Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1051466/
The 6.19-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “I obviously expect next week to be even quieter, with people
“
being distracted by the holidays. So let’s all enjoy taking a little break,
but maybe break the boredom with some early rc testing?
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1051459/
The 2025 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory
Board has
concluded; the winners are Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, Julia
Lawall, David Hildenbrand, and Ted Ts’o.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1051179/
Stephen Rothwell, who has maintained the kernel’s linux-next integration
tree from its inception, has announced his
retirement from that role:
I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026.
Mark Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge. He
has helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so
hopefully knows what he is getting in to. I hope you will all
treat him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have
received.It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has
been helpful to others. It seems a long time since I read Andrew
Morton’s “I have a dream” email and decided that I could help out
there – little did I know what I was heading for.
Over the last two decades or so, the kernel’s development process has evolved
from an unorganized mess with irregular releases to a smooth machine with a
new release every nine or ten weeks. That would not have happened without
linux-next; thanks are due to Stephen for helping to make the current
process possible.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050317/
Linus Torvalds is famously averse to presenting prepared talks, but the
wider community is always interested in what he has to say about the
condition of the Linux kernel. So, for some time now, his appearances have
been in the form of an informal conversation with Dirk Hohndel. At the
2025 Open Source Summit Japan, the pair followed that tradition for the
29th time. Topics covered include the state of the development process,
what Torvalds actually does, and how machine-learning tools might fit into
the kernel project.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049996/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049604/
The Civil Infrastructure Platform
(CIP) first launched in that form in April 2016, so it has a
tenth-anniversary celebration in its near future. At the 2025 Open
Source Summit Japan, Yoshitake Kobayashi talked about the goals of this
project and where it is headed in the future. Supporting a Linux system
for even one year is a challenging task; maintaining that support for a
decade or more is rather more so, and a changing regulatory environment
complicates the task further.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050179/
The final part of the 2025 Maintainers Summit was devoted to the kernel’s
development process itself. There were two sessions, one on continuity and
succession planning, and the traditional discussion, led by Linus Torvalds,
on any pain points that the community is experiencing. There was not a lot
that developers were unhappy about, and there are now more explicit plans in
the works to provide a process should Torvalds abruptly become unable to
fill his role.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050177/
Despite depending heavily on tools, the kernel project often seems to
under-invest in the development of those tools. There has been progress in
that area, though. At the 2025 Maintainers Summit, Konstantin Ryabitsev,
who is (among other things) the author of b4, led a session on ways
in which the kernel’s tools could be improved to make the development
process more efficient and accessible.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049424/
Linus Torvalds released 6.19-rc1 and
closed the 6.19 merge window on December 14 (Japan time), after having
pulled 12,314 non-merge commits into the mainline. Over 8,000 of those
commits came in after our first 6.19
merge-window summary was written. The second part of the merge window
was focused on drivers, but brought in a number of other changes as well.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050381/
Linus has released 6.19-rc1, perhaps a bit
earlier than expected.
So it’s Sunday afternoon in the part of the world where I am now,
so if somebody was looking at trying to limbo under the merge
window timing with one last pull request and is taken by surprise
by the slightly unusual timing of the rc1 release, that failed.Teaching moment, or random capricious acts? You be the judge.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050370/
Ariadne Conill is
exploring a capability-based approach to privilege escalation on Linux
systems.
Inspired by the object-capability model, I’ve been working on a
project named capsudo. Instead of
treating privilege escalation as a temporary change of identity,
capsudo reframes it as a mediated interaction with a service called
capsudod that holds specific authority, which may range
from full root privileges to a narrowly scoped set of capabilities
depending on how it is deployed.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050174/
The ability to write kernel code in Rust was explicitly added as an
experiment — if things did not go well, Rust would be removed again. At
the 2025 Maintainers Summit, a session was held to evaluate the state of
that experiment, and to decide whether the time had come to declare the
result to be a success. The (arguably unsurprising) conclusion was that
the experiment is indeed a success, but there were some interesting points
made along the way.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1050027/
One of the key components in the kernel’s development process is the
linux-next repository. Every day, a large number of branches, each
containing commits intended for the next kernel development cycle, is
pulled into linux-next and integrated. If there are conflicts between
branches, the linux-next process will reveal them. In theory, many other
types of problems can be found as well. Some developers feel that
linux-next does not work as well as it could, though. At the 2025
Maintainers Summit, Mark Brown, who helps to keep linux-next going, led a
session on how it could be made to work more effectively.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/
The first topic of discussion at the 2025 Maintainers Summit has been in
the air for a while: what role — if any — should machine-learning-based
tools have in the kernel development process? While there has been a fair
amount of controversy around these tools, and concerns remain, it seems
that the kernel community, or at least its high-level maintainership, is
comfortable with these tools becoming a significant part of the development
process.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049161/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual
Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that
Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the
kernel and is here to stay. So the “experimental” tag will be coming off.
Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust-for-Linux team.
(Stay tuned for details in our Maintainers Summit coverage.)
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049822/
The Free Software Foundation has announced
the recipients of its 2024 (even though 2025 is almost over) Free Software
Awards. Andy Wingo won the award for the advancement of free software, Alx
Sa is the outstanding new free-software contributor, and Govdirectory takes
the award for projects of social benefit.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049035/
As has been recently announced,
nominations are open for the 2025 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board
(TAB) elections. I am one of the TAB members whose term is coming to an
end, but I have decided that, after 18 years on the board, I will not
be seeking re-election; instead, I will step aside and make room for a
fresh voice. My time on the TAB has been rewarding, and I will be sad to
leave; the TAB has an important role to play in the functioning of the
kernel community.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1048869/
As of this writing, 4,124 non-merge commits have been pulled into the
mainline repository for the 6.19 kernel development cycle. That is a
relatively small fraction of what can be expected this time around, but it
contains quite a bit of significant work, with changes to many core kernel
subsystems. Read on for a summary of the first part of the 6.19 merge
window.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049142/
Version
2025.12 of the Home Assistant home-automation system has been released.
This month, we’re unveiling Home Assistant Labs, a brand-new space
where you can preview features before they go mainstream. And what
better way to kick it off than with Winter mode? ❄️ Enable it and
watch snowflakes drift across your dashboard. It’s completely
unnecessary, utterly delightful, and exactly the kind of thing we
love to build. ❄️But that’s just the beginning. We’ve been working on making
automations more intuitive over the past releases, and this release
finally delivers purpose-specific triggers and conditions. Instead
of thinking in (numeric) states, you can now simply say “When a
light turns on” or “If the climate is heating”. It’s automation
building the way our mind works, as it should be.