Linux Weekly News

The iov_iter interface is used to describe and iterate through buffers in the kernel. David Howells led a combined storage and filesystem session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss ways to improve iov_iter. His topic proposal listed a few different ideas including replacing some iov_iter types and possibly allowing mixed types in chains of iov_iter entries; he would like to make the interface itself and the uses of iov_iter in the kernel better.

The Linux kernel famously scales from the smallest of systems to massive servers with thousands of CPUs. It was not always that way, though; the initial version of the kernel could only manage a single processor. That limitation was lifted, obviously, but single-processor machines have always been treated specially in the scheduler. That longstanding situation may soon come to an end, though, if this patch series from Ingo Molnar makes it upstream.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The central feature of the OIN community is a patent cross-license that covers core Open Source functionality and expands in parallel with the growth of Open Source technology. As growth in Open Source has accelerated, OIN has proactively expanded the scope of the OIN license's benefit by including more than 4,500 software components and platforms in its Linux System definition, which comprises the list of Open Source code and associated functionality in OIN's patent cross-license.

LWN's first look at OIN was this article by Pamela Jones in late 2005.

The 6.15.2, 6.14.11, and 6.12.33 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a relatively small set of important fixes.

Note that this is the end of the line for the 6.14.x updates; Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the timing of this move:

If you notice, this has happened a bit more "early" than previous end-of-life announcements. Normally, after -rc1 is out there is a TON of stable patches happening due to the changes that come into the merge-window that were marked for stable backports but didn't get into Linus's release before -final. As some people have objected to this large influx being added to a stable kernel that is just about to go end-of-life, let's try marking this end-of-life a bit earlier to see how it goes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-django), Fedora (krb5), Mageia (cockpit, golang, kernel, and kernel-linus), SUSE (augeas, go1.23, go1.24, iputils, libwebp, transfig, and xen), and Ubuntu (amd64-microcode, apport, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-raspi, systemd, and tomcat).

The 6.16 merge window closed on June 8, as expected, containing 12,899 non-merge commits. This is slightly more than the 6.15 merge window, but well in line with expectations. 7,353 of those were merged after the summary of the first half of the merge window was written. More detailed statistics can be found in the LWN kernel source database.

At Flock, Fedora's annual developer conference, held in Prague from June 5 to June 8, two members of the Fedora documentation team, Petr Bokoč and Peter Boy, led a session on the state of Fedora documentation. The pair covered a brief history of the project's documentation since the days of Fedora Core 1, challenges the documentation team faces, as well as plans to improve Fedora's documentation by enticing more people to contribute.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced a report for work completed in April to improve FreeBSD support for laptops. This includes installer updates, improved suspend/resume behavior, as well as progress on a port of Linux 6.7 and 6.8 graphics drivers to drm-kmod. A roadmap for the FreeBSD laptop work is also available.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (golang, nodejs22, thunderbird, and varnish), Debian (gimp, modsecurity-apache, python-tornado, and roundcube), Fedora (chromium, coreutils, fcgi, ghostscript, krb5, libvpx, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-libsoup, mod_security, and samba), Mageia (php-adodb, systemd, and tomcat), Red Hat (buildah, firefox, glibc, grafana, kernel, libsoup, libxslt, mod_security, perl-FCGI, podman, python-tornado, and skopeo), Slackware (libvpx), and SUSE (helm-mirror, iputils, and libraw).

Linus has released 6.16-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release.

I think we had a fairly normal merge window, although I did get the feeling that there were a few more "late straggler" pull requests than usual. Not to a huge degree, but there was definitely an upward bump at the end of the second week.

But on the whole, all the stats look pretty normal.

Nyxt is an unusual web browser that tries to answer the question, "what if Emacs was a good web browser?". Nyxt is not an Emacs package, but a full web browser written in Common Lisp and available under the BSD three-clause license. Its target audience is developers who want a browser that is keyboard-driven and extensible; Nyxt is also developed for Linux first, rather than Linux being an afterthought or just a sliver of its audience. The philosophy (as described in its FAQ) behind the project is that users should be able to customize all of the browser's functionality.

The Netdev 0x19 conference was held in Zagreb, Croatia from March 10 through March 13. The organizers announced today that the videos and slides for all sessions are now online. Topics from the conference include IRQ suspension, the future of SO_TIMESTAMPING, remote TCP connection offloading, and more.

The 6.16 kernel will include a number of changes to how the kernel handles the processing of core dumps for crashed processes. Christian Brauner explained his reasons for doing this work as: "Because I'm a clown and also I had it with all the CVEs because we provide a **** API for userspace". The handling of core dumps has indeed been a constant source of vulnerabilities; with luck, the 6.16 work will result in rather fewer of them in the future.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, openssh, and python36:3.6), Debian (edk2, libfile-find-rule-perl, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (emacs, libvpx, perl-FCGI, and seamonkey), Mageia (cifs-utils), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, gvisor-tap-vsock, krb5, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, protobuf, and thunderbird), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (gimp, gnutls, haproxy, opensaml, openssh, openvpn, python-cryptography, python-tornado, python311-nh3, and python311-selenium), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-bad1.0 and linux-fips).

In a combined storage and filesystem session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Keith Busch led a discussion about zero-copy operations for the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem. The session was proposed by his colleague, David Wei, who could not make it to the summit, so Busch filled in, though he noted that "I do not really know FUSE so well". The idea is to eliminate data copies in the data path to and from the FUSE server in user space.

The European Union's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has caused a stir in the software-development world. Thanks to advocacy by the Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation, Mozilla, and others, open-source software projects generally have minimal requirements under the CRA — but nothing to do with law is ever quite so simple. Marta Rybczyńska spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about the impact of the CRA on the open-source ecosystem, with an emphasis on the importance of understanding a project's role under the CRA. She later participated in a panel discussion with Joakim Bech, Kate Stewart, and Mike Bursell about how the CRA would impact embedded open-source development.

Version 3.0 of the privacy-centric, open-source mobile operating system has been released. Notable changes in this release include improved privacy tools, a "find my device" feature, and more. LWN looked at /e/OS in March.

One of the more obscure features provided by Unix-domain sockets is the ability to pass a file descriptor from one process to another. This feature is often used to provide access to a specific file or network connection to a process running in a relatively unprivileged context. But what if the recipient doesn't want a new file descriptor? A feature added for the 6.16 release makes it possible to refuse that offer.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and mariadb-10.5), Oracle (firefox, ghostscript, git, go-toolset:ol8, golang, kernel, krb5, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, perl-CPAN, python36:3.6, rsync, varnish, and varnish:6), Red Hat (firefox, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (curl and python3), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, apache2-mod_security2, avahi, buildkit, ca-certificates-mozilla, cloud-regionsrv-client, cloud-regionsrv-client, python-toml, containerd, containerized-data-importer, cups, curl, dnsmasq, docker, elemental-operator, elemental-toolkit, expat, firefox, freetype2, gdk-pixbuf, git, glib2, glibc, gnuplot, gnutls, gpg2, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gtk3, haproxy, helm, java-17-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, keepalived, kernel, kernel-firmware, krb5, kubevirt, less, libarchive, libcryptopp, libdb-4_8, libndp, libpcap, libsoup, libtasn1, libvirt, libX11, libxml2, libxslt, Mesa, mozilla-nss, nghttp2, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, opensc, openssh, openssl-3, openssl-3, libpulp, ulp-macros, orc, pam, pam_pkcs11, pam_u2f, patch, pcp, pcr-oracle, shim, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, podman, postgresql16, procps, protobuf, python-dnspython, python-Jinja2, python-requests, python-setuptools, python-tornado6, python-urllib3, python311, python311, python-rpm-macros, qemu, rsync, runc, rust-keylime, selinux-policy, sevctl, skopeo, sssd, SUSE Manager Client Tools, systemd, thunderbird, tiff, tpm2.0-tools, tpm2-0-tss, u-boot, ucode-intel, unbound, util-linux, vim, wget, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia, python-django, twitter-bootstrap3, twitter-bootstrap4, and wireshark).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: OpenH264 in Fedora; Wallabag; Safety certification; 6.16 Merge window; Bounce buffering; Hardening repository problems; Device-initiated I/O; Faster networking; OSPM 2025; Free software in science.
• Briefs: Kea vulnerabilities; Alpine Linux 3.22.0; Fedora strategy; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.