LWN.net

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: 2026 Maintainers Summit; Rust goals; GCC and LLMs; GCC CFI; systemd; C types in Rust; LTTng; Swap showdown; KDE Linux.
• Briefs: 64-day certificates; Nix and Lix security; Asterinas 0.19.0; LineageOS 24; KDE 6.8; Python 3.15; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems a bit trapped in something of a catch-22. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying to collaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace, perf) in the kernel. The feedback he has gotten, both over the years and more recently, does not show a path that would allow him to contribute the 21-year-old GPLv2-licensed LTTng tracing framework, or, incrementally, features from it, to the mainline kernel.

At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit, Linus Torvalds said that he had been using a large language model to work on a patch series addressing a longstanding problem; he has now posted that series for review.

The fairly short series of ten patches basically enhances folio lookup by noticing when folios are hot, and setting a "delay releasing this folio until after a RCU period", and then using that RCU delay it does not just the folio lookup itself under RCU (which we've done forever), but also the actual folio data accesses themselves under RCU. No refcount taking needed for the fastpath where we can just read the data from the folio entirely in an RCU-protected region when the user copy doesn't cause page faults.

The end result is an order-of-magnitude speedup for a read()-heavy benchmark. Review has already identified a race condition in the code, though, so further work will be needed.

Version 6.8 of the KDE Plasma desktop has been released. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing the project:

Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available, so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI.

Notable changes include accessibility improvements, inclusion of the Kup backup tool as part of Plasma, as well as the ability to include system audio and microphone input in Spectacle screen recordings. Plasma 6.8 also drops support for Plasma X11 sessions, as was announced in November 2025. X11 applications are still supported via XWayland, and KDE applications will continue to support X11 "for the foreseeable future".

See the KDE wiki for a list of major user-facing changes, and the changelog for all changes since Plasma 6.7.5.

After much deliberation, the GCC project recently came up with a policy on the use of large language models for development of the compiler suite. It is somewhat restrictive, but still leaves room for LLMs in the development process. At the 2026 GNU Tools Cauldron, Jeff Law and Kyrill Tkachov discussed how these tools have been useful for them.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind9.18, dovecot, flatpak, gd, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base, kernel, opentelemetry-collector, pcre2, and tftp), Debian (curl and keystone), Fedora (aegisub, arm-none-eabi-binutils-cs, avr-binutils, chromium, curl, firefox, kernel, python-jupytext, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Mageia (apache, freeciv, gnumeric, mingw-gdk-pixbuf, and patool), Red Hat (cockpit-image-builder, fence-agents, firefox, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, pcre2, python-tornado, qt6-qtdeclarative, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (expat), SUSE (bind, busybox, containerd, cups-filters, fixme, gimp, glibc, google-osconfig-agent, kernel, libtcnative-2-0, openssh, openssl-3, php8, podman, python-oauthlib, python-PyJWT, python-urllib3, python-virtualenv, python311, python313-jupyter-server, python313-kubernetes, python313-logilab-common, python313-markdown-it-py, python313-markdown2, python313-marshmallow, python313-mpmath, python313-mysql-connector-python, python313-oci-sdk, python313-oic, unbound, wpa_supplicant, xen, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (kernel, libyaml-perl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-fips, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, and pyjwt).

KDE Linux, the KDE Project's second stab at creating its own distribution, was first introduced as "Project Banana" at the Akademy conference in 2024 by Harald Sitter. Nate Graham announced the first alpha-quality release during Akademy 2025. Graham and Sitter paired up at Akademy 2026 to provide an update on its progress, lay out plans for refining the distribution to address user feedback, and discuss some of the problems that still need to be dealt with. KDE Linux is still not-quite-ready for prime time, but Graham hopes that it will be suitable for widespread use soon—for an undefined value of "soon".

The Lix and Nix projects have jointly disclosed a set of vulnerabilities that can be used to escalate privileges to root on systems running the Lix or Nix daemons. "All systems that build untrusted derivations are affected." Releases with fixes from each project are available today. CVE IDs have not yet been requested. See the announcement for more details on the vulnerabilities.

Rust's system of ownership and borrowed references is convenient when it can correctly model a program's needs. The Rust for Linux project has worked to provide adapters between Rust's semantics and the existing C code in the kernel. At Kangrejos 2026, Andreas Hindborg spoke about a patch series implementing the next such adaptor: an Ownable trait for representing objects that are allocated in C code, but which Rust code is responsible for cleaning up (if not necessarily deallocating) when it is done with them. He hoped to finally reach a consensus on the patch series, after months of discussion on the mailing list.

PostgreSQL core team member Peter Eisentraut has written a blog post reflecting on the "unusually high number of features" that have been taken out of the upcoming PostgreSQL 19 release since the beta period began.

Some of the reverted features had significant architectural defects that would have been hard to fix quickly and during beta. But there was also a long tail of relatively harmless issues involving various edge cases. In past times, many of these would not have surfaced until much later and we would have fixed them bit by bit over the subsequent five years. But with LLM-assisted code review, these kinds of things can get found much faster, and then you're staring at a list of like forty defect reports. And even if each of them requires only a three-line fix on average, there is a fixed overhead to dealing with each of these, and then you run out of time. Most if not all of the affected reverted features were written a long time ago when LLM-assisted code review was not as useful as it is now, meaning that the effective quality bar has been raised after the time the feature was written and committed. Unless the capabilities of LLM-assisted code review keep improving at the current rate, this situation should sort itself out for future development cycles.

A corollary of that is that, at least for the most part, as far as I can tell, this situation is not due to "vibe coding". This code was written well before that was a possibility.

LWN covered the unusually large number of bug fixes required for PostgreSQL 19 features in September.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, curl, emacs, environment-modules, flatpak, flatpak-builder, gd, glibc, kernel, libxml2, pcre2, and rsyslog), Debian (chromium, keystone, libgit2, librsvg, nagios4, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (baresip, bcm283x-firmware, curl, flare-im, GitPython, iperf3, kernel, libebml, libmatroska, libre, mkvtoolnix, python-mkdocs-rss-plugin, radicale, uboot-tools, and xiphos), Mageia (antlr4-project, cjose, cups, firefox, nss, golang, libextractor, nginx, ntfs-3g, openvpn, perl-DBI, perl-Imager, polkit, rsync, strongswan, thunderbird, tor, ugrep, vlc, and wireshark), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, cjose, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, curl, dovecot, emacs, flatpak, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs:22, tftp, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, gcc13, gcc48, ghostscript, go1.26, go1.27, helm, libpng16, librsvg, libsoup, libX11, libXi, python, python-anyio, python-Django, python-PyJWT, python-tornado6, python-urllib3, python310, python313-bugzilla, python313-cmarkgfm, python313-colander, python313-configobj, python313-confluent-kafka, python313-django-registration, python313-ecdsa, python313-httptools, python313-imagecodecs, python313-impacket, terraform-provider-aws, terraform-provider-azurerm, terraform-provider-external, terraform-provider-google, terraform-provider-helm, terraform-provider-kubernetes, terraform-provid, thunderbird, unbound, virtiofsd, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, and libx11).

Asterinas is a project to build a new operating-system kernel in Rust; it was covered here in 2025. Version 0.19.0 of the Asterinas kernel has been released; changes include a new graphics subsystem capable of running X.org, "minimal but usable" 64-bit Arm support, better virtualization support, and more.

The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia. Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language models (LLMs) and their effect on the development community, but some time was also found to talk about security bugs and long-term succession planning.

The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0.

We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone.

On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of developers, maintainers, contributors, and users who have kept so many devices alive along the way.

[...] We've been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17's release in June. Android 17's first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17's code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We're early this year!

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cjose, compat-openssl10, compat-openssl11, curl, dogtag-pki, dovecot, emacs, glibc, kernel, openssl, python3.12, python3.14, and sssd), Debian (chromium, ghostscript, tor, and vips), Fedora (kernel, libical, markdownlint-cli2, openbao, openvpn, php-getid3, python3.10, python3.11, and python3.13), Mageia (capnproto, chirp, flatpak, freetype2, hamlib, mingw-pcre2, pcre2, openssl, tomcat, tomcat-native, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Oracle (bind, cjose, dogtag-pki, dovecot, firefox, kernel, nodejs:24, openssl, pki-core:10.6, python3.12, python3.14, ruby:2.5, rust-sequoia-sq, sssd, and tftp), Red Hat (libxml2), Slackware (mutt), SUSE (apache-sshd, bind, ccache, chromium, cpp13, dash, expat, fetchmail, flatpak, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, system-user-grafana, incus, libpng16-16, libsoup, logback, openssh8.4, perl-DBI, php8, python3-paramiko, python312, python313-asyncpg, python313-azure-identity, python313-Babel, python313-Beaker, python313-bjoern, python313-black, python313-Brotli, python313-CairoSVG, python313-Flask-Cors, python313-FontTools, python313-Jinja2, python313-jwcrypto, python313-MechanicalSoup, python313-oauthlib, python313-PyJWT, python313-PyMySQL, python313-PyYAML, python313-virtualenv, python313-XStatic-jquery-ui, qemu, rsyslog, shadowsocks-rust, squid, stunnel, swtpm, trivy, unbound, wpa_supplicant, and yast2-users), and Ubuntu (libdbi-perl).