FSF Patches Two-Year-Old Vulnerability Found by AI Researchers in GNU Savannah Repository
The Free Software Foundation’s GNU Savannah hosts thousands of free software projects — both GNU and non-GNU projects, including Drupal.

But in early May, security researchers from Hacktron.AI reported vulnerabilities and demonstrated an exploit, according to a new statement Friday from the FSF:
… ⌘ Read more

GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal
Following yesterday’s release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

GNU Gets Back Into Nutrition Software After 14 Year Hiatus
For those looking for open-source food nutrition software, GNU’s GNUtrition has seen its first new release in 14 years… ⌘ Read more

Some Elements Of Intel APX Not Proving Beneficial On Nova Lake / Diamond Rapids
Some compiler tuning merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is disabling some features of Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) for upcoming Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids processors as they are not proving worthwhile for performance… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.9 Released With Additional Security Hardening, Zero-Copy I/O
Rust Coreutils 0.9 was tagged today as the latest major update to this GNU Coreutils implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust Coreutils 0.9 is up to a 90.4% pass rate against the GNU test suite!.. ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Produces Faster Binaries Than GCC 15, Competitive Race With LLVM Clang 22
GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Looking To Create New Tool For Generating AutoFDO Profiles For GCC
NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance… ⌘ Read more

GCC 16.1 released
Version\
16.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been
released.

The C++ frontend now defaults to the GNU C++20 dialect and the corresponding
parts of the standard library are no longer experimental. Several
C++26 features receive experimental support, including Reflection
( -freflection), Contracts, expansion statements and std::simd.

Other changes include the introduction of an experimental compiler
frontend for the [Algol … ⌘ Read more

GCC Establishes Working Group To Decide On AI/LLM Policy
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has a working group established by their steering committee to study the use of AI and large language models (LLMs) within the context of GCC compiler development… ⌘ Read more

GnuPG 2.5.19 released
Werner Koch has announced
the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options
and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the
GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon

The main features in the 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows
and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption
algorithm. Other than PQC support the 2.6 series will not differ a lot
from 2.4 because th … ⌘ Read more

GNU Coreutils 9.11 Brings New Performance Improvements: Up To 15x Faster cat
It’s not only the uutil’s Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster… ⌘ Read more

FSF to OnlyOffice: You Can’t Use the GNU (A)GPL to Take Software Freedom Away
Nextcloud joined a project to create a sovereign replacement for Microsoft Office called “Euro-Office”. But after that project forked OnlyOffice, OnlyOffice suspended its partnership with Nextcloud. “They removed all references to our brand/attribute as required by our license,” argued OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov on March 30t … ⌘ Read more

Glibc Lands A Big Optimization For LoongArch CPUs
Loongson’s LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library “glibc” release… ⌘ Read more

FSF clarifies its stance on AGPLv3 additional terms
OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov has recently\
claimed that the Euro-Office fork of the
OnlyOffice suite violates the GNU Affero General Public License
version 3 (AGPLv3). Krzysztof Siewicz of the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) has [published\
an article](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/agpl-is- … ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 7.0 Deals With Deblobbing More Drivers & Cleansing DT Files
Building off last night’s release of the Linux 7.0 kernel is now the GNU Linux-libre 7.0-gnu kernel release for that downstream kernel that removes support for loading non-free-software kernel modules, blocks the loading of loadable microcode/firmware even when it means greatly reduced hardware support, and other sanitization of code in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 9, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: TPM attacks; arithmetic overflow protection; Ubuntu GRUB changes; kernel IPC proposals; fre:ac; Scuttlebutt.

• Briefs: Nix vulnerability; OpenSSH 10.3; Sashiko reviews; FreeBSD testing; Gentoo GNU/Hurd; SFC on router ban; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.8 Brings Significant Performance Gains
Rust Coreutils 0.8 was released today as the newest major release to this alternative to GNU Coreutils… ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Releases Experimental Images Using GNU/Hurd
Following an April Fools’ Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available… ⌘ Read more

GRUB Bootloader Development Moves To FreeDesktop.org
The widely-used GRUB bootloader is now being developed on FreeDesktop.org with a modern GitLab-based workflow… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Lands x86_64 FMA’ed cosh For A ~35% Improvement
A bit of time has passed since having any exciting performance improvements to report on within the GNU C Library “glibc” but that changed today with another nice x86_64 optimization for modern CPUs… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.7 Released With Many Performance Optimizations
Rust Coreutils 0.7 released on Sunday as a performance-focused update to this popular alternative to GNU Coreutils that is still striving for 100% compatibility against the GNU Test Suite… ⌘ Read more

GNU Hurd On Guix Is Ready With 64-bit Support, SMP Multi-Processor Support “Soon”
After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is “almost there” with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline “The 64-bit Hurd is Here!” GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development… ⌘ Read more

GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files
Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Released
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.

In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager a … ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-Libre 6.19 Deals With More Firmware Blobs In Intel Xe, IWLWIFI & NVIDIA Nova
Building off yesterday’s Linux 6.19 release is now the GNU Linux-libre 6.19-gnu downstream release that strips out support for open-source drivers dependent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements deemed against free software standards, removing the ability to load non-open-source kernel modules, and similar restrictions in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

GNU Binutils 2.46 Released With AMD Zen 6 Support, SFrame Version 3
Following last week’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

GNU Nettle 4.0 Released With SLH-DSA Support
The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard… ⌘ Read more

GNU Coreutils 9.10 Released With Many Improvements
Earlier this week Rust Coreutils 0.6 released while out today is GNU Coreutils 9.10 as the de facto standard for this set of core utilities on Linux systems and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.6 Brings Increased Compatibility, Removing Some Unsafe Code & More Perf
Following the Rust Coreutils presentation from FOSDEM this weekend, Rust Coreutils 0.6 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust programming language re-implementation of GNU Coreutils… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year’s talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10’s adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils… ⌘ Read more

GNU Hurd Is “Almost There” With x86_64, SMP & ~75% Of Debian Packages Building
Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year’s was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd… ⌘ Read more

GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30 Years
After more than 30 years of development, GNU gettext finally “crossed the symbolic ‘v1.0’ milestone,” according to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel. “GNU gettext 1.0 brings PO file handling improvements, a new ‘po-fetch’ program to fetch translated PO files from a translation project’s site on the Internet, new ‘msgpre’ and ‘spit’ pre-translation programs, and Ocaml and Rust programming l … ⌘ Read more

GNU gettext Reaches Version 1.0 After 30+ Years In Development - Adds LLM Features
Sun Microsystems began developing gettext in the early 1990s and the GNU Project began GNU gettext development in 1995 for this widely-used internationalization and localization system commonly for multi-lingual integration. While GNU gettext is commonly used by countless open-source projects and adapted for many different programming languages, only an hour ago was GNU gettext 1.0 finally released… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Moving From Sourceware To Linux Foundation Hosted CTI
GNU C Library “glibc” developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure “CTI” project hosted by the Linux Foundation… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library 2.43 Released With More C23 Features, mseal & openat2 Functions
Version 2.43 of the GNU C Library “glibc” was released on Friday evening as the newest half-year feature update. This is a very feature packaged update and even managed to be released ahead of the 1 February release plan… ⌘ Read more

GNU Guix 1.5 Released With RISC-V Support, Experimental x86_64 GNU Hurd Kernel
GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release… ⌘ Read more

CVE-2026-0915: GNU C Library Fixes A Security Issue Present Since 1996
CVE-2026-0915 was published on Friday as a security issue with the GNU C Library “glibc” for code introduced 30 years ago. The latest Glibc Git code is now patched for this issue introduced in 1996… ⌘ Read more

I recently got an email with this byte sequence:

\xf0\x9f\x8e\x81\xf0\x9f\x95\xaf\xef\xb8\x8f

That’s U+1F381, U+1F56F, U+FE0F. The last one is a “variation selector”:

https://unicodeplus.com/U+FE0F

My toolkit renders this incorrectly – and so do tmux and GNU screen.

Unicode ain’t easy. 🥴

GCC 16 Compiler Steps Closer To Release With Algol 68 Frontend, AMD Zen 6, C++20 Default
GCC 16 as this year’s major feature release of the GNU Compiler Collection should be out in the typical March~April timeframe if all goes well. Today the GCC 16 compiler transitioned to its final stage “stage 4” of development with a focus exclusively on documentation and regression fixing… ⌘ Read more

GNU ddrescue 1.30 “Orders of Magnitude” Better In Recovery From Drives With A Dead Head
GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by “orders of magnitude” for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head… ⌘ Read more

GCC & The GNU Toolchain’s Exciting 2025 With New Languages, More Optimizations
The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It’s pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025… ⌘ Read more

the easy solution (using GNU Make) doesn’t play well with pkgsrc

Open Source Initiative Estimates the ‘Top Open Source Licenses in 2025’
The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers “enriched” license pages with “relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support”.

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

mit
(1.5M)
apache-2-0
(344k)
bsd-3-c … ⌘ Read more

GNU Debugger 17.1 Released With CET Shadow Stack Support, New DAP Features
The GNU Debugger “GDB” 17.1 is out today with a number of new features for enhancing the open-source debugging experience… ⌘ Read more

GCC Developers Considering Whether To Accept AI/LLM-Generated Patches
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils 0.5 Released - Inching Toward Full GNU Compatibility
Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to “full GNU compatibility” with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite… ⌘ Read more

System76 Launches First Stable Release of COSMIC Desktop and Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS
This week System76 launched the first stable release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment, reports 9to5Linux.

Announced in 2021, it’s designed for all GNU/Linux distributions — and it shipping with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS (based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS):

Previous Pop!_OS releases used a version of the COSMIC desktop tha … ⌘ Read more

TrixiePup64 11.2 Released For Debian-Based Puppy Linux With Wayland & X11 Options
For those with fond memories of the original Puppy Linux as a lightweight Linux distribution that used to run well back in the day on systems with less than 1GB of RAM, TrixiePup64 is out with a new release of this Puppy Linux based distribution with Debian GNU/Linux components. The new TrixiePup64 11.2 release is based on the latest Debian Trixie sources while continuing to offer separate builds for either X11 or Wayland usage… ⌘ Read more

‘Free Software Awards’ Winners Announced: Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory
This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year’s annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making
“significant” contributions to software freedom):

Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile,
the official extension language of the GNU operating … ⌘ Read more