Linux Community News

Python’s experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which was added to CPython in 2024 for the 3.13 release, is on its way out. In June, the Python steering council announced that it was pausing work on the JIT in CPython’s main branch until there was an accepted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that addressed concerns about maintenance, compatibility, and set clear success metrics as well as a timeline for completion. After creating PEP 836 (“JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython”) to try to meet the council’s request, and after months of discussion, the JIT maintainers have withdrawn the PEP. For now, it appears that development on the once-promising project has come to an end.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.13 and 6.18.59 stable kernels. Each contains a number of fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

Christian Brauner has announced that he has merged support for writing leaf components of systemd in Rust. Rust will be used only for new leaf components, existing code is not being ported to Rust and nothing that other components depend on is written in Rust. Brauner said that the project would like to move forward with Rust support in core systemd, “but there are several blockers in Rust’s support for dynamic libraries which prevents us from doing that without massively bloating every binary we build”. Assuming all goes well, it seems likely this work will appear in the systemd v263 release expected in December.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ca-certificates, cockpit-machines, container-tools:4.0, expat, flute, libbase, libfonts, libformula, liblayout, libloader, libreoffice, librepository, libserializer, pentaho-libxml, pentaho-reporting-flow-engine, and sac, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana-pcp, hplip, kernel, nodejs:14, nodejs:18, openssl, php:7.2, php:7.3, php:8.0, php:8.1, podman, postgresql16-pgvector, postgresql18-pgvector, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (brotli, caddy, imagemagick, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libheif, openjdk-17, openssl, thunderbird, tzdata, varnish, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Fedora (btrfs-backup-ng, chromium, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, gegl04, GitPython, ImageMagick, jfrog-cli, libindi, mingw-libpng, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-python-lxml, mupdf, nix, openssh, perl-Badger, perl-CLI-Simple, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-CSS-Inliner, perl-Encoding-FixLatin, perl-HTML-Query, perl-Markdown-Render, perl-Text-CSV_XS, perl-Text-Markdown-Discount, pgbouncer, php-pecl-mongodb2, podofo, rt, and thunderbird), Mageia (bind, bluez, iperf, kernel-linus, and nss, rootcerts), Oracle (ca-certificates, cockpit-machines, expat, go-toolset:ol8, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd, iperf3, openssh, and podman), Red Hat (freeipmi), and SUSE (alloy, amazon-ecs-init, aspell, aws-iam-authenticator, ca-certificates-mozilla, cifs-utils, container-suseconnect, cosign, cpupower, docker, elemental3, emacs, expat, fetchmail, ffmpeg-7, firefox-esr, ghostscript, gimp, glibc, go1.26, go1.27, google-osconfig-agent, guava, haproxy, helm, iscsiuio, jfrog-cli, kernel, kernel-devel, krb5, kubernetes, libmodplug, libsbc1, libvpx-devel, libxls-devel, mozilla-nss, mozillafirefox, openssh8.4, openssl-3, php8, python, python-base, python-doc, python-weasyprint, python311, python312, python313, python313-CairoSVG, python313-Django, python313-multidict, python313-sglang, python313-urllib3_1, python313-vllm, python314, python315, rabbitmq-server, rclone, rpcbind, squid, trivy, wpa_supplicant, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland).

Since the merge window for 7.4 opened, there have been 6,753 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline repository. Many more are expected, especially given the possibility that this merge window will be extended to three weeks. Still, even this initial set brought in a number of new features, in addition to the continued general cleanups and security fixes that the kernel has seen recently.

Memory has always been a scarce resource in computing systems, but the problem seems to have worsened recently. In particular, the worldwide shortage of memory chips has led to a renewed focus by systems developers on reducing memory usage. During the memory-management microconference at the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, Will Deacon discussed one specific consumer of memory that is being re-examined: kernel stacks.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, expat, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd, iperf3, openssh, php, php8.4, php:7.4, php:8.2, and php:8.3), Debian (aide, chromium, clamav, erlang, linux-6.12, roundcube, unbound, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (bind9-next, ca-certificates, clevis-pin-trustee, golang-x-mobile, knot-resolver, maradns, ntpsec, php, socat, and vlc), Mageia (golang, jq, msgpack, open-isns, perl-Mozilla-CA, roundcubemail, and sudo), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, cockpit-files, cockpit-machines, fetchmail, glycin-loaders, golang, jackson-core, librsvg2, mariadb11.8, openexr, openssh, php, php8.4, php:7.4, php:8.2, php:8.3, postgresql:16, qt5-qtbase, rust-sequoia-sq, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (ca-certificates and opentelemetry-collector), SUSE (aliyun-cli, amazon-ecs-init, bcel, coreutils, cups-filters, cyrus-sasl, distribution, expat, firefox, go1.26, go1.26-openssl, go1.27, guava, mutt, nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed, p11-kit, php74, php8, podman, python-soupsieve, python313-datamodel-code-generator, python313-Django5, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (openvpn, python-tornado, and zlib).

Linus Torvalds rarely writes significant amounts of kernel code these days, so the merging of a 48-part patch series from him is an unusual event. This series, destined for the 7.4 kernel release, performs some long-delayed kernel cleanup by removing a couple of the primitives used to access user-space memory from the kernel. What was once a best practice has long been superseded, but it can take time for such changes to work their way through a body of code this large.

Version 2.8.0 of the KeePassXC password-management application has been released. The new release brings a lot of long-awaited new features, many bugfixes, and several security updates. Among the major features are the migration from Qt5 to Qt6, Auto-Type on Wayland (Linux), configurable keyboard shortcuts, remote database synchronization with external tools, quick unlock with password on macOS, and quick unlock via Polkit on Linux. Version 2.8.0 is also the first version for which we ship native ARM64 builds for Windows and an experimental AArch64 (i.e., ARM64) AppImage for Linux. See the changelog for a full list of new features, major changes, and bug fixes.

There are several Rust features that kernel developers have been hoping to stabilize, but Josh Triplett wanted to describe all of the other features that the Rust project is currently working on. He spoke about the topic at Kangrejos 2026, leaving the assembled kernel developers with several ideas about how to use these upcoming Rust features in the kernel. The features included refinements to the type system, small syntax improvements, and a smarter borrow checker.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, cockpit-files, cockpit-machines, fetchmail, glycin-loaders, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, hostapd, jackson-core, kernel, kernel-rt, librsvg2, lrzsz, mariadb11.8, openexr, openssh, openssl, perl-DBI:1.641, python-urllib3, python3.12-urllib3, qt5-qtbase, rust-sequoia-sq, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Arch Linux (php and php-legacy), Debian (bind9, firefox-esr, nginx, php8.2, and php8.4), Fedora (ca-certificates, dolphin, gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect, libdigidocpp, linux-firmware, nicotine+, perl-ExtUtils-Typemaps-Default, php, python-cairosvg, qdigidoc, rust-rustls-webpki, rust-webpki-root-certs, and rust-webpki-roots), Gentoo (PHP), Mageia (php8.5, php8.4), Oracle (perl-URI), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, rhc, and sudo), Slackware (php), SUSE (aliyun-cli, bouncycastle, buildah, ca-certificates-mozilla, chromedriver, cifs-utils, cyrus-sasl, docker, firefox, gimp, git-bug, GraphicsMagick, libheif, libpng16, libraw, libsoup-2_4-1, mutt, onefetch, openexr, openssh, openssl-certs, php7, php8, poppler, python-hpack, python310, python313-Django4, qemu, rootlesskit, tiff, xwayland, and yt-dlp), and Ubuntu (c-ares, ghostscript, libsoup3, libxs-parse-keyword-perl, nss, php5, php7.0, php7.2, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, php8.5, poppler, pyjwt, u-boot, and unbound).

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Android vendor hooks; Reproducible builds and kernel integrity; Rust data structures; NFS server changes; Setting no_new_privs for PID 1; Rust XArray; Rust cross-crate declarations; 7.3 statistics; Nix flakes. Briefs: eMudhra CA compromise; PHP RCEs; Node.js and musl vulnerabilities; GNOME OS; OpenBSD 8.0; Ubuntu 26.10; TAB results; Quotes; … Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The PHP Foundation has put out a blog entry explaining how the vulnerabilities disclosed today came about and why they took so long to fix. To fix the OOM problem, the PHP security team developed several competing approaches, but each came with its own trade-offs: backward compatibility breaks, new denial-of-service potential, or requiring changes to many third-party extensions which seemed impossible to coordinate. The PHP security team, operating on consensus, struggled to choose between these and feared the repercussions of shipping the wrong choice. Combined with the lack of a known path to remote code execution and the small team of core developers with the necessary deep knowledge of the engine occupied with many responsibilities, this decision process caused work on a fix to stall and restart repeatedly over months. We won’t pretend otherwise: the delay was a structural failure, caused by both the security team’s decision process and its lack of resources.

The Node.js project has released a number of security updates to fix, among other vulnerabilities, a remote-code-execution bug affecting programs that use Brotli compression. And, in case any programmers who use compiled languages thought they could relax, the musl libc project has also announced a new vulnerability: an out-of-bounds write that could potentially lead to remote code execution, although that has not been demonstrated.

We last looked in on hash-based integrity checking for kernel modules just over a year and half ago. Since that time, the patch set has undergone multiple revisions. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Thomas Weißschuh described the need for kernel-module integrity guarantees while still providing reproducible builds, how his patches implement that, and some ideas for possible further work.