lwn.net

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.
• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Firefox has long had support for multiple profiles to store personal information such as bookmarks, passwords, and user preferences. However, Firefox did not make profiles particularly discoverable or easy to manage. That is about to change; Mozilla has announced that it is launching a profile management feature that will make it easier to create and switch between profiles. According to the support page for the feature, it will be rolled out to users gradually beginning on October 14.

The Rust for Linux project has been good for Rust, Tyler Mandry, one of the co-leads of Rust's language-design team, said. He gave a talk at Kangrejos 2025 covering upcoming Rust language features and thanking the Rust for Linux developers for helping drive them forward. Afterward, Benno Lossin and Xiangfei Ding went into more detail about their work on the three most important language features for kernel development: field projections, in-place initialization, and arbitrary self types.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (apptainer, civetweb, mod_http2, openssl, pandoc, and pandoc-cli), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, and podman), SUSE (cairo, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, gstreamer-plugins-rs, libxslt, logback, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python-xmltodict, and rubygem-puma), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux-aws-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-gke, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, and linux-raspi).

Version 3.14.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of changes this time around, including official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more; see the announcement for details.

Paul McKenney gave a remote presentation at Kangrejos 2025 following up on the talk he gave last year about the lifetime-end-pointer-zapping problem: certain common patterns for multithreaded code are technically undefined behavior, and changes to the C and C++ specifications will be needed to correct that. Those changes could also impact code that uses unsafe Rust, such as the kernel's Rust bindings. Progress on the problem has been slow, but McKenney believes that a solution is near at hand.

Systemd v258 was released on September 17 after more than nine months of development. LWN has already covered some of the features and changes being readied for v258 before it was final. Now that the release is out, it is time to look at more of what came in v258, including a sandbox shell, new boot options, service-level disk quotas, and enhancements to systemd-resolved.

Taylor Blau has posted an extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor's Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on Google Docs for those who prefer that format.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (kernel, open-vm-tools, and postgresql), SUSE (chromedriver and chromium), and Ubuntu (haproxy and pam-u2f).

Version 2025.10 of the U-Boot boot loader has been released with new features, including Python tooling improvements, cleanups for implicit header inclusions, better support for numerous Arm platforms, support for new RISC-V platforms, better documentation, and more. Maintainer Tom Rini also reports on some project news: As I mentioned with the v2025.07 release, I was looking for a few people to step up and help with the overall organization and management of the project. To that end, Peter Robinson and Neil Armstrong have stepped up and have been helping me. This has been part of the process for the project to join up under the Software Freedom Conservancy's (SFC) umbrella and have a legal entity that can help the project work with other legal entities on things like donations.

At the time of writing, there have been 9,099 commits in the 6.18 merge window, 8,475 non-merges and 624 merges. The changes so far include core-kernel, graphics, and networking work, among others. There are no big surprises, but several items that were discussed at this year's LFSMM+BPF Summit have now been merged.

Support for BPF in the kernel has been tied to the LLVM toolchain since the advent of extended BPF. There has been a growing effort to add BPF support to the GNU toolchain as well, though. At the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron, the developers involved got together with representatives of the kernel community to talk about the state of that work and what needs to happen next.

The 6.17.1, 6.16.11, 6.12.51, and 6.6.110 stable kernels have been released. This time around, they contain a relatively small number of important fixes in various parts of the kernel.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Debian (dovecot, git, log4cxx, and openssl), Fedora (containernetworking-plugins, firebird, firefox, jupyterlab, mupdf, and thunderbird), Oracle (ipa), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, firefox, gnutls, kernel, kernel-rt, multiple packages, mysql, mysql:8.0, nginx, podman, and thunderbird), Slackware (fetchmail), SUSE (afterburn, chromium, firefox, haproxy, libvmtools-devel, logback, python311-Django, python311-Django4, and redis), and Ubuntu (linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.14, linux-oem-6.14, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, mysql-8.0, poppler, and squid).

OpenSSH 10.1 has been released. Along with "a minor security fix" and some other bug fixes, this release disallows control characters in user names passed via the command line, adds better logging around certificate refusals, and a new RefuseConnection server configuration option.

Despite its name, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is not an operating system; it is a software development kit (SDK) that provides building blocks for robotic applications. One of the main goals of ROS is to present a common API that abstracts away the details of particular hardware drivers or algorithms to make development easier; developers can focus on what a robot should do rather than the low-level details of specific controllers. The latest release of ROS, Kilted Kaiju, features improvements to the middleware layer that is used to deliver data between components.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (idm:DL1), Debian (gegl and haproxy), Fedora (ffmpeg, firefox, freeipa, python-pip, rust-astral-tokio-tar, sqlite, uv, webkitgtk, and xen), Oracle (idm:DL1, ipa, kernel, perl-JSON-XS, and python3), Red Hat (git), SUSE (curl, frr, jupyter-jupyterlab, and libsuricata8_0_1), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, and linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime).

The Free Software Foundation has announced the selection of Ian Kelling as the organization's president.

Kelling, age forty-three, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors. The board is confident Kelling is the right person to help the organization achieve its long-term goals. His commitment to free software comes from a life of exploring ways to exert user control. He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger."

The GNU Tools Cauldron is almost entirely focused on user-space tools, but kernel developers need a solid toolchain too. In what appears to be a developing tradition (started in 2024), some kernel developers attended the 2025 Cauldron for the second year in a row to discuss their needs with the assembled toolchain developers. Topics covered in this year's gathering include Rust, better BPF type format (BTF) support, SFrame, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.16.10, 6.12.50, 6.6.109, 6.1.155, 5.15.194, 5.10.245, and 5.4.300 stable kernels. All of these kernels have lots of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.