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.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1073759/

Many organizations require US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)
certification of the crypto code they are running. The certification
process is lengthy, but the bigger problem is that the way the crypto
subsystem is built into the kernel makes the result unable to be reused
across kernel updates. I have proposed a patch
series that decouples the crypto subsystem into a standalone
loadable module, allowing a certified crypto module to be reused with
multiple kernels and, thus, requiring fewer lengthy recertification delays.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1074557/

In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein wanted to
discuss his proposed
documentation on adding new filesystems to the kernel. There are a
number of unmaintained and untestable filesystems already in the kernel,
which are a burden to VFS-layer developers who are trying to make sweeping
changes, such as switching to folios and the “new” mount API. Goldstein’s
document is an attempt to head off the addition of filesystems that may
increase that burden down the road.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1073583/

In a plenary session at
the
2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, the state of patch
review using large language models (LLMs) was discussed. It is a topic that has been swirling around in the
kernel community for much of the year. The plenary, which was led by Roman
Gushchin, Chris Mason, Josef Bacik, and Sasha Levin, resulted in a quite bit
of discussion, so much that a second filesystem-track-only (though others
surely sat in) slot was used to continue it later in the day.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1074286/

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)
published a news
item on May 18 about its response to violations of the AGPLv3 by Bambu
Lab in its 3D printers. The company has not provided the source code to
its modifications to a 3D “slicer” program that was released under the
AGPLv3 and it has also threatened Paweł Jarczak who created a fork of a
different slicer (Orca Slicer) released under AGPLv3 in order to interoperate with his
Bambu printer. Based on that, the SFC has created the baltobu
project aimed at reverse-engineering and reimplementing the Bambu code
while also hosting the Orca Slicer fork.

Bambu has behaved badly for years and made multiple, provably false public statements regarding the AGPLv3 and its requirements. The recent aggressive behavior toward Paweł Jarczak was a last straw for us: we have decided to launch a multi-pronged effort that will assist consumers and users in the short-term, and also work toward a long-term strategy to improve the software right to repair for all 3D printer consumers.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1074280/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (atril, evince, gnutls28, haproxy, haveged, jq, kernel, krb5, libgcrypt20, nodejs, and thunderbird), Fedora (aw-server-rust, awatcher, bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, composer, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, evince, firefox, httpd, kernel, nodejs-aw-webui, nss, perl-Apache-Session-Browseable, pie, python-pulp-glue, python-requests, and python3.15), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (apptainer, chromium, cockpit, dnsmasq, google-guest-agent, hauler, iproute2, jfrog-cli, kernel, libecpg6, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, mcphost, oci-cli, perl-YAML-Syck, python-lxml, python-urllib3, python311-impacket, rqlite, rsync, util-linux, and xz), and Ubuntu (evince, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-6.17, node-path-to-regexp, and rclone).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1072019/

In back-to-back sessions at the start of the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (which spilled over into
a third slot), the atomic-buffered-writes
feature was discussed. In the first session, Pankaj Raghav and Andres
Freund set the stage with an introduction to the problem, along with a use
case for its solution: the PostgreSQL database system. In the second, Ojaswin Mujoo
described a potential way forward for the feature using an approach based
on writethrough, which effectively means that the kernel immediately writes
the data to disk instead of waiting for writeback from the page cache to occur. As might be
expected, there was quite a bit of discussion among the assembled
filesystems and storage developers during the combined sessions for those
tracks.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1068704/

The Python packaging world now has a formal
governance council, of the form described in PEP 772 (“Packaging
Council governance process”), which was approved
by the steering council on April 16. It has been over a year
since the PEP was first proposed in February 2025 and it has undergone
lengthy discussions in multiple postings to the Python discussion forum. The
packaging council will have “broad authority over packaging standards,
tools, and implementations“; it will consist of five members who will
be elected in a vote that is likely to come in June—after PyCon US 2026 is held mid-May.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1067234/

The open-source world is currently awash in
reports of LLM-discovered bugs and vulnerabilities, which makes for a lot more
work for maintainers, but many of the current crop are being reported
responsibly with an eye toward minimizing that impact. A recent report
on an effort to systematically find bugs in Python extensions
written in C has followed that approach. Hobbyist Daniel Diniz used Claude
Code to find more than 500 bugs of various sorts across nearly a million
lines of code in 44 extensions; he has been working with maintainers to get
fixes upstream and his methodology serves as a great example of how to keep
the human in the loop—and the maintainers out of burnout—when employing LLMs.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1066103/

The OpenWrt One is a
router powered by the open-source firmware from the OpenWrt project; it was also the
subject of a keynote at SCALE in 2025
given by Denver Gingerich of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC),
which played a big role in developing the router. Gingerich returned to
the conference in
2026 to talk about the build system used by the OpenWrt One, which is
focused on creating the needed binaries, naturally, but doing so in a way
that makes it easy to comply with the licenses of the underlying code.
That makes good sense for a project of this sort—and for a talk given by
the director of compliance at SFC.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1064685/

The Trusted
Platform Module (TPM) is a widely misunderstood piece of hardware (or
firmware) that lives in most x86-based computers. At SCALE 23x in Pasadena, California,
James Bottomley gave a presentation on the TPM and the work that he and
others have done to enable the Linux kernel to work with it. In
particular, he described the problems with interposer attacks, which target
the communication between the TPM and the kernel, and what has
been added to the kernel to thwart them.