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Version 6.3 of the Plasma desktop has been released. One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma's developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone. Changes include improved support for drawing tablets, better fractional-scaling support, and more.

The 6.6.77 stable kernel update has been released; it contains a single fix for a User Mode Linux build problem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (cacti, libtasn1-6, and rust-openssl), Oracle (galera and mariadb, kernel, raptor2, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, fq, java-21-openj9, libtasn1-6-32bit, ovmf, python310, python312, python313, python314, rime-schema-all, thunderbird, and wget), and Ubuntu (eglibc, firefox, glibc, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, and vim).

Miguel Ojeda gave a keynote at FOSDEM 2025 about the history of the Rust-for-Linux project, and the current attitude of people in the kernel community toward the experiment. Unlike his usual talks, this talk didn't focus so much on the current state of the project, but rather on discussing history and predictions for the future. He ended up presenting quotes from more than 30 people...

Version 1.4.0 of Arti, the Tor Project's next-generation Tor client written in Rust, has been released. Notable improvements in this release include a new RPC interface, and preparatory work toward service-side onion service denial-of-service resistance. The release is dedicated to the memory of Jérémy Bobbio, better known by many as "Lunar". For full details on the release, see the changelog.

Miguel Ojeda has announced the posting of a new document describing policies around the use of Rust in the Linux kernel. There has been a fair amount of confusion about what the kernel policies around Rust are, who maintains what and so on. This document tries to clarify some of these points with what, to the best of our knowledge, is the current status.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, bzip2, galera and mariadb, keepalived, kernel, kernel-rt, mariadb:10.11, mingw-glib2, and podman), Debian (ark, firefox-esr, kernel, sssd, and thunderbird), Fedora (abseil-cpp, clevis-pin-tpm2, dbus-parsec, envision, fido-device-onboard, firefox, golang-github-nvidia-container-toolkit, gotify-desktop, jpegxl, keylime-agent-rust, keyring-ima-signer, libkrun, php-phpseclib, python-cryptography, python3-docs, python3.12, python3.13, rust-afterburn, rust-cargo-vendor-filterer, rust-coreos-installer, rust-crypto-auditing-agent, rust-eif_build, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-nu, rust-oo7-cli, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, rust-pore, rust-routinator, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-keyring-linter, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-policy-config, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-sqv, rust-sevctl,...

The second 6.14 kernel prepatch is out for testing. It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm releasing the usual regularly scheduled release candidate while the rest of the US is getting ready for the biggest day in TV commercials interrupted by some kind of lawn bowling tournament.

The 6.13.2, 6.12.13, and 6.6.76 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The BPF verifier is charged with the challenging task of ensuring that a BPF program is safe for the kernel to run before that program is loaded. Among many other concerns, the verifier must ensure that any kfuncs (kernel functions that have been exported to BPF programs) are called with the correct parameters and from the right context. The "context" part of that enforcement...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-17), Fedora (firefox, FlightGear, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, and SimGear), Mageia (gstreamer), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libsoup, and python-jinja2), SUSE (bind, curl, dcmtk, etcd, firefox, google-osconfig-agent, krb5, openssl-1_1, podman, python311-cbor2, thunderbird, wget, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (glibc).

Jonathan Bryce has announced two open community meetings to hear input on the topic of the OpenInfra Foundation migrating to the Linux Foundation. Bryce wrote that the OpenInfra board has carefully evaluated its options, and sees joining the Linux Foundation as the best way forward. Like the Linux Foundation, the OpenInfra Foundation is 501(c)(6) nonprofit. According to the FAQ, OpenInfra "is in great health,...

Version 25.2 of the LibreOffice productivity suite is out. Changes include the ability to remove all personal information from any document, support for ODF version 1.4, a number of accessibility improvements, and more; see the release notes for details.

Version 24.10.0 of the OpenWrt router-oriented distribution has been released. Changes include an update to the 6.6 kernel, use of access control lists on larger systems, multipath TCP support, better WiFi6 support, the beginning of WiFi7 support, and more.

Open source is often described as a "gift economy"—an ecosystem where contributors are motivated by a desire to make the world a better place. That is, sometimes, true. However, James Bottomley used his main track slot at FOSDEM 2025, on February 1, to make the case that it is better to bank on the selfish motivations of individuals to drive community success than to rely...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk and chromium), Fedora (FlightGear, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, and SimGear), Mageia (bind, chromium-browser-stable, python-django, and vim), Oracle (buildah, bzip2, firefox, keepalived, mariadb:10.11, and podman), Slackware (curl, mariadb, and mozilla), SUSE (cargo-audit-advisory-db-20250204 and python311-scikit-learn), and Ubuntu (ckeditor, krb5, and ruby2.7).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Finding concurrency bugs with sched_ext; Rust abstractions; 6.14 Merge window; Sealed system mappings; OpenSUSE board; Julia; Site tour. Briefs: Binutils 2.44; Firefox 135.0; Freedesktop GitLab; GNU C Library 2.41; GTK; Servo; Thunderbird updates; Sanctions; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Servo Rust-based rendering engine project has published an article summarizing its progress in 2024, and plans for the future: Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been upgraded, the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for floats, tables, flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under active development: WebGPU, Shadow...

Over the past year or so, LWN has added a number of useful new features for our subscribers to enhance the experience of reading and commenting on our content. Those features are of little use, however, to readers who do not know about them. It has been more than a decade since we last provided a tour of the site—it seems that another is...

Jake Hillion gave a presentation at FOSDEM about using sched_ext, the BPF scheduling framework that was introduced in kernel version 6.12, to help find elusive concurrency problems. In collaboration with Johannes Bechberger, he has built a scheduler that can reveal theoretically possible but unobserved concurrency bugs in test code in a few minutes. Since their scheduler only relies on mainline kernel features, it can...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libreoffice), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (google-osconfig-agent, grafana, helm, and rime-schema-all), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-23, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

Jeff Xu has been working on a patch set that makes certain mappings in a process's address space impossible to change, sealing them against tampering. This has some potential security benefits — mainly, making sure that someone cannot relocate the vsyscall and vDSO mappings — but some kernel developers haven't been impressed with the patches. While the core functionality (sealing the mappings) is sound,...

Version 135.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Changes include more languages for the translations feature, increasing roll-out of the credit-card autofill and AI chatbot features, and (perhaps most welcome): Firefox now includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries, which can make navigating with the back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history....

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-17), Fedora (chromium, fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libxml2 and redis), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good), Red Hat (buildah, bzip2, galera, mariadb, grafana, keepalived, libsoup, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-glib2, podman, python-jinja2, and rsync), SUSE (bind, ignition, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, krb5, libxml2, openssl-1_1, orc, python-asteval, rsync, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz, libndp, libvpx, and opencv).