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Version 2.0 of the Aqualung gapless music player has been released. Aqualung supports playback of a wide range of audio formats, ripping CDs to WAV, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3, and subscribing to podcasts via RSS or Atom feeds. The primary change in this release is the migration from GTK2 to GTK3, and dropping support for custom skins as a result.

The kernel's slab allocator is responsible for the allocation of small (usually sub-page) chunks of memory. For many workloads, the speed of object allocation and freeing is one of the key factors in overall performance, so it is not surprising that a lot of effort has gone into optimizing the slab allocator over time. Now that the kernel is down to a single slab allocator, the memory-management developers have free rein to add complexity to it; the latest move in that direction is the per-CPU sheaves patch set from slab maintainer Vlastimil Babka.

The AlmaLinux project has published a request for comments (RFC) on rebuilding Fedora's Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), which provides additional software for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives, to support older x86_64 hardware that is not supported by EPEL 10. While this may sound simple on the surface, the proposed rebuild carries a few potential risks that the AlmaLinux and EPEL contributors would like to avoid. The AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee (ALESCo) is currently considering feedback and will vote on the RFC in March.

The Emacs extensible text editor (among other things) has made a security release to address two vulnerabilities. Emacs 30.1 has fixes for CVE-2025-1244, which is a shell-command-injection flaw in the man.el man page browser and for CVE-2024-53920, which is a code-execution vulnerability in the flymake syntax-checking mode. LWN covered the flymake problems back in December.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, libpq, mysql, postgresql, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), Debian (fort-validator, gnutls28, krb5, libxml2, and python-werkzeug), Fedora (chromium, openssh, proftpd, python3.8, vaultwarden, and vim), Oracle (bind, bind9.16, bind9.18, libpq, libsoup, mysql, mysql:8.0, nodejs:18, nodejs:22, postgresql, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), Red Hat (mysql, mysql:8.0, and python3), SUSE (chromedriver, dcmtk, grub2, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-23-openjdk, luanti, openssh, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, proftpd, radare2, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, netty, and nginx).

The 6.14-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "This continues to be the right kind of 'boring' release: nothing in particular stands out in rc4".

The pytest-mh project is a plugin that provides a multi-host test framework for the popular pytest unit-testing framework and test runner. Work on pytest-mh started in 2023 to solve a multitude of issues that cropped up for developers and testers when testing the SSSD project, which is a client for enterprise identity management. I was not happy with the state of testing of the SSSD project and wanted to create something that would increase test readability, remove duplication, eliminate errors, and provide multi-host testing capabilities, while having the flexibility to build a new API around it. Finally, I also wanted something that can be used by anyone to test their projects as well.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released another four stable kernels: 6.13.4, 6.12.16, 6.6.79, and 6.1.129. As usual, all users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.16, and mysql:8.0), Debian (chromium, djoser, libtasn1-6, and postgresql-13), Fedora (python3.12 and vim), Red Hat (libpq, postgresql, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), Slackware (ark), SUSE (brise, chromium, emacs, google-osconfig-agent, grafana, grub2, helm, kernel, openssh, openssl-1_1, ovmf, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, and postgresql17), and Ubuntu (gnutls28, libtasn1-6, openssl, python3.10, python3.12, python3.8, and webkit2gtk).

At the end of January we ran this article on the discussions around a set of Rust bindings for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer. Many pixels have been expended on the topic since across the net, most recently in this sprawling email thread. Linus Torvalds has now made his feelings known on the topic:

You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it.

But "ignore the Rust side" automatically also means that you don't have any *say* on the Rust side.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I want to have nothing to do with Rust", and then in the very next sentence say "And that means that the Rust code that I will ignore cannot use the C interfaces I maintain".

The code in question seems highly likely to be merged for the 6.15 release.

Version 1.85.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes in the release include support for async closures, some convenience iterators for tuples, and a number of stabilized APIs. The headline feature, though, is that this release stabilizes the Rust 2024 edition, described as "the largest edition we have released". The 2024 edition guide has a detailed listing of all the changes that were incorporated this time around.

The maximum filesystem block size that the kernel can support has always been limited by the host page size for Linux, even if the filesystems could handle larger block sizes. The large-block-size (LBS) patches that were merged for the 6.12 kernel removed this limitation in XFS, thereby decoupling the page size from the filesystem block size. XFS is the first filesystem to gain this support, with other filesystems likely to add LBS support in the future. In addition, the LBS patches have been used to get the initial atomic-write support into XFS.

Atomic block writes, which have been discussed here a few times in the past, are block operations that either complete fully or do not occur at all, ensuring data consistency and preventing partial (or "torn") writes. This means the disk will, at all times, contain either the complete new data from the atomic write operation or the complete old data from a previous write. It will never have a mix of both the old and the new data, even if a power failure occurs during an ongoing atomic write operation. Atomic writes have been of interest to many Linux users, particularly database developers, as this feature can provide significant performance improvements.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (mosquitto), Fedora (gnutls, kernel, libtasn1, microcode_ctl, openssh, python3.10, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (bind, bind9.16, buildah, container-tools:rhel8, podman, and redis:6), Slackware (libxml2), SUSE (dcmtk, google-osconfig-agent, java-17-openj9, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.31-apiserver, openssh, and ruby3.4-rubygem-grpc), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-lowlatency and linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Systemd; AI scraperbots; Time-slice extension; FUSE regression; Multi-size THPs; Memcached; Meshtastic.
• Briefs: Asahi leadership; Debian images; RISC-V Fedora; OpenSUSE; Mesa 25.0.0; Pi-hole v6; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced leadership updates for Mozilla. This includes a Mozilla Leadership Council made up of executives from each Mozilla organization, and new board chairs for the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation, and Mozilla.ai. The announcement also indicates a desire to further "diversify" Mozilla's focus:

We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts.

Steven Rostedt recently posted a patch set that could help improve the performance of certain user-space applications by giving the scheduler more context about when they are safe to interrupt. The patch set lets programs request a small grace window before they can be interrupted so that they can relinquish any locks, decreasing the amount of time that other threads have to spend waiting. Rostedt shared performance numbers suggesting that the patch might cut the amount of time spent acquiring locks in half for some programs — although, since his test was specifically tuned for this case, real-world projects should expect a somewhat less dramatic improvement. The change received some pushback from scheduler maintainer Peter Zijlstra, who objected to the patch set's approach.

Version 25.0.0 of the Mesa graphics library has been released. "The flashiest addition is probably the support for Vulkan 1.4 by Anv (Intel), Asahi (Apple), Lavapipe (software), NVK (NVIDIA), PanVK (Mali), RADV (AMD), and Turnip (Qualcomm). Users can expect the usual flurry of improvements across all drivers and components."

Many of us enjoy uninterrupted access to mobile networks. However, in remote areas or during emergencies, that connectivity may not always be available. For such scenarios, Meshtastic offers a decentralized wireless mesh network with open-source firmware that runs on affordable, low-power devices. At FOSDEM 2025, the Meshtastic project was represented by one of its core developers, Thomas Göttgens, who gave a talk, "Meshtastic - off-grid communication for everyone", in the Radio developer room (devroom).

The Fedora Project has announced two milestones in its journey to supporting the RISC-V architecture: a dedicated RISC-V Koji build system instance is live in the Fedora data center, and Fedora 41-based images are now available for RISC-V. It is also possible to run Fedora RISC-V images using QEMU for those without supported hardware.