Version
4.6 of the Mastodon fediverse platform has been released.
The headliner of this release is Collections, a way to create and
share curated collections of profiles. Part of Mastodon’s work
ethos is our commitment to trust and safety, so we’ve put a lot of
thought and care into the design of this feature to avoid some of
the pitfalls and abuse people have experienced with similar
features on other platforms, while focusing on its primary goal:
Helping new users discover more of the Fediverse.
Other new features include support for subscribing to posts via email, the
ability to generate a “year in review” post, accessibility improvements,
and more.
Part of running LWN is keeping a list of potentially interesting topics
that may merit the effort to turn into articles. As an experiment, we are now exposing that list to our subscribers at the
Project Leader and Supporter levels. The hope is that this list will
provide useful insights into what is on our radar and which might be coming
to LWN in the near future.
With this feature, we hope to give our most committed subscribers a look
behind the curtain and the ability to provide input on the topics they are
most interested in reading about. There, is, thus, a simple voting
mechanism built into this list. No topic will be chosen (or rejected)
solely on the basis of votes; there are a lot of considerations that go
into topic selection, and that will not change. But more information about
where our readers’ interests lie will, hopefully, be helpful.
For all readers: we are always happy to welcome topic suggestions sent to [email protected].
Linus Torvalds released
the 7.1 kernel as expected on June 14. This development cycle
brought in a lot of new features — and a lot of new developers as well.
The time has come for our traditional look at where the changes in 7.1 came
from, with a digression into how our community may be changing in general.
Linus has released the 7.1 kernel.
“So it’s only Sunday morning back home, but it’s Sunday afternoon where
I am right now, so I’m doing the 7.1 release at the regular time –
just not in the regular timezone.”
The Linux kernel has long tried to use huge pages as a way to improve
performance, sometimes with more success than others. The size of huge
pages has traditionally been imposed by the hardware, which typically only
offers a couple of relatively large options. In more recent times, though,
the use of multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs), with more flexible
sizing implemented in software, has been growing. If all goes well, the
7.2 development cycle will include the addition of a new feature,
contributed by Nico Pache, to make the use of mTHPs even more transparent.
The slightly more than a dozen talks were symbolically framed
between the opening keynote by systemd creator Lennart Poettering
and the closing talk by Jorge Castro, initiator of the Universal
Blue project, from which the modern Linux systems Bluefin and
Bazzite emerged. Both Castro and Poettering call for a fundamental
rethink of how Linux operating systems are delivered but pursue
different approaches.
The 7.1-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus said: “Anyway, as things look now this is the last
rc. Something can obviously always come up and force us to change that, but
please give rc7 a whirl and keep testing for one more week.“
Since the earliest days of Unix, two of the core process-oriented system
calls have been fork(), which creates a child process as a copy of
the parent, and exec(), which runs a new program in the place of
the current one. In Linux kernels, those system calls are better known as clone()
and execve(),
but the core functionality remains the same. While there is elegance to
this process-creation model, there are shortcomings as well. A recent proposal from
Li Chen to add “spawn templates” to the kernel will not be accepted in its
current form, but it may point the way toward a new process-creation
primitive in the future.
The Software Engineering Radio podcast has put up an
interview with graphics maintainer Dave Airlie. Much of what is in
there will not be news to LWN readers, but it is an interesting overview of
the life of a large-subsystem maintainer.
I was talking to a few of the Rust people, and I thought: these are
very young people, these are a group of people in their 20s, maybe
30s, they are a younger cohort of developers than the people I am
normally used to dealing with. I thought there was maybe a good
way we could bring these groups together. I think that having
young people coming into the kernel using Rust is valuable… So I
thought that I should be supportive of bringing Rust into the
kernel.
The splice()
and vmsplice()
system calls are meant to improve performance for certain data-movement
tasks by minimizing (or avoiding altogether) system calls and the copying
of data. They also have a long history of security problems. The recent
flood of LLM-discovered vulnerabilities has drawn attention, once again, to splice() and vmsplice(); as a result, they may end up
being removed altogether.
The DistroWatch site is celebrating its
25th anniversary. “All in all, it has been an incredible ride. Many
of you who read these pages regularly know that downloading and testing
distributions is a highly addictive pastime. I have been an avid
distro-hopper for the last 25 years and I don’t see myself abandoning this
activity for many more years to come.” Congratulations to Ladislav
Bodnar and all the others who have kept that resource going for so long.
The x32 ABI was meant
to be the best of both worlds, providing the expanded registers and
instruction set of the x86-64 architecture while preserving the lower
memory use of 32-bit systems. The Linux kernel has supported x32 since the
3.4 release in 2012. The initial excitement around x32 did not last,
though, and kernel developers are considering removing that support — and
not for the first time. Even the most unloved features tend to have a few
users, though, making removal hard.
The 7.1-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus said: “Well, I wouldn’t call this ‘small’, but it is
certainly smaller than rc5 was. And I don’t think there’s anything
particularly scary here, so maybe we’re still on track for a normal release
cycle. Let’s see.“
Version
1.96.0 of the Rust programming language has been released. Changes
include a new set of Copy-implementing Range types,
assertions with pattern matching, a number of stabilized APIs, and two
Cargo vulnerability fixes.
IBM has sent out a
press release touting a claimed $5 billion investment into an
operation called Project Lightwell:
Project Lightwell will establish a trusted enterprise clearinghouse
combined with a global force of engineers to identify and fix
vulnerabilities at scale. The clearinghouse will serve as a
security coordination layer, using advanced AI capabilities to
validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open
source code. These capabilities will be offered through commercial
subscriptions, allowing enterprises to integrate secure patches
directly into their existing software supply chains with
enterprise-grade validation and lifecycle management.
Toward the bottom, it does also mention sharing vulnerability information
with upstream projects.
The kernel’s memory-management subsystem is currently partway through a
multi-year project to replace the page structure (which represents
a page of physical memory) with memory
descriptors. At the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Vishal Moola ran a
fast-paced session in the memory-management track to describe the current
state of that work and what is likely to happen next.
The Linux Foundation will be hosting a
live interview with LWN co-founder Jonathan Corbet. The event will
take place on Tuesday, June 2 at 8:00AM Pacific daylight time (UTC-7).
Registration is open for those who would like to attend.
I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit; it included a suggestion that reading (or
re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive.
This talk, given immediately after the Kernel
Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel’s
development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where it
is today. The text of that speech was hosted on Groklaw, and has since
been replaced by crypto spam, which is rather less useful. In the hopes of
preserving this seminal moment, the transcript has been rescued from the
Wayback Machine and is presented here.
The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings
(page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be
reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly
challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in
complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it.
This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to
bring up this topic.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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![[Topic
list screenshot]](https://lwn.net/images/2026/topiclist.png)