LWN.net

Buildroot maintainer Peter Korsgaard gave a presentation about the long history of the build tool for embedded Linux systems at the 2026 Embedded Linux Conference Europe. In it, he covered more than just the past 25 years, looking at the current status of the project as well as what to expect in Buildroot's future. It was an interesting view inside this long-running project that has been a mainstay of the embedded-Linux world throughout almost all of this century.

Christoph Hellwig has announced the initial public release of XRAID—declustered parity RAID that is integrated into XFS.

The two primary aims of XRAID are to support parity RAID on zoned devices like SMR hard drives, and to provide a fast RAID implementation without inherent data integrity problems. XRAID, just like zoned XFS also works on conventional hard drives and SSDs. Optimizing for SSD performance has not been a focus, but even without that, writes are up to 20 times faster than mdraid. [...]

Work on XRAID has been ongoing for a year and a half, and while we aren't anywhere near ready for an upstream submission, we are interested in feedback and testing from a wider audience now. The current implementation supports zero to 2 parities. We did experiments with the SnapRAID parity library to support 3 and more parities, and while that is not included in the current version, support for more parities is planned and the code is prepared for it.

The xfsprogs branch includes mkfs support and a new "xraid" utility for managing devices and inspecting an XRAID file-systems. We have also extended Zonar (The zoned file-system visualisation tool) to show how each logical zone maps onto physical zones on devices.

Hellwig gave a presentation at FOSSY in August on this topic; video of the talk does not seem to be available yet, but his slides are available.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, gcc, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-plugins-base, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, libimobiledevice, mingw-libpng, nginx:1.24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, perl-CGI, perl-DBI, qt5-qtbase, tigervnc, vim, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (apache2, c-ares, linux-6.12, node-shell-quote, nova, parted, postgresql-17, python-django, sympa, and tomcat10), Fedora (cockpit, erlang-ssl_verify_fun, httpd, ignition, jackson-bom, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-modules-base, libvirt, mod_http2, mongo-c-driver, poppler, prometheus, pylint, python-discovery, python-loguru, python-PyMuPDF, rabbitmq-server, rust-crypto-bigint, rust-ctutils, rust-elliptic-curve, rust-num-bigint, rust-num-bigint0.4, rust-num-modular, rust-num-modular0.6, rust-num-prime, rust-routinator, rust-zmij, strongswan, xen, xorg-x11-server, and zvbi), Mageia (amule, peazip, and python-pytest), Red Hat (buildah, fence-agents, go-fdo-server, grafana, grafana-pcp, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, osbuild-composer, podman, and rhc), SUSE (ansible-core, apr-util, aspell, brotli, cadvisor, civetweb, distribution-registry, elemental, elemental-register,, elemental-operator, elemental-system-agent, elemental- toolkit, ffmpeg, firefox, gimp, git-annex, go1.26, go1.27, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, google-cloud-sap-agent, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, goose, gosec, graphicsmagick, haproxy, hauler, hawk-apiserver, hawk2, hcloud-cli, jhead, jsoup, kernel, librsvg, libXtst, libxtst, nodejs24, nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed, nvidia-open-driver-g07-signed, open-iscsi, perl-XS-Parse-Keyword, perl-xs-parse-keyword, python-asyncssh, python-Brotli, python-django, python-joserfc, python-M2Crypto, python-Pillow, python-pillow, python313-setuptools, rsyslog, speex, tiff, trivy, udisks2, vsftpd, xen, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (apache2, charybdis, debian-lan-config, glibc, golang-github-seccomp-libseccomp-golang, hiredis, httpie, imapfilter, lhasa, libjgraphx-java, libjwt, libsolv, linux-fips, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-hwe-7.0, linux-nvidia-tegra, minissdpd, ncmpc, nfdump, node-tough-cookie, openconnect, pillow, pngquant, python-gevent, radicale, ruby-openid, sa-exim, signing-party, sudo, tigervnc, and x11vnc).

Version 1.100.0 of the Rust language has been released. Notable changes include the stabilization of the never type, core parts of the Allocator API, reporting of unused dependencies in Cargo, and more.

Patrick Garrity of VulnCheck has written a blog post that looks at vulnerabilities found by Anthropic's Project Glasswing since it launched on April 7, and finds it wanting:

Of the 37,966 findings Anthropic reports, only 7,349 (19.4%) have been made public. Just 217 of those have been marked fixed. The more glaring number is that 4.4% (1,654) of the project's findings have already been marked as duplicates, 7.5x more duplicates than fixes. On top of that, 419 findings have been withdrawn. It seems odd that the ledger now claims a 94.2% true positive rate, up from 90.8% at launch, when more findings have been withdrawn or marked as duplicates than fixed, likely a feedback loop missing to the triage rates listed as "True Positives".

[...] AI is a valuable tool for finding vulnerabilities, and I'm not discounting that. But seven months in, the evidence still doesn't match the launch narrative. The CVEs are a sliver of this year's total, almost none are being exploited, fixes have stalled while duplicates and withdrawals pile up, and the triage burden is shifting onto the open source maintainers Glasswing promised to help. The receipts keep coming in. They still don't reconcile.

Kerem Söke has announced the 1.0 release of Polo, a Wayland compositor for the MATE Desktop Environment:

The idea is to keep MATE behaving as closely as possible to how it does on X11, rather than changing the desktop to fit a different compositor. [...]

Window management, metacity, workspaces, tiling, XWayland, clipboard and clipman support, multiple monitors, display scaling, hotplugging, screenshots, screen sharing, and session management are all working.

I've also added desktop effects: fade, zoom, zap, spin, squeemize, magic lamp, desktop cube, expo, and wobbly windows.

Söke is looking for people to test Polo, particularly on multi-monitor setups, and report back with problems.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has blessed seven C++ language revisions since 1998. The language is mostly developed by ISO's Working Group 21, which considers proposed additions and amendments, integrates them into a document, and then presents that document to the main ISO body to be voted on as a standard. On October 23, for the first time ever, ISO declined to ratify a document presented by Working Group 21, leaving the future of the C++26 standard in doubt. The decision was driven by controversy around a proposed new "contracts" feature that would add pre- and post-conditions to function signatures.

Daniel Stenberg reflects on the 30th anniversary of the curl project.

libcurl runs in an estimated thirty billion installations today. It is a rough estimate since the majority of all libcurl users never tell us they use it, but we need to find it mentioned in their credit screens, open source license windows or their manuals. A super popular app might use libcurl today and not tomorrow, or vice versa, which can make the numbers shift by several billions overnight. In reality of course, once the pulse raise has calmed down and your ego is content, these numbers do not matter. In our corner of the world, things don't change notably when we go from a thousand installs to billions. We still work with similar people, in similar ways, with similar challenges.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (aodh, apache2, dnspython, firefox-esr, mutt, octavia, spip, thunderbird, and watcher), Fedora (epiphany, firefox, freerdp, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, libsoup3, perl-HTTP-Parser-XS, perl-libnet, php-getid3, pipx, python-crate-ingredients, python-pillow, python-robotframework, python3.9, rsync, rubygem-nokogiri, tpm2-tss, udns, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Gentoo (curl, ImageMagick, libheif, and PCRE2), Mageia (nginx and python-django), Oracle (go-toolset:rhel8, libimobiledevice, nodejs:22, util-linux, and vim), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, cockpit, freerdp, gdb, go-fdo-client, grafana-pcp, ignition, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, openssh, openssl, osbuild-composer, rpm, rsync, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (git, httpd, and tigervnc), SUSE (aliyun-cli, alloy, apache-parent, aqute-bnd, google-gson, logback, maven, maven-artifact-transfer, maven-parent, maven-resolver, methanol, osgi-service- subsystem, slf4j, xmvn, bcel, benchdnn, containerd, distribution, dpdk, efivar, elemental, elemental-register, elemental-system-agent, elemental-toolkit, firefox, kernel, liblldpctl4, libonnxruntime1, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openvpn, pcre2, perl-Net-DNS, perl-Plack, perl-Starman, psqlODBC, python-M2Crypto, python-Pillow, python-Twisted, python-urllib3_1, python313-djangorestframework, python313-fpdf2, python313-langgraph-sdk, python313-nltk, rust-keylime, skopeo, traefik, zchunk, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (asyncpg, awl, btrbk, davical, dotnet8, dotnet10, dotnet11, libfcgi, linux-raspi, logback, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, mysql-9.7, network-manager-ssh, node-babel, php-pecl-http, prosody-modules, rkhunter, ruby-actionpack-page-caching, ruby-jwt, ruby-kramdown, shiro, snmptt, and yodl).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Synaptics patent claims; Git LLM policy; Hibernation and lockdown; User namespaces; glibc tunables.
• Briefs: *sshole; Amutable foundations; Asahi Linux 7.3; OpenIndiana 2026.10; Firefox 160; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 0.46 of the Zellij terminal workspace has been released.

This release includes a major addition in Zellij: Zellij is now also a desktop terminal. To run it: zellij terminal. It works on linux, mac and windows.

Nothing changes for the normal multiplexer - Zellij can still run inside another terminal. Both sessions are the same and can be shared.

Additional features in this release include a GUI settings screen, session previews, and right-click menu. See this walkthrough for more on the 0.46 release.

Guido van Rossum conveys the sad (and somewhat delayed) news of the passing of Tim Peters.

It's hard to overestimate Tim's influence on Python. He's probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that.

Tim found Python not long after its initial release. His first deed was to convince me that Python should support mixed arithmetic between int and float, because most users would expect them to work that way. And he never stopped contributing.

The Node.js project recently had a security vulnerability that affected its Brotli decoder. The bug was a buffer overflow, but the particular way that official Node.js binaries are built for Linux meant that one of the main protections against turning a buffer overflow into remote code execution, address space layout randomization (ASLR) could not be turned on. If ASLR had been enabled, the bug would still be exploitable in theory, but much more difficult to exploit in practice. In response, the GNU C Library (glibc) is considering a new set of tunable settings to allow administrators to forbid programs that do not support ASLR. The new settings, while a welcome hardening measure, may not address the root problem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (edk2), Debian (openexr, rsyslog, and srt), Fedora (alertmanager, dotnet11.0, gdal, mstflint, nextcloud, python-crate-ingredients, rust-ingredients, rust-pore, rust-pulldown-cmark, rust-rbw, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-siguldry-fedora-autopen, tigervnc, unbound, and zchunk), Gentoo (Brotli, git, and libde265), Mageia (mopidy, python-dulwich, rust-similar3, rclone, and sofia-sip), Oracle (dpdk, edk2, firefox, glibc, kernel, kernel-uek, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs:24, patch, ruby, ruby4.0, squid:4, and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 11.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, bind9.16, bind9.18, buildah, c-ares, containernetworking-plugins, delve, flatpak-builder, gcc, gcc-toolset-15-gcc, gcc-toolset-16-gcc, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gvfs, gvisor-tap-vsock, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, oci-delta, podman, python-oauthlib, python3, python3.12, python3.9, qt5-qtbase, qt6-qtbase, rhc, runc, skopeo, squid, squid:4, tesseract, util-linux, xdg-dbus-proxy, and yggdrasil), Slackware (xorg-server), SUSE (aliyun-cli, amazon-cloudwatch-agent, ansible-core, aspell, azure-storage-azcopy, bind, cups, dlib-devel, docker, dolphin, dpdk, evolution, firefox, flannel, fuse-overlayfs, gnome-podcasts, google-cloud-sap-agent, GraphicsMagick, graphicsmagick, haproxy, istioctl, kernel, kubevirt, kured, libvips-devel, libXi, mozilla-nss, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed-check, okteto, openssl-1_1, pcre2, poppler, poppler-qt, poppler-qt5, poppler, poppler-qt5, proftpd, psqlodbc, python-graphql-core, python-M2Crypto, python-pillow, python-soupsieve, python-urllib3_1, python313-wyoming, qt6-coap, rust-keylime, sbc, scribus, SDL2_image, tar, terraform-provider-susepubliccloud, the linux kernel (live patch 18 for suse linux, vsftpd, xen, xorg-x11-server, and zchunk), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates-java, gst-plugins-good1.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, hplip, linux-azure-fde, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-7.0, linux-nvidia-bos, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, python-tornado, rust-coreutils, and unbound).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.3.4, 6.18.63, and 6.12.117 stable kernels. The 7.3.4 kernel has more than 1,250 patches, 6.18.63 contains more than 860, and 6.12.117 includes more than 1,530 patches. Users of these kernels are, of course, encouraged to upgrade.