Linux Weekly News

Ihor Solodrai has been working on the BPF subsystem's continuous-integration (CI) testing for the last six months. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he remotely shared an update on his work, and solicited feedback on how the tests could be further improved. Much of the work he's done has been specific to the BPF subsystem, but some is more generic and could potentially be of use to other subsystems. He also shared some general lessons learned from working on the BPF CI tests.

Despite careful planning and months of warning, Debian developer Mo Zhou has acknowledged that the project needs more time to grapple with the questions around AI models and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). For now, he has withdrawn his proposed General Resolution (GR) that would have required the original training data for AI models to be released in order to be considered DFSG-compliant—though the debates on the topic continue.

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. A blog post accompanying the release provides details on some of the more notable features, such as encrypted DNS, a developer preview of RHEL 10 for RISC-V, and image mode for RHEL using bootc.

RHEL 10 includes the 6.12.0 kernel, GCC 14.2, GNU Binutils 2.41, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.39, Python 3.12, Perl 5.40, and more. See the release notes for a full list of changes. LWN covered CentOS Stream 10 in December, which provided an early look at what would be in the RHEL 10 release.

Roland Shoemaker has published a blog post about a recent security audit of the cryptography packages shipped as part of the Go standard library. The audit, performed by the Trail of Bits security firm, uncovered one low-severity vulnerability in the legacy Go+BoringCrypto integration, as well as a handful of informational findings.

During the review, there were a number of questions about our cgo-based Go+BoringCrypto integration, which provides a FIPS 140-2 compliant cryptography mode for internal usage at Google. The Go+BoringCrypto code is not supported by the Go team for external use, but has been critical for Google's internal usage of Go.

The Trail of Bits team found one vulnerability and one non-security relevant bug, both of which were results of the manual memory management required to interact with a C library. Since the Go team does not support usage of this code outside of Google, we have chosen not to issue a CVE or Go vulnerability database entry for this issue, but we fixed it in the Go 1.25 development tree.

The entire report is available as a PDF for those who enjoy a little light security reading.

The Asahi Linux project, which supports Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, has published a progress report ahead of the 6.15 kernel's release.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public's right to know.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release of the Rust language, version 1.87.0 was announced live today at the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands. Notable changes include the addition of anonymous pipes to the standard library and the ability for inline assembly (asm!) to jump to labeled blocks within Rust code.

The Tor project has announced the oniux utility which provides Tor network isolation, using Linux namespaces, for third-party applications.

Namespaces are a powerful feature that gives us the ability to isolate Tor network access of an arbitrary application. We put each application in a network namespace that doesn't provide access to system-wide network interfaces (such as eth0), and instead provides a custom network interface onion0.

This allows us to isolate an arbitrary application over Tor in the most secure way possible software-wise, namely by relying on a security primitive offered by the operating system kernel. Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.

The Tor project cautions that oniux is considered experimental as the software it depends on, such as Arti and onionmasq, are still new.

• Front: Home Assistant; YaST; bpfilter; Flatpak; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Screen security; Guix on Codeberg; Postgres I/O; GNOME executive director; Nextcloud blog; Podman 5.5.0; OSL sustainability; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.