lwn.net
[$] Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine
Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before, and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is to make running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address the problem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.
[$] The reverting of revocable
Debian DFSG Team announces new dashboard and queue processes
Reinhard Tartler of Debian's new DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team, or simply "DFSG Team", has announced that the team is now operational and is deploying new tooling to improve the NEW queue experience for Debian developers and maintainers.
Our primary and immediate goal is simple: get the queue down.
We are currently settling in and refining our processes to ensure stability and consistency. While our focus right now is on clearing the backlog, our long-term vision is to enable all Debian Developers to meaningfully contribute to DFSG reviewing activities, distributing the workload and knowledge more effectively across the project.
The announcement includes information on the new dashboard for packages in the NEW queue, the rationale for the new tooling, and an introduction to the members of the team.
A single stable kernel for Thursday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.71 stable kernel. He writes, "All users of the 6.12 kernel series that had issues with 6.12.69 or 6.12.70 should upgrade, as some regressions are fixed here."
Security updates for Thursday
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 12, 2026
- Front: Git; GCC and KCFI; modernizing swapping; 6.18 statistics; modern FOSS challenges.
- Briefs: Kernel ML; tag2upload; LFS sysvinit; postmarketOS FOSDEM; Ardour 9.0; Offpunk 3.0; Dave Farber RIP; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Linux man pages 6.17 released
The grepc(1) program is something that originated in this project, as it helped me find code quickly in glibc and the Linux kernel. However, I've found it incredibly useful outside of this project. I'll take some space to announce it, as it's much more than just a tool for writing manual pages, and I expect it to be useful to most --if not all-- C programmers.
It is a command-line tool that finds C source code (for example, a function definition) in arbitrary projects. It doesn't use any indexing mechanism (unlike ctags and similar tools). This means that it can be used right after cloning some repository, without having to first generate an index.
[$] Evolving Git for the next decade
Git is ubiquitous; in the last two decades, the version-control system has truly achieved world domination. Almost every developer uses it and the vast majority of open-source projects are hosted in Git repositories. That does not mean, however, that it is perfect. Patrick Steinhardt used his main-track session at FOSDEM 2026 to discuss some of its shortcomings and how they are being addressed to prepare Git for the next decade.
postmarketOS FOSDEM 2026 and hackathon recap
The postmarketOS project has published a recap from FOSDEM 2026, including the FOSS on Mobile devroom, and a summary of its post-FOSDEM hackathon. This includes decisions on governance and the project's AI policy:
AI policy: our current AI policy does not state that we forbid the use of generative AI in postmarketOS, so far this document just lists why we think it is a bad idea and misaligned with the project values. We discussed this and will soon change it (via merge request) to clearly state that we don't want generative AI to be used in the project. It was also noted that currently the policy is too long, it would make sense to split it into the actual policy and still keep, but separate the reasoning from it.
[...] Power delegation and teams: in over two hours we discussed how to move forward with [postmarketOS change request] PMCR 0008 to organize ourselves better, and how it fits with soon having a legal entity. We figured that we need to rename "The Board" (which is currently for financial oversight) to "Financial Team", as we will soon have a new board for the legal entity. In the end our idea was to have the new board refer to an "assembly" for all important decisions, and this "assembly" would just be all Trusted Contributors in postmarketOS. The Core Contributors team would be dissolved in favor of having several topic-specific teams (a lot of which we already have, such as the infra team). This way we would have a very flat decision structure. The PMCR will be updated soon and discussed further there. Casey also asked on fedi for further feedback and got a lot of input.
Other topics include reaching out to resellers to sell phones with postmarketOS preinstalled, security, and more.
Stable kernels for Wednesday
Security updates for Wednesday
The 6.19 kernel has been released
The most significant changes in 6.19 include initial support for Intel's linear address-space separation feature, support for Arm Memory system resource Partitioning And Monitoring, the listns() system call, a reworked restartable-sequences implementation, support for large block sizes in the ext4 filesystem, some networking changes for improved memory safety, the live update orchestrator, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.19 page for details.
An in-kernel machine-learning library
What is the goal of using ML models in Linux kernel? The main goal is to employ ML models for elaboration of a logic of particular Linux kernel subsystem based on processing data or/and an efficient subsystem configuration based on internal state of subsystem. As a result, it needs: (1) collect data for training, (2) execute ML model training phase, (3) test trained ML model, (4) use ML model for executing the inference phase. The ML model inference can be used for recommendation of Linux kernel subsystem configuration or/and for injecting a synthesized subsystem logic into kernel space (for example, eBPF logic).
It is rigorously undocumented and there are no real users, so it's not entirely clear what the purpose is, but there are undoubtedly interesting things that could be done with it.
Six stable kernels for Friday
Ardour 9.0 released
We expect to get feedback on some of the major new features in this release, and plan to take that into account as we improve and refine them and the rest of Ardour going forward. We have no doubt that there will be both delight and disappointment with certain things - rather than assume that we don't know what we're doing, please leave us feedback on the forums so that Ardour gets better over time. Those of you new to our clip launching implementation might care to read up on the differences with Ableton Live.
In the coming weeks, we'll begin to sketch out what we have planned next for Ardour, in addition to responding to the feedback we get on this 9.0 release.
[$] Kernel control-flow-integrity support comes to GCC
Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a set of techniques that make it more difficult for attackers to hijack indirect jumps to exploit a system. The Linux kernel has supported forward-edge CFI (which protects indirect function calls) since 2020, with the most recent implementation of the feature introduced in 2022. That version avoids the overhead introduced by the earlier approach by using a compiler flag (-fsanitize=kcfi) that is present in Clang but not in GCC. Now, Kees Cook has a patch set adding that support to GCC that looks likely to land in GCC 17.
Linux from Scratch to drop System V versions
The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project provides step-by-step instructions on building a customized Linux system entirely from source. Historically, the project has provided separate System V and systemd editions, which gave users a choice of init systems. Bruce Dubbs has announced the project will no longer produce the System V version:
There are two reasons for this decision. The first reason is workload. No one working on LFS is paid. We rely completely on volunteers. In LFS there are 88 packages. In BLFS there are over 1000. The volume of changes from upstream is overwhelming the editors. In this release cycle that started on the 1st of September until now, there have been 70 commits to LFS and 1155 commits to BLFS (and counting). When making package updates, many packages need to be checked for both System V and systemd. When preparing for release, all packages need to be checked for each init system.
The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd that are not in System V. This could potentially be worked around with another init system like OpenRC, but beyond the transition process it still does not address the ongoing workload problem.
[...] As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files. Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider important.
The next version, 13.0, is expected in March and will only focus on systemd.