The gist: On October 27, LLM provider Anthropic reported on a remotely exploitable use-after-free bug affecting systems with multipath TCP listeners open. The bug works by triggering a response to a retransmitted SYN packet at the same moment that the TCP connection is established in another thread, causing the first thread to a
The gist: Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.3.1, 7.2.14, 6.18.60, 6.12.115, 6.6.161, 6.1.191, 5.15.224, and 5.10.273 stable kernels. As usual, he advises all users to update—advice that seems especially wise given the increased number of security-relevant bug fixes that the kernel is seeing these days. [Edit:
The gist: Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (aspell, cjose, curl, gcc-toolset-15-gcc, httpd:2.4, ignition, java-21-openjdk, libX11, libXi, libXrender, libXtst, mariadb:10.11, nodejs:24, python-pillow, python3.12-urllib3, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (imagemagick, libdatetime-timezone-perl, python-git, tor, tzdata, vlc,
The gist: Alexandre Courbot spends most of his time working on the kernel doing code reviews. Recently, he's been wondering about what the standards should be for when Rust code is allowed to panic, and how it should do error handling more generally. Unlike many of the other talks at Kangrejos 2026, his talk was not presenting s
The gist: 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 con
The gist: 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 thes
The gist: 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: a
The gist: The work to support block sizes larger than the page size on XFS has been difficult. Many users of XFS run stable kernels, which means that they aren't testing new XFS code as it is released. That has made Daniel Gomez wonder whether adopting Rust for some of the data structures underlying XFS, particularly XArrays, co
The gist: Rust has several ad-hoc mechanisms to allow user code to influence how the standard library executes. For example, custom panic handlers and custom allocators both involve registering functions that core standard library code needs to call. With more similar features planned, Jana Dönszelmann spotted the developing pat
The gist: Self-referential structures that can be used without unsafe code have posed a problem for Rust for years. There are many cases where a self-referential data structure is the elegant algorithmic choice, but implementing it in accordance with Rust's lifetime rules is all but impossible. At Kangrejos 2026, Gary Guo presen
The gist: 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 s
The gist: Tomáš Šedovič is a program manager at the Rust Foundation. He co-leads the goals team, which helps organize the Rust project's overall goals, including making sure that the people who have agreed to work on one have the support they need. At Kangrejos 2026, he provided an overview of the Rust project's goal processes a
The gist: Nadrieril is a long-time Rust contributor, and the maintainer of the rustc pattern-matching infrastructure. During his involvement with Rust, he has noticed a problem with the usability of the language: it is difficult to automatically extract information from a Rust crate for use with other tooling. The Charon project
The gist: The Rust Foundation has posted the recordings from RustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada. Photos of the event are also available. LWN covered four talks from RustConf this year.
The gist: Rust has a number of kinds of smart pointers, both in the standard library and defined by users. Still, some operations that are possible with built-in references are not possible to perform with user-defined smart pointers. Tyler Mandry, lead of the Rust project's language team, spoke at RustConf 2026 about the length
The gist: Christian Legnitto is the maintainer of rust-gpu and Rust CUDA, two libraries that make it possible to program a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) from Rust. He isn't satisfied with the current state of GPU support in Rust, however. In a talk at RustConf 2026, he explained his vision for how the GPU could becom
The gist: Many of the transmissions sent over the radio spectrum can be decoded with a relatively cheap hardware dongle. Thomas Eckert presented at RustConf 2026 in Montreal about his hobby: decoding radio transmissions with Rust. In his presentation, he covered all of the math necessary to get started with software-defined radi
The gist: Pierre-Emmanuel Patry and Arthur Cohen gave a talk at RustConf 2026 on the status of the Rust frontend for GCC (gccrs), with a particular eye toward the goal of compiling the Linux kernel. Patry gave a follow-up talk for a more kernel-focused audience at Kangrejos the next week, which Cohen could not attend. The gccrs
The gist: A function's return type is supposed to indicate the kind of data that it produces. Rust's "never" type, which is denoted by an exclamation mark ("!"), is the type the language uses to mark a function that never returns and other places where a value can never occur. For a long time, the never type was used internally
The gist: When a laptop is asleep, its memory is not unreadable. The right tooling can attach to the computer's memory bus and read out its contents, and cold-boot attacks can theoretically read values from memory for a short time after the computer loses power. That is really an unavoidable fact about the hardware, but some use
The gist: 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,
The gist: Practical quantum computers have been ten years away for the last several decades. Now, however, it's beginning to look as though they will be possible in just a few years. Recent research with obfuscated results demonstrated much lower memory requirements to factor ECDSA keys on a quantum computer, with work by other
