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Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, ruby:2.5, and ruby:3.3), Debian (bird3, chromium, kernel, linux-6.1, mediawiki, nginx, openvpn, php-phpseclib, php8.2, php8.4, and sympa), Fedora (7zip, buildah, chromium, clamav, freerdp, leptonica, mariadb10.11, mariadb11.8, nextcloud, nsd, openqa, openvpn, os-autoinst, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-Crypt-ScryptKDF, podman, python-jupyter-server, and python-streamlink), Mageia (mariadb and yt-dlp), Slackware (libevent, libseccomp, mozilla, mutt, and php82), SUSE (apache2, containerd, dnsmasq, docker, dracut, firewalld-legacy, gimp, glibc, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, google-guest-agent, gstreamer-plugins-bad, helm, kernel, kernel-devel, keybase-client, kitty, krb5, libarchive, libnfs, libslirp, nilfs-utils, openCryptoki, openQA, openssl-3, pacemaker, pcr-oracle, perl-DBI, perl-List-SomeUtils-XS, podman, python-pip, python-pydata-sphinx-theme, python-tornado6, python3-lxml, python311-mistune, python313-joserfc, rmt-server, sg3_utils, systemd, tracker-miners, and xdg-dbus-proxy), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.17, linux-raspi-realtime, and ncurses).

The 7.2-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "It's Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal - it's not a small rc2, but it's in line with recent releases, and slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1. Let's see how that all continues, but so far so good."

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.3, 6.18.38, 6.12.95, 6.6.144, 6.1.177, 5.15.211, and 5.10.260 stable kernels. Several kernels in this batch include a fix for a vulnerability introduced in the 6.0 kernel in IPv6 (CVE-2026-53362), which could allow an attacker to escape a container and gain root access.

There is also a fix for a use-after-free bug in KVM (CVE-2026-53359) that was introduced in the 2.6.36 kernel. As usual, each stable kernel includes a number of fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

The GNU Guix project has announced three vulnerabilities in the guix substitute utility as well as a fourth that affects the guix pull and guix time-machine commands. The impact of the vulnerabilities ranges from remote privilege escalation to local disclosure of sensitive files.

The remote exploitation of guix substitute only requires that the vulnerable system attempt to download a binary substitute. Any configured substitute server, including ones discovered using guix-daemon's --discover option, can exploit this, and so can a man-in-the-middle (MITM), regardless of whether https is used in the substitute server urls.

The local exploitation of guix substitute only requires the ability to connect to guix-daemon's socket, which by default any user can do.

Separately, another security issue (CVE ID pending) was identified in guix pull and guix time-machine, which enables anyone who can control the channels file used by these commands to cause a file to be created or overwritten wherever the user running the command in question has permission to create them.

The project is recommending that all users upgrade guix and guix-daemon immediately. See the announcement for instructions, how to test for the vulnerabilities, the disclosure timeline, and more.

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.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, bind9.18, evince, fence-agents, freerdp, frr, frr10, gimp, gnutls, hplip, jmc, mariadb:11.8, mysql:8.4, php:7.4, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, valkey, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (fastnetmon), Fedora (7zip, apptainer, cpp-httplib, mysql8.4, and nmap), Oracle (freerdp, giflib, glib2, glibc, kernel, libreoffice, libvirt, mariadb:10.11, postgresql, python3.11, python3.12, rrdtool, and thunderbird), Red Hat (buildah, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (alloy, apache2, buildah, c3p0, containerd, crun, cups, dhcpcd, dnsmasq, docker-stable, dracut, editorconfig-core-c, ffmpeg-7, fontforge, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, graphicsmagick, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-good, helm, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jline3, kernel, kubectl-cnpg, lcms2, libslirp, libssh2_org, libxreaderdocument3, openbabel, openssl-3, pacemaker, perl-CGI-Session, perl-list-someutils-xs, python-lxml, python-tornado, python-tornado6, python3-onionshare, python311-python-engineio, sg3_utils, thunderbird, transmission, and trivy), and Ubuntu (cifs-utils, kernel, libvncserver, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux-xilinx, nghttp2, nginx, perl, and vim).

In August 2025, the CalyxOS privacy-focused Android distribution announced that it was pausing all releases while it reworked its release process, security protocols, and changed its signing keys following the departure of one of its founders. The project has now announced that it is "officially back from the hiatus" with the 7.2.2.0 release.

CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 is signed by us using a new HSM-based, open-source signing solution we designed to enhance the security of the entire signing process, ensure redundancy, and remove single points of failure. You can verify CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 and future builds following these instructions. For anyone who is interested, the security audit report of the HSM provisioning ceremony script can be found here.

In addition, we also went through significant infrastructure improvements. In particular, we have set up a cleaner server structure to streamline each release. In response to Google's less frequent AOSP source code releases, our team developed scripts to reduce the overhead in applying monthly patches and updates. Please keep in mind, additional manual steps are still needed to compensate for AOSP changes, such as requesting and storing kernel sources with each update. Currently, our lead engineer is continuing the maintenance of the base device trees for both LineageOS and CalyxOS to bridge the gap created by the absence of Google Pixel device trees.

A few astute observers have noticed that some content on kernel.org had disappeared and were understandably concerned. Konstantin Ryabitsev has provided an update via social.kernel.org:

There was an unfortunate error while changing the kernel.org primary/secondary mirroring infrastructure, which resulted in the /pub tree suddenly becoming empty. No data was lost, just public mirror copies. Everything is now being restored, but deletes are fast and restores are slow, so thank you for your patience!

The incident is being tracked on the Linux Foundation's IT status page.

We were made aware today of an email sent to a reader that was spoofed to appear to be from LWN. The message claimed, among other things, that we were providing personal information about the reader to another site user. As is explained in our privacy policy we do not, and would not, provide such information.

If any other readers have received an odd message from LWN, it is an attempt at a hoax; if in doubt, please check the DKIM header of the email. Any email that does come from LWN will have a proper DKIM signature in its headers.

If you receive such a message, please feel free to send it to us, with its headers intact. But to reiterate, we are not providing any user information upon request, nor banning any accounts. We hope this will not be a recurring problem.

Aoife Moloney has, on behalf of the Fedora Council, posted an announcement that the Fedora Council is "proposing we pause the Community Initiatives process as an official project process" because it has decided the current process is ineffective. It is also closing discussion regarding the AI developer desktop initiative covered by LWN in May.

The Fedora Objectives/Initiatives framework was never intended as a mandatory prerequisite to do the work in Fedora. It supposed to help by focusing the community on a certain work when needed, not to decide what is allowed. The AI developer desktop initiative proposal highlighted that the Community Initiatives process has failed to serve as a good framework in Fedora where new ideas can surface, receive respectful feedback, and gain Council support for work that fits the project's present and/or future. This is something that the Council must address.

As a first step, we would like to halt the community initiative process immediately. Existing initiatives in flight (Fedora Forge, Atomic, and Fedora Docs 2026) will continue with full Council backing. Their underlying work will be completed as planned in their current timeboxed state, though the administrative framework around them may evolve. As a second step, we would like to work out a new mechanism to allow Council to set strategic direction in an open, transparent way that more intentionally includes the community voice. We recognise that we have to be better at being more open in our discussions and decision making.

The council is considering the "sandbox" proposal as an alternative or supplement to a process that replaces the Community Initiatives.

The kernel community (like many other free-software projects) has recently seen a large influx of patches developed with the assistance of large language models (LLMs). Those patches tend to come from developers who were previously unknown to the community. At the moment, though, the memory-management developers are evaluating two large patch sets, developed with LLM assistance, that were submitted by established and well-respected developers. The rather different reception accorded to that work may give insights into how LLM-generated contributions will be handled going forward.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (giflib, kernel, mariadb:10.11, mod_http2, php, rrdtool, ruby, ruby:3.3, and ruby:4.0), Debian (jq and node-lodash), Fedora (caddy, hut, ipp-usb, kernel, opkssh, rclone, thunderbird, and transmission), SUSE (389-ds, 7zip, alsa, amazon-ecs-init, avahi, cadvisor, cosign, cups, dnsdist, docker, dracut, firefox, firewalld, giflib, glib-networking, glycin-loaders, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, gsasl, hauler, helm, ImageMagick, kernel, keylime, krb5, libaom, libexif, libgcrypt, libnfs, libssh2_org, loupe, lrzip, mutt, ncurses, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openssh, openssl-3, pacemaker, perl-Config-IniFiles, perl-CSS-Minifier-XS, perl-DBI, perl-JavaScript-Minifier-XS, perl-libwww-perl, postfix, python-click, python-idna, python-Markdown, python-joblib, python-handy-archives, python-apache-libcloud, python-WebOb, python-PyGithub, python-soupsieve, python-pip, python-pytest-html, python-python-dotenv, python-python-multipart, python-starlette, python-tornado6, python-zeroconf, python311, python311-jupyter-server, rpcbind, sed, sg3_utils, tar, tiff, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-oem-6.17, and linux-oem-7.0).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Xsnow protestware; Git 2.55; Rhombus; kernel hardening; More LSFMM+BPF coverage; 7.2 merge window; Secure Boot certificate expiration; Ceph and Garage; OSPM 2026.
• Briefs: Akrites; Mageia 10; Git 2.55.0; Podman 6.0; systemd v261; Creative Commons chat; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

When a BPF program is used to filter or redirect packets in the networking subsystem, the program will often want to associate data with each packet as it moves through the kernel. The kernel's local BPF storage API, which associates extra data with some kernel objects, provides a way to do that. (See also the BPF map types that end in STORAGE.) Amery Hung and Jakub Sitnicki led two sessions at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about how to make accesses to local storage data more efficient. Hung spoke about general performance problems related to locking, while Sitnicki examined the use of local storage in the networking subsystem in particular.

Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems rely on certificates issued by Microsoft to verify the software used to boot a system is trusted by the user. One of those certificates expired recently, but that will not cause systems that are able to boot to stop doing so. There are situations where the expiration may cause problems, however, and the window for relying on existing signed binaries is shorter than it might appear. Users and administrators will want to stay on top of these changes. Over the last year, part of my job at Microsoft has been to work on this problem. LWN wrote about the certificate expiration in July 2025, and this article follows up with where we are now.