LWN.net

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Git 2.56; gccrs; NetBSD and compat_linux; io_uring; Desktop UX.
• Briefs: WordPress vulnerability; Radicle vulnerability; Systemtap 5.6; GNOME 51; Systemd v262; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer conference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimed at convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design.

Systemd v262 has been released. Some of the notable new features include the ability to build systemd as a single statically linked binary for small containers, support for the kernel coredump socket protocol introduced with Linux 6.17, addition of OpenSSL 4 support, and many other changes. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

The Radicle peer-to-peer code-collaboration project has disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in the network protocol used by Radicle nodes. The first flaw is that the network protocol used by Radicle "does not give the confidentiality it was expected to give", which allows anyone who can observe the network between two nodes to read the data exchanged. The second is that peer authentication is broken and allows impersonation, so an attacker can spoof their Node ID and read private repositories they should not be able to read.

In practice, the two flaws are most useful when they can be exploited together: an attacker on the path sees the Node IDs at both ends of a connection, and both are normally on the allow-list. That attacker can read whatever is exchanged while they watch, and can then use a Node ID they saw to fetch the whole repository on demand. The realistic threat is anyone on the path between your node and node it syncs with, and no setting or allow-list protects against them.

We are publishing this before the security update is available. You can act on it today, and no fix we release later can undo an exposure that has already happened.

See the post for workarounds that can be used today; a major update that will be backward-incompatible is underway.

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress's get_page_template() function for page-template resolution that could allow remote-code execution (RCE) by an unauthenticated attacker, in some limited circumstances. The project has provided an update for the most recent branch of WordPress, as well as backports of the fix for branches back to 4.7. See the vulnerability report for the conditions required for an RCE attack to be successful.

The vulnerability also affects the ClassicPress fork of WordPress, though a security update has not been provided for that project yet. LWN covered ClassicPress in 2024. Users of either content-management system should update soon.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (coreutils, postgresql18-postgis, and postgresql:16), Debian (memcached), Fedora (chromium, cyrus-imapd, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, freeipmi, kernel, libxmp, perl-Net-DNS, and postgresql16-anonymizer), Mageia (cpio, diffutils, perl-Dancer2, and rest), Oracle (389-ds-base and firefox), Red Hat (opentelemetry-collector and osbuild-composer), SUSE (amazon-cloudwatch-agent, amazon-ssm-agent, apko, apptainer, bazel-rules-python-source, bind, cups, firefox, freeipmi, gdb, google-osconfig-agent, kernel, kyverno, libipa_hbac-devel, libsoup, libsoup-3_0-0, libtpms, openssl-certs, perl-Authen-SASL, php-composer2, python313-PyMuPDF, thunderbird, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (gzip, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-azure, linux-oracle, linux-azure-7.0, linux-azure-fde-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, openssh, and sudo).

Pierre-Emmanuel Patry and Arthur Cohen gave a talk at RustConf 2026 on the status of the Rust frontend for GCC (gccrs), with a particular eye toward the goal of compiling the Linux kernel. Patry gave a follow-up talk for a more kernel-focused audience at Kangrejos the next week, which Cohen could not attend. The gccrs project is making good progress overall, but it will still be some time until the compiler is usable.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (apr-util, corosync, curl, freerdp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, libarchive, libtiff, libxml2, openexr, openssh, rsyslog, sudo, tomcat, unbound, webkit2gtk3, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (chromium), Fedora (alsa-plugins, amarok, aqualung, atomes, attract-mode, audacious-plugins, audacity, baresip, blender, calibre, cantata, cef, chromaprint, chromium, digikam, doctl, dragon, ffmpeg, ffmpegthumbnailer, ffmpegthumbs, ffms2, fooyin, glaxnimate, goldendict-ng, gpac, gstreamer1-plugin-libav, guacamole-server, guvcview, haruna, hedgewars, icecat, janus, k3b, kdenlive, kf5-kfilemetadata, kf6-kfilemetadata, kpipewire, lazygal, lego, libcamera-apps, libheif, libopenshot, libopenshot-audio, libvncserver, localsearch, mat2, minidlna, mivisionx, mixxx, mlt, monado, mpd, mpv, mpv-mpris, neatvnc, notcurses, nv-codec-headers13.0, obs-studio, obs-studio-plugin-droidcam, obs-studio-plugin-pwvideo, obs-studio-plugin-vaapi, obs-studio-plugin-vkcapture, obs-studio-plugin-webkitgtk, olive, openal-soft, OpenBoard, opencv, openmw, opustags, os-autoinst, patool, Pencil2D, perl-HTML-FormHandler, pianobar, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-audioread, python-torchaudio, python-torchvision, qmmp, qmmp-plugin-pack, qmplay2, qt5-qtwebengine, qt6-qtmultimedia, qt6-qtwebengine, qtox, retroarch, rocdecode, rocdecode7.2, rsgain, siril, squeezelite, swayimg, tigervnc, timg, unpaper, vlc, vtk, waypipe, wf-recorder, wivrn, wxsvg, xine-lib, xmms2, xpra, xscreensaver, yle-dl, znc, and znc-clientbuffer), Mageia (nmap, pcre2, and vim), Oracle (curl, openssl-fips-provider, sudo, tomcat, webkit2gtk3, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Slackware (util-linux), SUSE (cadvisor, chromium, coredns, fake-gcs-server, freeciv, gh, glibc, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, hugo, kbd, kbfs, keybase-client, libheif, libpcap, mbedtls, pcre2, python-asteval, python-jwcrypto, python311, python313-ansi2html, shadowsocks-rust, sofia-sip, and trivy), and Ubuntu (clamav, expat, ghostscript, glib2.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, libsoup2.4, libsoup3, libssh2, libxml2, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-7.0, linux-azure-fde, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-xilinx, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia-bos, linux-raspi, memcached, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-25, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, rsyslog, and strongswan).

The open-source consulting firm Igalia has put out an announcement celebrating 25 years of working on upstream FOSS projects for its clients. The list of projects the company has worked on is rather eye-opening: WebKit, mobile-browser rendering (on Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen), the Linux kernel (CPU and GPU scheduling), 3D graphics drivers, the Orca screen reader, GStreamer, and lots more. Beyond that, the company, which is a worker-owned cooperative, does its work in ways that benefit the community as well as its clients:

None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working better than it does today. What they get from us is not a patch to carry forever. We do the work upstream, in the project itself, so it arrives in the next release and keeps working long after the contract ends. Our customers ship products built on code that nobody has to maintain alone, and everyone else gets the same code. That has been the arrangement from the start.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.2.7, 6.18.53, and 6.12.111 stable kernels. As is usual these days, they are quite large; also no surprise is that they provide many important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of those kernels are advised to update.

NetBSD has long had support for running Linux binaries via its kernel-level compat_linux feature, but test coverage for it was less complete than some might hope. In order to provide better testing for compat_linux, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant Henrique Brito opted to work on enabling the Linux Test Project (LTP) test suite to compile and run on NetBSD. At EuroBSDCon 2026, Brito's mentor, Stephen Borrill, provided a report on the project, and the status of LTP on NetBSD. The work has already resulted in some minor fixes, and a good list of additional problems to solve.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, perl-Net-DNS, sudo, tomcat, and tomcat9), Debian (chromium, gimp, libde265, libevent, linux-6.12, ruby-jwt, and unbound), Fedora (asterisk, chromium, doctl, dovecot, evolution, firefox, forgejo, freeciv, freeipa, gegl04, gimp, libheif, nss, opkssh, parted, ruby, stb, thunderbird, unbound, and webkitgtk), Mageia (bind, gawk, gdk-pixbuf2.0, graphicsmagick, gstreamer1.0-plugins-base, libde265, libpcap, libssh, mpg123, ntfs-3g, ntpsec, patch, perl-YAML, postfix, python-configargparse, and python-httplib2), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, image-builder, kernel, libevent, libsoup, libsoup3, perl-Net-DNS, python-lxml, sudo, tomcat, tomcat9, and unbound), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (alloy, dovecot22, ffmpeg-8, firefox, firefox-esr, freeipmi, glibc, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, helm, ImageMagick, jq, kbd, kernel-devel, libpcap, libsoup, libzypp, zypper, NetworkManager-applet-l2tp, nginx, openCryptoki, pcre2, python311, python313-aiosmtplib, python313-litellm, rpm, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, and rclone).

Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4 kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'".

The Git source-code management system is at the core of development processes worldwide, so changes, especially incompatible changes, are of great interest to the developers involved. The Git 2.56 release, which can be expected around the end of September, is currently available in release-candidate form. It is not the most earth-shaking of releases, but the one that follows, which might be the long-awaited Git 3.0, may well be.

Version 5.6 of the Systemtap tracing tool has been released.

BPF LSM hooks and XDP packet-processing probes for the --bpf runtime, BTF-based kernel.tracepoint probes, statement execution tracing, a new @enumname() operator, richer runtime error context, dyninst hardware watchpoints, modern systemd service templates, and broad Linux 7.2 runtime/tapset compatibility work. Multithreaded speedups throughout.