Major Homebuilder To Test Placing Mini Data Centers in Suburban Backyards
NewtonsLaw writes: According to Realtor.com, a California startup called Span plans to partner with Nvidia, PulteGroup, and other homebuilders to equip new homes with mini-data centers, so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger traditional centers. The article states the company “can install 8,000 XFRA units ab … ⌘ Read more
Three stable kernel updates
The
7.0.4,
6.18.27, and
6.12.86
stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important
fixes. ⌘ Read more
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 7, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: LLMs and security; restartable sequences and TCMalloc; Fedora and GNOME bug reports; Prolly trees; Arm on s390.
Briefs: NHS open source; Alpine outage; GCC 16.1; Incus 7.0 LTS; NetHack 5.0.0; PHP license; Quotes; …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more
Zuckerberg ‘Personally Authorized and Encouraged’ Meta’s Copyright Infringement
Five major publishers and author Scott Turow have sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged” massive copyright infringement by using pirated books, journal articles, and web-scraped material to train Meta’s Llama AI systems. Meta denies wrongdoing and says it w … ⌘ Read more
[$] LLM-driven security reports disrupt coordinated disclosure
Predictions that LLM tools would cause a surge in reports of security vulnerabilities
have, unquestionably, borne out. As expected, maintainers are having to wade
through more security reports than ever before; in addition, LLM tools are
disrupting traditional-coordinated disclosure practices as well. The method of Copy Fail’s disclosure, in particular, left
vendors, projects, and users scrambling. In addition, maintainers are seeing
parallel discove … ⌘ Read more
Incus 7.0 LTS released
Version\
7.0 of the Incus container and
virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this
release include the inclusion of a low-level backup API, the addition\
of basic S3 operations directly in Incus to replace the now-unmaintained
MinIO project, as well as the removal of support … ⌘ Read more
Distributions quote of the week
2,442 days is a fair amount of time, and that’s how long I had been
on the openSUSE Board as its chair when I started this note.That journey began on August 19th, 2019, and it ends today as I am
stepping down as chair of the openSUSE Board.It’s been an intense time for most of it — just a bit calm the last
year and a half. A time of joy and frustration, anger occasionally
and rewarding more often than that.During those years we have seen SUSE and openSUSE carve out from Micro
… ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, dovecot, image-builder, python-tornado, resource-agents, and systemd), Debian (openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and pyjwt), Fedora (pdns, pyOpenSSL, and squid), Slackware (hunspell), SUSE (alloy, avahi, bubblewrap, cmctl, coredns, curl, dpkg, firefox, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, libpng12, PackageKit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (docker.io-app, nghttp2, python-django, and python-mako). ⌘ Read more
[$] Hardware-assisted Arm VMs for s390
A recent
patch set from Steffen Eiden and others has set the groundwork for allowing
hardware-assisted emulation of Arm CPUs on s390 CPUs.
Version two of the posting fixes a handful of smaller problems, but does not
differ much.
The patches were welcomed
by the Arm maintainers, pending some discussion of how the collaboration between the
architectures … ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libcap, LibRaw, openssh, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (libarchive and lxd), Fedora (chromium, insight, nodejs20, rust-sequoia-git, and uriparser), Mageia (kernel, kmod-virtualbox), Oracle (kernel, libcap, thunderbird, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, sudo, and systemd), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (freerdp, hauler, helm, himmelblau, kernel, libspectre, thunderbird, tri … ⌘ Read more
The retirement of the PHP license
The PHP project has long shipped under its own license — except for
the parts under the Zend Engine License. The PHP project has now announced
that the PHP license has been retired, and the PHP code has been relicensed
under the three-clause BSD license. See this\
blog entry for more details.
Getting here required more than [writing an\ > RFC](https://wiki … ⌘ Read more
Alpine Linux systems currently offline
The Alpine Linux account on fosstodon.org reports
that all systems hosted at Linode, including its GitLab instance,
“are suspended at the moment due to some billing issue”. They
are working to get it resolved, but in the meantime all of their
services appear to be down. ⌘ Read more
[$] Bug-monitoring expectations and Fedora GNOME packages
For a number of years, users submitting bugs reports against GNOME packages in Fedora have
received an auto-reply saying that the reports were not actively
monitored; users were encouraged to file bugs with GNOME upstream instead. However,
that practice seems to be in conflict with the Fedora Engineering Steering\
Committee (FESCo) [policy](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Package_maintainer_responsibilities/#_deal_with_ … ⌘ Read more
NetHack 5.0.0 released
Version 5.0.0
of the NetHack
dungeon-exploration game, a distant relative of Rogue and
Hack, has been released. NetHack’s code is now compliant with the
C99 standard, and the release includes more than 3,100
bug fixes and changes, detailed in doc/fixes5-0-0.txt
… ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, libcap, libtiff, sudo, and thunderbird), Debian (dovecot, imagemagick, incus, kernel, libexif, linux-6.1, openjdk-25, pyasn1, python-aiohttp, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, GitPython, glibc, insight, krb5, nano, nss, openssh, openvpn, perl-CryptX, python3.14, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, rust-sequoia-git, and xen), Oracle (dtrace, fence-agents, grafana-pcp, libcap, libtiff, sudo, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), **Red Ha … ⌘ Read more
Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc2
The second 7.1 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “It’s not small, and while it’s a bit early to say for sure, I
do suspect we’re seeing the same continued pattern of more patches than
usual - probably due to AI tooling - that we saw in 7.0.” ⌘ Read more
South Africa’s Draft AI Policy Withdrawn Due to ‘Fictitious’ AI-Generated Citations
An official in South Africa withdrew a draft of the country’s national AI policy, reports a local newspaper, “after it was found the draft policy was compiled using AI, which cited academic articles that were ‘fictitious’.”
Earlier this month, minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced cabinet had … ⌘ Read more
Chinese Exports of Green Technologies Surged to Record Levels After Iran War Began
“The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel,” CNN reported this week. And many of those countries now want renewable fuels, the article points out, “leaving them turning to the renewables king of the planet: China.”
Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicle … ⌘ Read more
Faillite de Gibert : échec de la lutte contre le numérique et le gratuit
Un article de Henry Bonner Le groupe Gibert, spécialisé dans les librairies, s’est placé dans une procédure de sauvegarde en raison de baisses de résultats et la nécessité de fermetures de magasins et ainsi des réductions d’effectifs. Le Monde explique ainsi : “Le groupe Gibert, qui se revendique premier libraire indépendant de France, va demander son […] ⌘ Read more
Eden: NHS goes to war against open source
Terence Eden reports
that the UK’s National\
Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a
response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic’s Mythos, becoming more
sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put
it mildly, agree with the decision:
The majority of [code repos … ⌘ Read more
[$] Version-controlled databases using Prolly trees
Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of
B-trees, which are tree
structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block
devices.
Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a
variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database.
The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects. ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents), Debian (chromium, dovecot, and kernel), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, emacs, glow, jfrog-cli, openbao, pyp2spec, python3.6, rust-rustls-webpki, vhs, and xen), Oracle (grafana, grafana-pcp, PackageKit, sudo, vim, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (rhc), SUSE (avahi, bouncycastle, chromium, container-suseconnect, firewalld, gdk-pixbuf, grafana, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libixml11, libmozjs-140-0, libpng12- … ⌘ Read more
[$] Restartable sequences, TCMalloc, and Hyrum’s Law
Hyrum’s Law states that any
observable behavior of a system will eventually be depended upon by
somebody. The kernel community is currently contending with a clear
demonstration of that principle. The recent work to address some restartable-sequences\
performance problems in the 6.19 release maintained the documented API
in all respects, but that was not enough; Google’s [TCMalloc](https://google.github.io/tcmalloc/ … ⌘ 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 andstd::simd.
Other changes include the introduction of an experimental compiler
frontend for the [Algol … ⌘ Read more
Seven new stable kernels for Thursday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.0.3, 6.18.26, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254 stable kernels. The 7.0.3 and
6.18.26 kernels only contain fixes needed for Xen users; he advises
that all users of the other kernel series … ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequo … ⌘ Read more
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 30, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Famfs; Python packaging council; Zig concurrency; pages and folios; Strawberry music manager; 7.1 merge window.
Briefs: GnuPG 2.5.19; Copy Fail; Plasma security; Fedora 44; Ubuntu 26.04; Niri 26.04; pip 26.1; RIP Seth Nickell; RIP Tomáš Kalibera; Quotes; …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patc … ⌘ Read more
A security bug in AEAD sockets
Security analysis firm Xint has disclosed a security bug in the Linux kernel
that allows for arbitrary 4-byte writes to the page cache, and which has been
present since 2017.
The vulnerability has
been fixed in mainline kernels. A proof-of-concept script demons … ⌘ Read more
[$] Python packaging council approved
The Python packaging world now has a formal
governance council, of the form described in PEP 772 (“Packaging
Council governance process”), which was approved\
by the steering council on April 16. It has been over a year
since the PEP was first proposed in February 2025 and it has undergone
lengthy discussions in multiple postings … ⌘ Read more
Security review of Plasma Login Manager (SUSE Security Team Blog)
SUSE’s Security Team has published a detailed\
blog post on their recent review of the Plasma\
Login Manager version 6.6.2,
which was forked from the SDDM display\
manager.
While most of the code [remains t … ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-17-openjdk, libxml2, python3, python3.11, python3.12, sudo, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (dnsdist, node-tar, pdns, pdns-recursor, and policykit-1), Fedora (chromium, edk2, and vim), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, go-toolset:rhel8, libpng12, LibRaw, libxml2, python, python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.12-wheel, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-mana … ⌘ Read more
Remembering Seth Nickell
LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on
April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:
Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his
roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of
a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard
drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird “Linux” thing.
And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open
source and Linus Tor … ⌘ Read more
Fedora Linux 44 has been released
The Fedora Project has announced
the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are “what’s new”
articles for Fedora\
Workstation, Fedora\
KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora\
Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs,
ba … ⌘ Read more
[$] Strawberry is ripe for managing music collections
There are dozens of music-player applications for Linux; the options range
from bare-bones programs that only play local files to full-blown
music-management projects with a full suite of tools for managing (and playing)
a music collection. Strawberry
is in the latter category; it has a bumper crop of features, including smart
playlists, support for editing music metadata tags, the ability to organize music
files, and more. ⌘ Read more
In Memoriam: Tomáš Kalibera
We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the
R Project core team, has
passed away\
after a short illness.
A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and
his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can
say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it
reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.
Kalibera was mentioned in … ⌘ Read more
All FOSDEM 2026 videos are online
FOSDEM’s organizers have announced
that all of the video recordings “worth publishing” from FOSDEM 2026 are now available.
Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and
the full\ > schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at
video.fosdem.org/2026.
LWN’s [coverage](https://lwn.net/Arc … ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-21 and webkit2gtk), Fedora (botan3, chromium, cockpit, firefox, flatpak, gum, libarchive, libcoap, mingw-python3, ngtcp2, nss, openssh, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, python3-docs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, vim, and xrdp), Oracle (firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, and tigervnc), Red Hat (tigervnc and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (mpg123 and proftpd), * … ⌘ Read more
Elon Musk Boosts New Yorker’s Sam Altman Exposé on X as Trial Begins
The move comes as the trial for Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI kicks off in federal court in Oakland. ⌘ Read more
pip 26.1 released
Version 26.1 of
the pip package installer for Python has been released. Richard Si
has published a blog\
post that looks at some of the highlights of 26.1 including
dependency cooldowns, experimental support for pylock ( pylock.toml)
files, and [resolver\
improvements](https://ichard26.github.io/blog/2026/04/whats-new-i … ⌘ Read more
[$] The rest of the 7.1 merge window
By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.1-rc1
and closed the 7.1 merge window, 12,996 non-merge changesets had been
pulled into the mainline repository; just over 9,000 of those arrived after
the first-half summary was written. These
changes were more driver-oriented than those seen earlier, but still also
included many new features across the kernel as a whole. ⌘ Read more
Four new stable kernels for Monday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each
contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade. ⌘ Read more
pgBackRest is no longer maintained
David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, has archived\
the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did
not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for
the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship f … ⌘ Read more
[$] Zig explores structured concurrency
Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was
recently announced, and with
it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we
covered in December.
The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing
correct concurrent applications easier. Zig’s implementation of
the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could
offer an oppor … ⌘ Read more
The future of AI in Ubuntu
Jon Seager, VP engineering for Canonical, has posted
an update on “what Canonical and Ubuntu will do (or not) to
incorporate AI” that explains what part AI will play in the future
of the company and its distribution.
The bottom line is that Canonical is ramping up its use of AI tools
in a focused and principled manner that favours open weight models
with license terms that feel most compatible with our values, combined
with open sou … ⌘ Read more
Niri 26.04 released
Version 26.04
of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. The most
notable change in this release, as the “most requested niri feature by far”,
is support for the blur effect using the Wayland protocol’s ext-background-effect. This
release also features optional configuration\
includes, screencasting support enhanc … ⌘ Read more
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-25-openjdk, kernel, osbuild-composer, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Debian (chromium, distro-info-data, libde265, mbedtls, and thunderbird), Fedora (awstats, bind9-next, bpfman, buildah, calibre, cef, chromium, composer, corosync, coturn, cups, curl, dnsdist, doctl, erlang, fido-device-onboard, flatpak-builder, freetype, glab, goose, jq, kea, libarchive, libcap, libcgif, libgsasl, libinput, libmicrohttpd, libpng, libpng12, libpng1 … ⌘ Read more
Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc1
Linus has released 7.1-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.
Things look fairly normal, although we do have a few different
projects to cull some old hardware support to help minimize
maintenance burden: phasing out i486 support (configs deleted, code
deletions to follow) and independently starting to remove some
really old networking hardware support, and removing some SoC
support that never went anywhere.But we’re more than making up for … ⌘ Read more
Bitwarden CLI Is the Next Compromise In Checkmarx Supply Chain Campaign
Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes: Socket Security published an article on the compromise of the Bitwarden CLI client, which was pushed from Bitwarden’s client repository. This breach was the next in a chain of supply-chain attacks that have affected Checkmarx KICS and Aqua Security’s Trivy scanners.
The breach was quickly dete … ⌘ 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
[$] On pages and folios
The kernel coverage here at LWN often touches on memory-management topics
and, as a result, tends to talk a lot about both pages and folios. As the
folio transition in the kernel has moved forward, it has often become
difficult to decide which term to use in writing that is meant to be both
approachable and technically correct. As this work continues, it will be
increasingly common to use “folio” rather than page. This article is
intended to be a convenient reference for readers wanting to differentiate
the tw … ⌘ Read more