Till Kamppeter, co-founder and lead of the OpenPrinting project, has put out a call for sponsors after being laid off by Canonical:

I want to continue doing OpenPrinting for a living, and need a way to do so. I am currently working with the Linux Foundation to make OpenPrinting an [organization] which can receive sponsor funding. So now I am looking for sponsors.

Even greater would be, if independent of this somebody could hire me to continue OpenPrinting...

The 6.16 development cycle was another busy one, with 14,639 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline — just 18 commits short of the total for 6.15. The 6.16 release happened on July 27, as expected. Also as expected, LWN has put together its traditional look at where the code for this release came from.

Fedora's quality team is looking to reduce the scope of test coverage and change the project's release criteria to drop some features from the list of release blockers. This is, in part, an exercise in getting rid of criteria, such as booting from optical media, that are less relevant. It is also a necessity, since the Red Hat team focusing on Fedora quality assurance (QA) is only half the size it was a year ago.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (audiofile, libcaca, libetpan, libxml2, php7.4, snapcast, and thunderbird), Fedora (glibc, iputils, mingw-binutils, and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, mod_auth_openidc, and mod_auth_openidc:2.3), SUSE (afterburn, apache2, atop, chromedriver, chromium, cloud-init, deepin-feature-enable, firefox, firefox-esr, grafana, grype-db, gstreamer-plugins-bad, javamail, jupyter-jupyterlab-templates, jupyter-nbdime, konsole, libetebase, libxmp, minio-client-20250721T052808Z, MozillaFirefox, MozillaFirefox-branding-SLE, opera, pdns-recursor, perl-Authen-SASL, polkit, python-Django, python3-pycares, python311-starlette, rpi-imager, ruby3.4-rubygem-thor, spdlog, thunderbird, varnish, viewvc, and xtrabackup), and Ubuntu (openjdk-21-crac).

The good folks at Linode still have not managed to fix whatever broke in their data center, so we are running on an emergency backup server. Things seem to be working, but the occasional glitch is to be expected. Please accept our apologies for the extended downtime!

Update: we're back on the regular production server, and all seems stable now.

Linus has released the 6.16 kernel:

It's Sunday afternoon, and the release cycle has come to an end. Last week was nice and calm, and there were no big show-stopper surprises to keep us from the regular schedule, so I've tagged and pushed out 6.16 as planned.

Headline changes in this release include enabling five-level page tables by default on x86 systems, a number of core-dump changes including the ability to send core dumps to a socket, the ability to create pipes in io_uring, atomic-write support in the XFS filesystem, the elimination of block-layer bounce buffering, a new DMA-mapping API, an option to block file descriptors passed in via Unix-domain sockets, and more.

See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.16 page for more information.

There is an inherent limit to the privacy of the public cloud. While Linux can isolate virtual machines (VMs) from each other, nothing in the system's memory is ultimately out of reach for the host cloud provider. To accommodate the most privacy-conscious clients, confidential computing protects the memory of guests, even from hypervisors. But the Linux cloud stack needs to be rethought in order to host confidential VMs, juggling two goals that are often at odds: performance and security.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, kernel, nginx:1.24, and sudo), Fedora (dpkg, java-21-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, and valkey), Oracle (apache-commons-vfs, sudo, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (kernel, krb5, and openssh), SUSE (gnutls, ImageMagick, iputils, kernel-livepatch-MICRO-6-0-RT_Update_10, kubernetes1.18, libarchive, ovmf, python, and salt), and Ubuntu (iputils, linux-aws-6.14, linux-raspi, openjdk-21, and openjdk-24).

Version 0.1 of the Wayback project has been released:

Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers.

Ever since Wayback was announced on June 28, we have been making lots of progress to get it as stable and functional as possible, and while this is a preview release it is already daily-driveable by users with simple requirements, as long as they don't mind bugs.

The release is considered alpha-quality and is missing a number of features, including multi-monitor support and DPMS, but adventurous users can find the code here.

The 6.15.8, 6.12.40, 6.6.100, and 6.1.147 stable kernels have been released. Each contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as usual.