Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1092553/

At the 2026 edition of FOSSY, Romeo
Solano gave a fast-paced, humorous presentation on what could have been a
rather boring topic: server encryption. There are a number of threats that
we face in today’s world, from criminals, government overreach, espionage,
and more, that can be thwarted with encryption. But encrypting data on a
system that may live elsewhere, without any access to its keyboard at boot
time, is rather more difficult than encrypting the disk of a laptop.
Solano described the problems and gave a tour of some of the solutions in
the talk.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1092993/

Typst is a system for typesetting documents
into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progress, HTML. It is adept at
handling technical material, and is often considered to be an eventual LaTeX replacement. We last looked
in on Typst a year ago, when it had reached version 0.13. A new version,
0.15, was released in
June with lots of new features, including support for variable fonts,
MathML, multiple bibliographies, and more. Typst is free, Apache-2.0-licensed software, programmed in Rust.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1090579/

Python’s support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over
the last few years with the advent of the “free-threaded” version of the language. But
testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the
underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering, which adds
an element of non-determinism. At PyCon US, Larry Hastings gave a talk (YouTube video)
about his blanket project,
which is meant to provide mechanisms for deterministic testing of
multithreaded Python code.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1089390/

At FOSSY 2026, several people from the
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC),
which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing
violation of the Affero General Public
License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver
Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in
regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being
done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is
particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is
employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1088781/

At the outset of his PyCon US 2026
talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing
filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib
instead. That’s kind of a tall order, at least for longtime Python users,
since string-based paths have been pervasive—and mostly work. It is that
“mostly” part that makes Hunner want to see things change, of course, so he
set out to describe a lesser-known corner of the language and to try to
change some minds.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/

This year’s edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Yearly conference, better known as “FOSSY”, moved north to the
beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC)
in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions:
Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at
FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal
and community issues, to the “FOSS in Daily Life” talks. In the “Toolchains
and Other Development Tools” track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation
about bootstrappable builds,
which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN
did look at the topic just over two years
ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny
program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet
another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is
built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a
completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1086336/

Filesystem in
Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather
(BoF) discussion about the subsystem at
the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. In it, he talked about
maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans
for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the
FUSE community these days it seems.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1085618/

The Filesystem in
Userspace (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem
requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out
of the kernel. The FUSE server can use the io_uring
facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that
memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single,
large buffer size that is excessive for small I/O operations. He led a discussion on that topic
in the filesystem track of the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in Zagreb, Croatia.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1082687/

The famfs filesystem, which is meant to provide shared access to huge
memory-resident files on CXL and other
devices, returned to
the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) in 2026.
It was first discussed at LSFMM+BPF 2024 and a new implementation was described at the 2025
gathering, but it still has not made its way into the kernel; LWN looked
at a discussion about merging famfs back in April 2026.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1082342/

It should come as no surprise that a gathering of filesystem developers
would discuss filesystem testing; it has been a mainstay of the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit over the years and the
2026 summit was no exception. Ted Ts’o led the discussion this time; he
had a few different topics to raise, including his perception of increasing
regressions for ext4 in the stable kernels and what can be done to help
reduce them. As with other similar
sessions at the summit over the years,
there is a lot of interest in collaborating on test inputs and outputs, but
finding a way to centralize that information has so far eluded the
filesystem community.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1080821/

Kitty is a terminal
emulator that
runs on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs, which is notable for its speed and features
such as image support and advanced font handling. It is under active development; a
recent major release adds a
new level of mouse support. Here, we will look at some of those features
and show how the program can also be used as platform for
text-based applications. Kitty is free software, released
under the GPLv3.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1081884/

Over on the OpenMandriva
forum, the Linux distribution has reported
sabotage of its repositories by a disgruntled contributor with
administrative credentials. According to “AngryPenguin”, an abusive
incident in a distribution Matrix chat led to a user being kicked out of
the chat; that “triggered a cascade of events“, which led to people
resigning from the distribution. Eventually, one of those people used
their administrative privileges to delete part of the distribution’s GitHub
repository and to “publish an empty package in the cooker
repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages, which could have
damaged the systems of people using gnome or cosmic“.

We are currently working to restore the deleted repositories and restore
the functionality of the obsolete packages.

[…] We performed a full system audit and, aside from the removed
packages, we found no other violations.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1079407/

A number of problems related to negative directory entries (dentries) were
the topic of a filesystem-track session at
the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Negative dentries are
used to indicate that a file of a given name does not exist in a directory;
it is an optimization that short-circuits the lookup of the file name when
the answer is already known.

Miklos Szeredi led a
session that discussed
some problems that come from having too many negative dentries for a
directory.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1078767/

Writeback is the process of ensuring that dirty pages or folios in the page
cache are flushed to the disk, so that changes to those files are made
persistent. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Jeff Layton wanted to
discuss whether the writeback operation should be initiated earlier than it
is today. The consensus seemed to be that it should be done earlier, but
the path toward making that happen was less clear.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1078367/

Probably the biggest change for Python over the last five years or so is
the advent of the “free-threaded” version of the language, which removes the
global interpreter lock (GIL) and allows multiple threads to run in
parallel in the interpreter. At PyCon
US 2026, held in Long Beach, California in mid-May, longtime CPython
core developer (and current steering council member) Thomas Wouters gave a
talk about the feature. He looked at the motivation behind the GIL-removal
efforts, some history,
the current status of the free-threaded interpreter, and provided a
prediction on where it all leads.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1077767/

Jan Kara has been working
on cleaning up how buffer
heads are used by some kernel filesystems. In a short
filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, he gave an update on
that work and where it is headed. Topics included generic infrastructure
to track buffer heads for metadata, a buffer-head cleanup for the Amiga
filesystem, and some planned locking fixes.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1077052/

In a shortened session in the filesystem track at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein gave an
update on the overlayfs
union filesystem. There are some new features over the last few years
that he wanted to mention, along with looking at the status of nesting
overlayfs layers. The composefs use case
that was discussed at the summit in 2023
has led to some interesting changes to overlayfs.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1075829/

In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein updated
attendees on the fanotify
filesystem-event monitoring
subsystem. He wanted to describe changes that had come in the last year or
so, as well as upcoming features and some remaining challenges in his
efforts to use fanotify for hierarchical
storage management (HSM). Fanotify is the user-space API for monitoring
files, directories, and filesystems for events of various sorts
(e.g. opening or deleting a file).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1074919/

Extended
attributes (xattrs) provide a way to attach key/value metadata to
inodes—files, directories, and the like—in a filesystem. As with many
Linux filesystems, the FUSE filesystem
supports xattrs. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, FUSE maintainer Miklos
Szeredi led a discussion about caching xattrs in kernel memory; he would
like to create some common infrastructure that could be used by FUSE and
shared with other filesystems.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1075832/

Over on the AboutCode blog, lead
maintainer Philippe Ombredanne writes
about an agentic LLM system porting the ScanCode
Toolkit to Rust. In the process, the LLM (or the people behind it)
infringed the ScanCode trademark, stripped copyright and license notices,
“and started an outreach campaign, without ever engaging the AboutCode
community“. Ironically, the toolkit is used to scan source code and binaries in
order to figure out licensing and copyright information; it also reports on
package
dependencies, vulnerabilities, and more.

This is worth repeating: A comprehensive test suite, decent documentation, and curated datasets is what makes automated porting possible. It is also what makes a codebase easier to replicate without understanding it.

The agent’s initial approach, using an existing Rust license-detection library, failed to match ScanCode’s output quality. The agent then did what any translator would do when a loose paraphrase fails: it copied the original more closely. The final port reproduces ScanCode’s core algorithms, code organization, and data-driven architecture in Rust, not because the agent understood them, but because it had enough training data and test feedback to converge on equivalent code.