Linux Weekly News

• Front: Owen Le Blanc and MCC; UID/GID drift; DMA for UIO; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: EU OS; RISC-V Fedora; Ubuntu 25.04; NLnet funding; Template strings; Tor Browser 14.5; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Fedora Project is looking for solutions to an interesting problem with its image-based editions and spins, such as the Atomic Desktops or CoreOS, that are created with rpm-ostree or bootc. If a package that is part of a image-based version has a user or group created dynamically on installation, and it owns files installed on the system, the system may be subject to user ID (UID) and group ID (GID) "drift" on updates. This "UID/GID drift" may come about when a new image with updates is generated, and therefore files may have the wrong ownership. This can have side-effects ranging from mildly inconvenient to serious. No solutions have been adopted just yet, but there are a few ideas on how to deal with the problem.

The NLnet Foundation has announced the projects that have received funding from its October call for grant proposals from the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.

In all, 42 projects have been selected for the NGI grants which are between €5,000 and €50,000. See the announcement for the full list of selected projects, and the current projects page for other recent projects funded by NLnet.

The Linux kernel can be configured so that kernel modules must be signed or otherwise authenticated to be loaded into the kernel. Some BPF developers want that to be an option for BPF programs as well — after all, if those are going to run as part of the kernel, they should be subject to the same code-signing requirements. Blaise Boscaccy and Cong Wang presented two different visions for how BPF code signing could work at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.

Anton Protopopov kicked off the BPF track on the second day of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a discussion about permitting indirect calls in BPF. He also spoke about his continuing work on static keys, a topic which is related because the implementation of indirect jumps and static keys in the verifier use some of the same mechanisms for tracking indirect control-flow. Although some design work remains to be done, it may soon be possible to make indirect calls in BPF without any extra work compared to normal C.

The Fedora Project's RISC-V special-interest group (SIG) has announced the availability of Fedora Linux 42 images for supported RISC-V boards, as well as QEMU and container images. The SIG is working toward making RISC-V a primary architecture for Fedora, and has made significant progress in the past year.

Our upstreaming work continues apace, and we want to acknowledge that none of this progress would be possible without the incredible collaboration from maintainers across the Fedora Project and beyond. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, accepted, merged, and built our patches. Your support makes this architecture possible.

We're also excited about just how many packages build cleanly without special treatment or overlay repositories that need to be cared for. RISC-V is becoming just another architecture, and that's exactly how it should be.

The Python Steering Council accepted PEP 750 ("Template Strings") on April 10. LWN covered the discussion around the proposal, including the substantial revisions to the idea that were needed for it to be accepted. Template strings (t-strings) are a new kind of string that produces structured data instead of a raw string, allowing library authors to build their own custom template-handling logic. Since the approval happened before the cutoff for new features (May 6), support for template strings will be included in Python 3.14, scheduled for October 2025.

Ask a Linux enthusiast who created the Linux kernel, and odds are they will have no trouble naming Linus Torvalds—but many would be stumped if asked what the first Linux distribution was, and who created it. Some might guess Slackware, or its predecessor, Softlanding Linux System (SLS); both were arguably more influential but arrived just a bit later. The first honest-to-goodness distribution with a proper installer was MCC Interim Linux, created by Owen Le Blanc, released publicly in early 1992. I recently reached out to Le Blanc to learn more about his work on the distribution, what he has been doing since, and his thoughts on Linux in 2025.

EU OS is not a brand-new Linux distribution in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a proof-of-concept built atop Fedora's immutable KDE Plasma spin (Kinoite). EU OS takes a layered approach to customization. The project's vision is to provide a standard, adaptable Linux base that can be extended with national, regional or sector-specific customizations, making it suitable for a wide range of European public sector needs.