The gist: In a followup to his session at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Carlos O'Donell returned to the topic of system-call wrappers for the GNU C library (glibc) at this year's event. This time around, he was joined by Florian Weimer, who is another glibc maintainer. The idea was to give an update on what has happe
The gist: 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
The gist: LTTng creator Mathieu Desnoyers seems a bit trapped in something of a catch-22. At the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), he led a discussion on the problem he is having in trying to collaborate with other tracing projects (e.g. ftrace, perf) in the kernel. The feedback he has gotten, both over the years and more re
The gist: Python's random and secrets modules both include utilities for obtaining random values, but only one of them is suitable for generating passwords and security tokens. For much of Python's history, random was used for passwords and tokens anyway, despite documentation that called it unsuitable for cryptography. In 2015,
The gist: Sharon Yang is a Chromium developer who worked at Google on the browser and now works on it at Igalia. On the final day of FOSSY 2026, she gave a presentation on her experiences with both of those companies, comparing and contrasting the ways the each operates and how that affects work on the code base. She enjoyed wor
The gist: Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cockpit-image-builder, expat, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, resteasy, ruby, ruby4.0, ruby:3.3, and ruby:4.0), Debian (dovecot, flatpak, glance, kernel, libdbi-perl, lxml, rsync, swift, and wordpress), Fedora (chromium, freeipa, freerdp, grub2, NetworkManager-iodine, NetworkMana
The gist: Version 2.56 of the Git distributed version-control system has been released. It has 748 non-merge commits since Git 2.55 was released back in June; those commits came from 104 developers, 39 of whom are first-time contributors. New features include a safer workflow for conflict resolution, smaller path-walk repacks, a
The gist: Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, ipa, kernel, libxml2, perl-DBI, python-cryptography, thunderbird, and unbound), Debian (chromium, evolution-data-server, exim4, ghostscript, incus, lemonldap-ng, libheif, nodejs, php8.4, ruby-oj, swift, and vlc), Fedora (chromium, cinnamon, cinnamon-desktop, cinn
The gist: Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (apr-util, corosync, curl, freerdp, gstreamer1-plugins-base, libarchive, libtiff, libxml2, openexr, openssh, rsyslog, sudo, tomcat, unbound, webkit2gtk3, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (chromium), Fedora (alsa-plugins, amarok, aqualung, atomes, at
The gist: None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working b
The gist: Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.2.7, 6.18.53, and 6.12.111 stable. As is usual these days, they are quite large; also no surprise is that they provide many important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of those kernels are advised to update.
The gist: Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, perl-Net-DNS, sudo, tomcat, and tomcat9), Debian (chromium, gimp, libde265, libevent, linux-6.12, ruby-jwt, and unbound), Fedora (asterisk, chromium, doctl, dovecot, evolution, firefox, forgejo, freeciv, freeipa, gegl04, gimp, libheif, nss, opkssh, parted, ruby, s
The gist: Linus Torvalds has released the 7.3-rc4 kernel prepatch. It is, unsurprisingly at this point, large: "We all know the drill by now: 'it's big, yadda yadda'".
The gist: At the 2026 edition of FOSSY, Romeo Solano gave a fast-paced, humorous presentation on what could have been a rather boring topic: server encryption. There are a number of threats that we face in today's world, from criminals, government overreach, espionage, and more, that can be thwarted with encryption. But encrypti
The gist: Typst is a system for typesetting documents into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progress, HTML. It is adept at handling technical material, and is often considered to be an eventual LaTeX replacement. We last looked in on Typst a year ago, when it had reached version 0.13. A new version, 0.15, was released in
The gist: Python's support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over the last few years with the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language. But testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering, which adds an element of
The gist: At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in
