LWN.net

The bootc project allows users to create a bootable Linux system image using the container tooling that many developers are already familiar with. It is an evolution of OSTree (now called libostree), which is used to create Fedora Silverblue and other image-based distributions. While creating custom images is still a job for experts, the container technology simplifies delivering heavily customized images to non-technical users.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.16, libsoup, mariadb:10.5, and sssd), Debian (chromium, keystone, and swift), Fedora (apptainer, buildah, chromium, fcitx5, fcitx5-anthy, fcitx5-chewing, fcitx5-chinese-addons, fcitx5-configtool, fcitx5-hangul, fcitx5-kkc, fcitx5-libthai, fcitx5-m17n, fcitx5-qt, fcitx5-rime, fcitx5-sayura, fcitx5-skk, fcitx5-table-extra, fcitx5-unikey, fcitx5-zhuyin, GeographicLib, libime, mbedtls, mingw-poppler, mupen64plus, python-starlette, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (dcmtk, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, libvpx, and sqlite3), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, kernel, libsoup, libsoup3, osbuild-composer, qt6-qtsvg, sssd, and valkey), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (bind, gpg2, ImageMagick, python-Django, and runc), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, inux-gcp-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-raspi-5.4, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8).

Version 4.5 of the Mastodon decentralized social-media platform has been released. Notable features in this release include quote posts, native emoji support, as well as enhanced moderation and blocking features for server administrators. The project also has a post detailing new features in 4.5 for developers of clients and other software that interacts with Mastodon.

The future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) has been under discussion for some time; now, Neal Gompa has announced that the FHS is "hosted and stewarded" by Freedesktop.org.

For those who are unaware, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is the definition for POSIX operating systems to organize system and user data. It is broadly adopted by Linux, BSD, and other operating systems that follow POSIX-like conventions.

See this page for the specification's new home.

Filesystems are complex and performance-sensitive beasts. They can also present security concerns. Microkernel-based systems have long pushed filesystems into separate processes in order to contain any vulnerabilities that may be found there. Linux can do the same with the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem, but using FUSE brings a significant performance penalty. Darrick Wong is working on ways to eliminate that penalty, and he has a massive patch set showing how ext4 filesystems can be safely implemented in user space by unprivileged processes with good performance. This work has the potential to radically change how filesystems are managed on Linux systems.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (unbound), Fedora (deepin-qt5integration, deepin-qt5platform-plugins, dtkcore, dtkgui, dtklog, dtkwidget, fcitx-qt5, fcitx5-qt, fontforge, gammaray, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, kddockwidgets, keepassxc, kf5-akonadi-server, kf5-frameworkintegration, kf5-kwayland, plasma-integration, python-qt5, qadwaitadecorations, qt5, qt5-qt3d, qt5-qtbase, qt5-qtcharts, qt5-qtconnectivity, qt5-qtdatavis3d, qt5-qtdeclarative, qt5-qtdoc, qt5-qtgamepad, qt5-qtgraphicaleffects, qt5-qtimageformats, qt5-qtlocation, qt5-qtmultimedia, qt5-qtnetworkauth, qt5-qtquickcontrols, qt5-qtquickcontrols2, qt5-qtremoteobjects, qt5-qtscript, qt5-qtscxml, qt5-qtsensors, qt5-qtserialbus, qt5-qtserialport, qt5-qtspeech, qt5-qtsvg, qt5-qttools, qt5-qttranslations, qt5-qtvirtualkeyboard, qt5-qtwayland, qt5-qtwebchannel, qt5-qtwebengine, qt5-qtwebkit, qt5-qtwebsockets, qt5-qtwebview, qt5-qtx11extras, qt5-qtxmlpatterns, qt5ct, and xorg-x11-server), Mageia (binutils, gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad, libsoup, libsoup3, mediawiki, net-tools, and tigervnc, x11-server, and x11-server-xwayland), Red Hat (tigervnc), SUSE (aws-efs-utils, fetchmail, flake-pilot, ImageMagick, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel-devel, kubecolor, OpenSMTPD, sccache, tiff, and zellij), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.14, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.14, linux-oem-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-realtime-6.14, poppler, python-django, and various linux-* packages).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Python thread safety; Namespace reference counting; Merigraf; Speeding up short reads; Julia 1.12; systemd security.
• Briefs: CHERIoT 1.0; Chromium XSLT; Arm KASLR; Bazzite; Devuan 6.0; Incus 6.18; LXQt 2.3.0; Rust 1.91.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Mason Freed and Dominik Röttsches have published a document with a timeline and plans for removing Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) from the Chromium project and Chrome browser:

Chromium has officially deprecated XSLT, including the XSLTProcessor JavaScript API and the XML stylesheet processing instruction. We intend to remove support from version 155 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines. This document provides some history and context, explains how we are removing XSLT to make Chrome safer, and provides a path for migrating before these features are removed from the browser.

LWN covered the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) discussion about XSLT in August.

Version 2.3.0 of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt) has been released. The highlight of this release is continued improvement in Wayland support across LXQt components. Rather than offering its own compositor, the LXQt project takes a modular approach and works with several Wayland compositors, such as KWin, labwc, and niri.

Linux has many security features and tools that have evolved over the years to address threats as they emerge and security gaps as they are discovered. Linux security is all, as Lennart Poettering observed at the All Systems Go! conference held in Berlin, somewhat random and not a "clean" design. To many observers, that may also appear to be the case for systemd; however, Poettering said that he does have a vision for how all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit together. He wanted to use his talk to explain "how the individual security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they exist in the first place".

Version 1.3 of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) Runtime Specification has been released. The specification covers the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of containers. The most notable change in 1.3 is the addition of FreeBSD to the specification, which the FreeBSD Foundation calls "a watershed moment for FreeBSD":

The addition of cloud-native container support complements FreeBSD's already robust virtualization capabilities, particularly the powerful FreeBSD jails technology that has been a cornerstone of the operating system for over two decades. In fact, OCI containers on FreeBSD are implemented using jails as the underlying isolation mechanism, bringing together the security and resource management benefits of jails with the portability and ecosystem advantages of OCI-compliant containers.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9 and gimp), Fedora (chromium, fastapi-cli, fastapi-cloud-cli, gherkin, libnbd, maturin, openapi-python-client, python-annotated-doc, python-cron-converter, python-fastapi, python-inline-snapshot, python-jiter, python-openapi-core, python-platformio, python-pydantic, python-pydantic-core, python-pydantic-extra-types, python-rignore, python-starlette, python-typer, python-typing-inspection, python-uv-build, ruff, rust-astral-tokio-tar, rust-attribute-derive, rust-attribute-derive-macro, rust-collection_literals, rust-get-size-derive2, rust-get-size2, rust-interpolator, rust-jiter, rust-manyhow, rust-manyhow-macros, rust-proc-macro-utils, rust-quote-use, rust-quote-use-macros, rust-regex, rust-regex-automata, rust-reqsign, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-reqsign-command-execute-tokio, rust-reqsign-core, rust-reqsign-file-read-tokio, rust-reqsign-http-send-reqwest, rust-serde_json, rust-speedate, rust-tikv-jemalloc-sys, rust-tikv-jemallocator, and uv), Mageia (golang and libavif), Red Hat (bind9.16, pcs, and qt6-qtsvg), SUSE (colord, ffmpeg, govulncheck-vulndb, jasper, openjpeg, poppler, qatengine, qatlib, runc, sccache, and tiff), and Ubuntu (keystone, libssh, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-raspi, runc-app, runc-stable, squid, squid3, and unbound).

Version 6.18 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include new configuration keys for providing credentials to systemd, BPF token delegation, VirtIO support for sound cards, the ability to export ISO volumes, improvements to the IncusOS command-line utility, and more.

Julia is a modern programming language that is of particular interest to scientists due to its high performance combined with language features such as Lisp-style macros, an advanced type system, and multiple dispatch. We last looked at Julia in January on the occasion of its 1.11 release. Early in October Julia 1.12 appeared, bringing a handful of quality-of-life improvements for Julia programmers, most notably support, though still experimental and limited, for the creation of binaries.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dcmtk, geographiclib, gimp, pure-ftpd, and ruby-rack), Fedora (dotnet9.0), Oracle (expat, kernel, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (git, mariadb:10.5, multiple packages, osbuild-composer, pcs, sssd, and tigervnc), SUSE (kernel and redis), and Ubuntu (google-guest-agent).