, interaction with Rust, and challenges faced by the Steering Council.

[$] Parallelizing filesystem writeback

Writeback for filesystems is the process of flushing the "dirty" (written) data in the page cache to storage. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Anuj Gupta led a combined storage and filesystem session on some work that has been done to parallelize the writeback process. Some of the performance problems that have been seen with the existing single-threaded writeback came up in a session at last year's summit, where the idea of doing writeback in parallel was discussed.

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Debian (chromium, gst-plugins-bad1.0, node-tar-fs, and ublock-origin), Gentoo (Emacs, File-Find-Rule, GStreamer, GStreamer Plugins, GTK+ 3, LibreOffice, Node.js, OpenImageIO, Python, PyPy, Qt, X.Org X server, XWayland, and YAML-LibYAML), Mageia (mariadb and roundcubemail), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libxml2, libxslt, mod_security, nodejs:20, and perl-FCGI:0.78), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (docker, docker-compose, iputils, kernel, libsoup, open-vm-tools, rabbitmq-server, rabbitmq-server313, wget, and yelp), and Ubuntu (libsoup2.4 and webkit2gtk).