Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040888/

The Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab
concerns itself with many aspects of software licensing, Krzysztof Siewicz
said at the beginning of his 2025 GNU Tools
Cauldron session. These include supporting projects that are facing
licensing challenges, collecting copyright assignments, and addressing GPL
violations. In this session, though, there was really only one topic that
the audience wanted to know about: the interaction between free-software
licensing and large language models (LLMs).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041886/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ghostscript and libfcgi), Fedora (qt5-qtsvg), Red Hat (kernel, perl-FCGI, perl-FCGI:0.78, and vim), SUSE (bluez, curl, podman, postgresql14, python-xmltodict, and udisks2), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, and subversion).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041658/

Linus has released 6.18-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this development cycle. “This was one of the good
merge windows where I didn’t end up having to bisect any particular problem
on nay of the machines I was testing. Let’s hope that success mostly
translates to the bigger picture too.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040197/

Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still
supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools
Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting
for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who
is working on just that compiler (known as “gccrs”), provided an update on
the status of that project and what is coming next.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040456/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.
• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041102/

Version
3.14.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of
changes this time around, including official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more; see
the announcement for details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041058/

Taylor Blau has posted an
extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor’s
Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID
headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on
Google Docs for those who prefer that format.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041069/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (kernel, open-vm-tools, and postgresql), SUSE (chromedriver and chromium), and Ubuntu (haproxy and pam-u2f).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039827/

Support for BPF in the kernel has been tied to the LLVM toolchain since the
advent of extended BPF. There has been a growing effort to add BPF support
to the GNU toolchain as well, though. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, the
developers involved got together with representatives of the kernel
community to talk about the state of that work and what needs to happen
next.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040870/

OpenSSH 10.1 has
been released. Along with “a minor security fix” and some other bug
fixes, this release disallows control characters in user names passed via
the command line, adds better logging around certificate refusals, and a
new RefuseConnection server configuration option.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040663/

The Free Software Foundation has announced
the selection of Ian Kelling as the organization’s president.

Kelling, age forty-three, has held the role of a board member and a
voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling’s
confirmation: “His hands-on technical experience resulting from his
position as the organization’s senior systems administrator proved
invaluable for his work on the board of directors. The board is
confident Kelling is the right person to help the organization
achieve its long-term goals. His commitment to free software comes
from a life of exploring ways to exert user control. He has the
technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software
issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an
active speaker and blogger.”

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039784/

The GNU Tools Cauldron is almost entirely focused on user-space tools, but
kernel developers need a solid toolchain too. In what appears to be a
developing tradition (started in 2024),
some kernel developers attended the 2025 Cauldron for the
second year in a row to discuss their needs with the assembled toolchain
developers. Topics covered in this year’s gathering include Rust, better
BPF type
format (BTF) support, SFrame, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039529/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Fedora and AI; Linting kernel Rust; openSUSE Leap 16; mmap() file operation; 6.17 statistics; dirlock.
• Briefs: Bcachefs removal; Alpine /usr merge; F-Droid; Fedora AI policy; OpenSUSE Leap 16; PostgreSQL 18; Radicle 1.5.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040323/

The openSUSE
Leap 16 release is now available.

This major version update of our fixed-release community-Linux
distribution has a fresh software stack and introduces an unmatched
maintenance- and security-support cycle, a new installer and
simplified migration options.

See our look at this release for more
information.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040152/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-internetarchive and tiff), Fedora (nextcloud), Oracle (kernel, openssh, and squid), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and ncurses), SUSE (afterburn and chromium), and Ubuntu (open-vm-tools, ruby-rack, and tiff).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040120/

After marking bcachefs “externally maintained” in 6.17, Linus Torvalds has
removed
it entirely for 6.18. “It’s now a DKMS module, making the in-kernel
code stale, so remove it to avoid any version confusion.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/

The 6.17 development cycle ended on September 28 with the release
of the 6.17 kernel. This cycle brought in 13,089 non-merge changesets, a
slowdown from its predecessor but still within the normal bounds for recent
kernels. The time has come for a look at where those changes came from,
with a bit of a side trip into bug statistics.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039904/

The F-Droid project has posted an
urgent message regarding Google’s plan to require developer
registration to install apps on Android devices.

The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their
apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over”
the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute,
as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to
those applications.

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree
will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app
distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be
deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of
apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s
myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install — or
even update their existing installed — applications.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1038266/

Linus Torvalds has released the 6.17 kernel. He notes that the shortlog for the changes since -rc7 are pretty tame:

It’s not exciting, which is all good. I think the
biggest patch in there is some locking fixes for some bluetooth races
that could cause use-after-free situations. Whee – that’s about as
exciting as it gets.

Other than that, there’ the usual driver fixlets (GPU and networking
dominate as usual, but “dominate” is still pretty small), there’s some
minor random other driver updates, some filesystem noise, and core
kernel and mm.

And some selftest updates.

Significant features in this release include
better control over x86 Spectre
mitigations,
live patching support on 64-bit Arm platforms,
a number of pidfd
improvements,
the removal of special support for
uniprocessor systems,
initial support for proxy execution,
experimental large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem,
the file_getattr()
and file_setattr() system calls, and
support for the DualPI2
congestion-control protocol.

See the LWN merge-window summaries
(part 1, part 2) for more information.
In addition, KernelNewbies has a look at the changes that went into 6.17.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1038715/

The file_operations
structure in the kernel is a set of function pointers implementing, as the
name would suggest, operations on files. A subsystem that manages objects
which can be represented by a file descriptor will provide a
file_operations structure providing implementations of the various
operations that a user of the file descriptor may want to carry out. The
mmap() method, in particular, is invoked when user space calls the
mmap()
system call to map the object behind a file descriptor into its address
space. That method, though, is currently on its way out in a multi-release
process that started in 6.17.