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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.2.3, 7.1.13, 6.18.49, 6.12.108, 6.6.156, 6.1.187, 5.15.220, and 5.10.269 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dbus-broker, freerdp, gegl, gegl04, gimp, gimp:2.8, glib2, grafana, gzip, iperf3, libssh, nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, php:7.4, php:8.2, pipewire, ruby:3.3, ruby:4.0, tar, wget, and xmlrpc-c), Debian (cyrus-imapd, keystone, and lemonldap-ng), Fedora (bubblewrap, cockpit, emacs, gdk-pixbuf2, openssl, openvkl, python-linkify-it-py, python-llm, and rkcommon), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi), Oracle (glib2, gzip, mingw-sqlite, nodejs22, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, and grafana), Slackware (pcre2), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, busybox, cups-filters, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-openj9, libapr-util1, libgcrypt, python-sqlparse, python3-sqlparse, python313-uv, terraform-provider-aws, terraform-provider-azurerm, terraform-provider-external, terraform-provider-google, terraform-provider-helm, terraform-provider-kubernetes, terraform-provid, ucode-intel, wicked, and yast2-auth-client), and Ubuntu (libevent, libgcrypt20, ncurses, opencryptoki, pam, pyasn1, rust-sudo-rs, and ubuntu-advantage-tools).

The online publication industry, as a whole, is struggling, with challenges coming from multiple directions. Thanks to the support of all of you, our readers, LWN would appear to be doing better than most. But the world has changed around us and, in particular, prices have changed considerably. By now, you probably know where this is going: subscription prices at LWN will be increasing as of September 15.

In 2024 the Python 3.13 release added an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to optimize the way that CPython executes Python code. Since then, work has proceeded on the JIT, albeit perhaps less formally than some might like. In June, Python's steering council (SC) put out an announcement that no new development on the JIT land (with the exception of bug and security fixes) in Python's main branch, until it accepts a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that would make the case for the JIT as a supported part of CPython. That has led to the creation of PEP 836 ("JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython"), which is currently under discussion. As it stands, it seems likely that work on JIT will continue, but when that will happen is less certain.

Version 155 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes include a count in the address bar of how many ad trackers Firefox has blocked, container reordering, and ensuring that mailto: links are only opened by explicit user actions. There is also a change of the domain used for "captive portals" (such as the ones used to sign into hotel WiFI): Firefox now uses "firefox-portal-detection.com" instead of "detectportal.firefox.com", which may require a change in network allow lists.

The release also includes a number of changes that may impact web developers, as well as a number of bug fixes and security fixes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gzip, iperf3, libxml2, mingw-sqlite, mysql:8.4, nginx:1.26, nodejs:24, php, and tar), Debian (expat and libdbd-csv-perl), Fedora (apache-ivy, bind, bluez, bubblewrap, curl, emacs, epiphany, expat, freerdp, gdk-pixbuf2, GitPython, hcloud, kbd, kernel, lego, libopenmpt, mqttcli, nebula, opkssh, python-mkdocs-git-revision-date-localized-plugin, python-pip, rpki-client, rubygem-mechanize, srt, and subfinder), Mageia (c-ares, clamav, expat, mingq-expat, firefox, nspr, nss, flatpak, hplip, jbig2dec, nodejs, openssl, perl-Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication, perl-Date-Manip, perl-HTML-FormHandler, perl-HTTP-Date, perl-Mojolicious, perl-Plack, postgresql15, postgresql18, python-hpack, redis, roundcubemail, thunderbird, varnish, and vim), Oracle (golang and libxml2), Red Hat (bind, bind9.18, dracut, glib2, golang, gzip, kernel, kernel-rt, openssl, osbuild-composer, tar, and unbound), SUSE (7zip, busybox, bzip2, c-ares, chromedriver, chromium, cpio, curl, dhcpcd, dovecot24, dracut, firefox, go1.25, go1.26, go1.26-openssl, google-cloud-sap-agent, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gzip, helm, ImageMagick, istioctl, jfrog-cli, jupyter-jupyterlab, libarchive, libcares2, libheif, liboqs, librest, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, owasp-modsecurity-crs, pcp, php-composer2, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-cryptography, python-httplib2, python-pip, python313, python313-djangorestframework, python313-starlette, qemu, qt6-svg, quagga, rav1e, rmt-server, rsync, rsyslog, snphost, sssd, thunderbird, unbound, vim, wget, xmlrpc-c, yast2-auth-client, and yast2-samba-client), and Ubuntu (attr, bind9, coreutils, cpio, diffutils, freerdp3, libssh, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, openjdk-17-crac, openjdk-21-crac, openjdk-25-crac, openssl, p11-kit, perl, pillow, udisks2, util-linux, webkit2gtk, zfs-linux, and zlib).

Version 4.0 of the OpenShot video editor has been released.

OpenShot 4.0 has arrived, bringing some of the biggest creative workflow upgrades in our history. You can now record your screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio directly into a project. You can correct and grade footage with color wheels, curves, LUTs, and professional video scopes. You can also isolate subjects with locally run machine learning models and create everything from animated audio visualizations to cinematic film looks.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

The Netdev 0x1A conference was held in Rome, Italy from July 13 through July 16. Conference organizer Jami Hadi Salim has let us know that the videos and slides for all sessions are now available. Topics include Linux QUIC, shared memory socket transport, eBPF-based DDoS protection, and more.

By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.3-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release, 15,267 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository. That is the second-highest commit count for an -rc1 release in the kernel's history; only the 6.7-rc1 release, which included nearly 3,000 commits of bcachefs history, had more. About 13,000 of those commits entered the mainline after the first 7.3 merge-window summary was written so, needless to say, there are a lot of changes to cover.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libarchive, libdbi-perl, libnet-dns-perl, librabbitmq, roundcube, starlette, and xrdp), Fedora (bluez, postgresql16-anonymizer, pyOpenSSL, python-cryptography, python-pynitrokey, and rust-h2), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Freenet, and Tor), Mageia (golang and python-nltk), Red Hat (nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, and nodejs:24), SUSE (7zip, apptainer, broot, cadvisor, coredns, coturn, distribution-registry, gh, git-lfs, grafana, gzip, java-25-openjdk, libopenssl-3-devel, libsoup-3_0-0, mozjs102, OpenRGB, openssl-3, openvpn, podman, pyenv, python, python-PyPDF2, python310, python312, python313-Authlib, python36, rekor, rsync, rsyslog, tor, trivy, v2ray-core, vim, wget, and wicked), and Ubuntu (bzip2 and openjdk-26).

Linus has released 7.3-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. "Nothing really stands out - except for the fact that it's big. It's not the biggest rc1 we've ever had, but it's certainly up there, at least in number of commits." He pulled 15,267 commits during this merge window, making it the second busiest ever; only 6.7 has exceeded it.

The results of the Debian general-resolution vote on the use of large language models have been posted; the winner is choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI.

Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project. We recognize that such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors when used responsibly, allowing volunteers to spend more of their limited time on work that requires technical expertise, judgment, review, and collaboration.

The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian.

Konstantin Ryabitsev has written a blog post with hard numbers about the impact of AI crawlers on the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org:

Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.

It's impossible to tell with certainty which of these are bots and which are real humans — but chances are, if it's asking for an old commit in a random old fork, it's probably not a real developer trying to do their work.

With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.

Méven Car has written a pair of interesting blog posts (part 1, part 2). The first post is largely about some of the recent new features and performance work that have gone into the Dolphin file manager 26.08 release, as well as the KIO framework. The second looks at the performance improvements and benchmarks for previous, current, and upcoming releases.

Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would expect: the fix is to the per-file overhead, and once each file carries a megabyte of actual I/O the overhead stops being what you are waiting for.

There is still a gap with cp, discussed at length in the July post. KIO is doing more than cp does, but not five times more, and the batching work that closes most of the rest of that gap is still in progress.

The null block driver (null_blk) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal version of the "rnull" driver is already present in the mainline kernel, but Hindborg's patch set brings it up to feature parity with the C version.