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Version 1.88.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the ability to chain let expressions, "naked" functions that have no compiler-generated prologue or epilogue, automatic garbage collection in cargo, a set of stabilized APIs, and more.

Version 10 of the Oracle Linux distribution has been released.

Oracle Linux 10 is now generally available for 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. Oracle Linux 10 delivers robust security and exceptional performance for business agility and demanding workloads at cloud scale. Key features include modernized cryptographic capabilities, advancements in developer tooling, and innovations for resilient infrastructure.

Over on the Collabora blog, Tathagata Roy has an update on the progress of targeting the Coccinelle tool for matching and transforming source code to Rust. The Coccinelle for Rust project, which we covered in a 2024 talk by Roy at Kangrejos, is adding the ability to transform Rust programs and the goal is "to bring Coccinelle For Rust at par with Coccinelle For C in terms of basic functionalities". There is still work to be done to get there, but progress is being made in various areas. Computational Tree Logic (CTL) is the heart of Coccinelle, which takes semantic patches and generalizes them over Rust files. Prior to using this engine, CfR used an ad-hoc method for matching patterns of code. This engine is the same as the one used for Coccinelle for C, with a few minor changes. Most of the changes were idiomatic but to the same effect. More information on the engine and its language (CTL-VW) can be found in the POPL Paper. With a standard engine, each step of the matching process can be logged, allowing us to learn and reuse the same design patterns from Coccinelle for C, including critical test cases.

Kernel development and machine learning seem like vastly different areas of endeavor; there are not, yet, stories circulating about the vibe-coding of new memory-management algorithms. There may well be places where machine learning (and large language models — LLMs — in particular) prove to be helpful on the edges of the kernel project, though. At the 2025 North-American edition of the Open Source Summit, Sasha Levin presented some of the work he has done putting LLMs to work to make the kernel better

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and libxml2), Fedora (firefox, libtpms, and tigervnc), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and nss & firefox), Oracle (emacs, iputils, kernel, krb5, libarchive, mod_proxy_cluster, pam, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, and qt5-qtbase), Red Hat (opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, and weldr-client), SUSE (clamav, firefox, go1.24-openssl, and helm), and Ubuntu (libarchive, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and python-urllib3).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Libxml2; GNOME and systemd; Rust in the kernel; Defconfigs; ngnfs, Free-threaded Python; Asterinas.
• Briefs: LSFMM+BPF book; tag2upload; PostmarketOS 25.06; Firefox 140.0; NLnet funding; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The NLnet Foundation has announced a new group of projects receiving funding through the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.

Free and open source technologies, open standards, open hardware and open data help to strengthen the open web and the open internet. The projects selected by NLnet all contribute in their own way to this important goal, and will empower end users and the community at large on different layers of the stack. For example, there are people working a browser controlled ad hoc cellular network (Wsdr) which can be used to create small mobile networks where they are needed. The open hardware security key Nitrokey is aiming for formal certification of their implementation of the FIDO2 standard, and will be adding encrypted storage capabilities. There are also more applied technologies: the high end open hardware microscope OpenFlexure will enable among others e-health use cases such as telepathology, allowing medical professionals to work together to help people in more remote areas.

See the announcement for the full list of selected projects and the current projects page for other projects recently funded by NLnet.

Libxml2, an XML parser and toolkit, is an almost perfect example of the successes and failures of the open-source movement. In the 25 years since its first release, it has been widely adopted by open-source projects, for use in commercial software, and for government use. It also illustrates that while many organizations love using open-source software, far fewer have yet to see value in helping to sustain it. That has led libxml2's current maintainer to reject security embargoes and sparked a discussion about maintenance terms for free and open-source projects.

One of the biggest changes to come to the Python world is the addition of the free-threading interpreter, which eliminates the global interpreter lock (GIL) that kept the interpreter thread-safe, but also serialized multi-threaded Python code. Over the years, the GIL has been a source of complaints about the scalability of Python code using threads, so many developers have been looking forward to the change, which has been an experimental feature since Python 3.13 was released in October 2024. Making the free-threaded version work with the rest of the Python ecosystem, especially native extensions, is an ongoing effort, however; Nathan Goldbaum and Lysandros Nikolaou spoke at PyCon US 2025 about those efforts.

It took time and the writing of over 60 articles, but LWN's coverage from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit is now complete. We have also made an EPUB book (13MB) containing the full set of coverage available to all readers. This coverage constitutes the definitive guide to the challenges that these core-kernel communities are facing and their development plans for the coming year.

Documenting an event of this intensity at such a detailed level is not a small undertaking. We are grateful to the Linux Foundation for funding our travel to our event and, especially, to LWN's subscribers for making the whole thing possible. If you appreciate this type of coverage and have not yet subscribed, please sign up today to help make more of it possible.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (commons-beanutils, dcmtk, nginx, trafficserver, and xorg-server), Fedora (atuin, awatcher, dotnet8.0, firefox, glibc, gotify-desktop, keylime-agent-rust, libtpms, mirrorlist-server, qt6-qtbase, qt6-qtimageformats, udisks2, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (apache-mod_security, clamav, docker, python-django, tomcat, udisks2, and yarnpkg), Oracle (firefox, libblockdev, mod_auth_openidc, perl-FCGI, perl-YAML-LibYAML, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (libssh and mozilla), SUSE (gimp, gstreamer-plugins-good, icu, ignition, kernel, pam-config, perl-File-Find-Rule, python311, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux, linux-gcp, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fips, and linux-realtime).

Version 140.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include more control over vertical tabs, a dialog to add custom search engines, improvements to translation performance, and more.

Working on the kernel can be a challenging task but, for many, configuring a kernel build can be the largest obstacle to getting started. The kernel has thousands of configuration options; many of those, if set incorrectly, will result in a kernel that does not work on the target system. The key to helping users with complex configuration problems is to provide reasonable defaults but, in the kernel community, there is currently little consensus around what those defaults should be.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dns-root-data and xorg-server), Fedora (glibc, mingw-glib2, and optipng), Red Hat (iputils, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libarchive, mod_auth_openidc, mod_proxy_cluster, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (python313), and Ubuntu (fig2dev, gnuplot, gss-ntlmssp, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.15, and linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime).

KDE contributor Nate Graham recently wrote about the KDE Project's plans for Plasma's X11 session. He notes that the project will continue to ensure that Plasma "continues to compile and deploy on X11" and isn't horribly broken. Major regressions will probably be fixed, eventually, but the writing is on the wall:

X11's upstream development has dropped off significantly in recent years, and X11 isn't able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to HDR, 10 bits-per-color monitors, other fancy monitor features, multi-monitor setups (especially with mixed DPIs or refresh rates), multi-GPU setups, screen tearing, security, crash robustness, input handling, and more.

As for when Plasma will drop support for X11? There's currently no firm timeline for this, and I certainly don't expect it to happen in the next year, or even the next two years. But that's just a guess; it depends on how quickly we implement everything on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues. Our plan is to handle everything on that page such that even the most hardcore X11 user doesn't notice anything missing when they move to Wayland.

The postmarketOS project, which creates a Linux distribution for mobile devices, announced it was working on adding a version with systemd last March. That day has arrived with the announcement of version 25.06:

We considered supporting an upgrade from OpenRC to systemd in our upgrade script, but then decided against it as such an upgrade path might introduce its own bugs and we would rather spend the time improving other parts of postmarketOS. So for this one-time scenario we ask you to please reinstall postmarketOS to get from OpenRC to systemd. Thank you for your understanding!

Adrian Vovk, a GNOME contributor and member of its release team, recently announced in a blog post that GNOME would be adding new dependencies on systemd, and soon. The idea is to shed GNOME's homegrown service manager in favor of using systemd, and to improve GNOME's ability to run concurrent user sessions. However, the move is also going to throw a spanner in the works for the BSDs and Linux distributions without systemd when the changes take effect in the GNOME 49 release that is set for September.

The Collabora blog has a summary, written by Nicolas Dufresne, about the Linux Media Summit held on May 13 in Nice, France. It was co-located with the Embedded Recipes conference and had sessions on stateless video encoders, camera support, staging drivers, memory accounting, and a multi-committer model for the media subsystem. "Our largest Media Summit to date brought together around 20 engaged participants. Engagement was strong, marked by thoughtful questions and lively discussions."

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libblockdev and open-vm-tools), Debian (debian-security-support, gdk-pixbuf, konsole, and node-send), Fedora (apache-commons-beanutils, chromium, clamav, dotnet9.0, libblockdev, mediawiki, mingw-python-setuptools, pam, perl-File-Find-Rule, python-pycares, python-setuptools, spdlog, udisks2, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Oracle (apache-commons-beanutils, container-tools:ol8, gimp:2.8, idm:DL1, perl-FCGI:0.78, and postgresql), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, delve, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, and spice-client-win), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, apache2-mod_security2, distribution, gstreamer-plugins-good, icu, ignition, perl, python310, python311, python312, and python39), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j1.2 and botan).

Linus has released 6.16-rc3 for testing. "So rc2 was smaller than usual, but rc3 seems to be right in the usual ballpark for this time, so everything looks entirely normal."