The gist: The foundation of the design for containers in the kernel is that there isn't one; there is no container abstraction that the kernel recognizes. Instead, the kernel provides a long list of components — namespaces, control groups, sandboxing mechanisms, and more — along with a note that says, in effect, "some assembly r
The gist: Three main topics dominated the discussions Priority inversion and how to handle it in sched_ext: lock holder and lock waiter preemption, time slice extension, and making proxy execution work together with BPF schedulers. Paravirtualized scheduling: letting the host and guest schedulers cooperate across the VM boundary
The gist: 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 Confere
The gist: Linus Torvalds rarely writes significant amounts 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 ker
The gist: 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 cons
The gist: One of our biggest challenges has been developing Tyr while the Rust kernel abstractions and driver interfaces are also being developed. As the driver interfaces are naturally revised and improved, we have rewritten Tyr several times to adapt to the larger Rust ecosystem. This not only makes progress much slower than i
The gist: The PHP security team has let it be known that there is a high-stakes security update coming at 14:00 UTC on October 21. "All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available". Anybody running a PHP site probably needs to be prepared for this one.
The gist: Linus Torvalds released the 7.3 kernel, at the end of the usual nine-week development cycle, on October 18. This cycle, abundantly fueled by LLM-assisted contributions, broke just about every record imaginable. As usual, we have compiled some statistics showing how this release, which is expected to be the next long-te
The gist: It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease? Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened this last week, so as expected the final 7.3 is out, and thus tomorrow the merge win
The gist: The NFS network filesystem protocol has a long history on Unix-like operating systems (and beyond). NFS is still evolving, though, and implementations need to keep up. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, NFS developer Jeff Layton gave an overview of recent enhancements to the Linux implementation, along with some hi
The gist: The results from the 2026 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) have been announced. Kees Cook, Dave Hansen, Miguel Ojeda, and Shuah Khan have all been re-elected, and Laurent Pinchart will be joining the board.
The gist: Since Android's inception, the kernels it has used have diverged significantly from the mainline. While many of those differences have been resolved over time, and the move to the generic kernel image has helped to bring Android closer, current devices still carry a lot of out-of-tree changes. The preferred form for su
The gist: 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.
The gist: 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 accesse
The gist: 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
The gist: 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 gist: 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
The gist: One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.
The gist: The 7.2.10 and 6.18.56 stable kernels have been released. Each contains another several hundred important fixes.
The gist: While many developers are struggling to keep up with the flood of vulnerability reports, others are still focused on preventing those reports from happening in the first place. Control-flow integrity (CFI) is the term for preventing (or at least detecting) exploits that divert the flow of control from its intended path
The gist: The kernel's swap layer has undergone some significant changes over the course of the last year and a number of longstanding problems have been addressed. One problem that has not yet been solved in the mainline is the direct tie between slots in the swap cache and space in persistent swap files, which can cause highly
The gist: Front: Kernel bugs; Gentoo's Chromium package; Rust smart pointers; Sashiko; Charon; LAVD scheduler; Python random-number modules. Briefs: OpenSSH 10.6; RustConf recordings; Rust 1.99.0; Picard 3.0; Zig 0.17; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
The gist: The extensible scheduler class, which enables the creation of custom CPU schedulers with BPF, has led to a burst of innovation in this area; the LAVD scheduler has, perhaps, been one of the most noteworthy schedulers to emerge. Though it was originally designed for gaming applications, the LAVD scheduler has since grow
The gist: Patch review has long been one of the limiting constraints for the kernel project (and most others); there just aren't enough people to properly review all of the code that is submitted for inclusion. The Sashiko system, which uses a large language model (LLM) to generate reviews automatically, offers the prospect of s
The gist: Next week might look a bit different: we've got the annual maintainer summit and the Linux plumbers conference going on , so I'll be on the road, as will a number of other maintainers. That may or may not end up changing the stats for -rc7. But it's unlikely to affect the release schedule, although the fact that I have
The gist: By now it is no secret that large language models (LLMs) have made it easy for people to identify security bugs, and that has resulted in a flood of bug reports to almost every free-software project, including the kernel. At the 2026 edition of Kernel Recipes, Greg Kroah-Hartman took the stage to talk about how the ker
The gist: Version 1.99.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time include support for extern "C" variadic functions, the establishment of functions for obtaining the size and alignment of raw pointers, a number of stabilized APIs, and more.
The gist: The full set of videos from the recently concluded Kernel Recipes conference has been posted. Also noteworthy are the associated caricature drawings, by Frank Tizzoni, of attendees and the speakers.
The gist: The 2026 Python Language Summit was held on July 14 in Kraków, Poland; there is now a series of reports available on the topics that were discussed there. They include the memory buffer protocol, garbage collection, free-threaded Python, and "Spicycrab".
The gist: Serving on the TAB is a good way to help the kernel-development community. Please see this article from last year for an overview of what the TAB does and why membership is rewarding, then consider putting in your nomination.
