Linux Weekly News

The fundamental concept of checkpoint/restore is elegant: capture a process's state and resurrect it later, perhaps elsewhere. Checkpointing meticulously records a process's memory, open files, CPU state, and more into a snapshot. Restoration then reconstructs the process from this state. This established technique faces new challenges with GPU-accelerated applications, where low-latency restoration is crucial for fault tolerance, live migration, and fast startups. Recently, the restore process for AMD GPUs has been redesigned to eliminate substantial bottlenecks.

Accessibility features and the work that goes into developing those features often tend to be overlooked and are poorly understood by all but the people who actually depend on such features. At Fedora's annual developer conference, Flock, Lukáš Tyrychtr sought to improve understanding and raise awareness about accessibility with his session on accessibility barriers and screen-reader functionality in GNOME. His talk provided rare insight into the world of using and developing open-source software for visually-impaired users—including landing important accessibility improvements in the latest GNOME release.

The Kubernetes project has announced that it will be losing its "special status" with the Slack communication platform and will be downgraded to the free tier in a matter of days:

The project has a FAQ covering the change, its impacts, and more. The CNCF projects staff has proposed a move to the Discord service as the best option to handle the more than 200,000 users and thousands of posts per day from the Kubernetes community. The Kubernetes Steering Committee will be making its decision "in the next few weeks".

Version 2.50.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released with a long list of new user features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog post for details.

The diffstat looks somewhat unusual, with a lot of one-liners with both ARC and pincontrol having (presumably independently) ended up doing some unrelated trivial cleanups.

But even that is probably noticeable only because everything else is pretty small. That "everything else" is mostly network drivers (and bluetooth) and bcachefs, with some rust infrastructure and core networking changes thrown in.

The Radicle peer-to-peer code collaboration project has released Radicle Desktop: a graphical interface designed to simplify more complex parts of using Radicle such as issue management and patch reviews.

LWN covered Radicle in March 2024.

The last year has been a rocky one for the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg—WordPress co-founder and CEO of WordPress hosting company Automattic—started a messy public spat with WP Engine in September and has proceeded to use his control of the project's WordPress.org infrastructure as weapons against the company, with the community caught in the crossfire. It is not surprising, then, that on June 6 a group of WordPress community participants announced the Federated and Independent Repositories Package Manager (FAIR.pm) project. It is designed to be a decentralized alternative to WordPress.org with a goal of building "public digital infrastructure that is both resilient and fair".

The Python Language Summit 2025 occurred on May 14th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Core developers and special guests from around the world gathered in one room for an entire day of presentations and discussions about the future of the Python programming language.

Topics covered include making breaking changes less painful, free-threaded Python, interaction with Rust, and challenges faced by the Steering Council.

Version 10.0 of the Rocky Linux distribution has been released. As with the AlmaLinux 10.0 release, Rocky Linux 10.0 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. See the release notes for details.

• Front: Nyxt; Cyber Resilience Act; Unwanted file descriptors; Core-dump API; 6.16 Merge window; Uniprocessor configurations; Smatch; FUSE zero-copy; iov_iter; Fedora documentation.
• Briefs: Android tracking; /e/OS 3.0; FreeBSD laptops; Ubuntu X11 support; Netdev 0x19; OIN anniversary; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Smatch is a GPL-licensed static-analysis tool for C that has a lot of specialized checks for the kernel. Smatch has been used in the kernel for more than 20 years; Dan Carpenter, its primary author, decided last year that some details of its plugin system were due for a rewrite. He spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about his work on Smatch, the changes to its implementation, and how those changes enabled him to easily add additional checks for locking bugs in the kernel.

While there are subtle differences in the way Meta and Yandex bridge web and mobile contexts and identifiers, both of them essentially misuse the unvetted access to localhost sockets. The Android OS allows any installed app with the INTERNET permission to open a listening socket on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1). Browsers running on the same device also access this interface without user consent or platform mediation. This allows JavaScript embedded on web pages to communicate with native Android apps and share identifiers and browsing habits, bridging ephemeral web identifiers to long-lived mobile app IDs using standard Web APIs.

This backdoor, the use of which has evidently stopped since its disclosure, allow tracking of users across sites regardless of cookie policies or use of incognito browser modes.