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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
664 stories archived
[$] Examining other network namespaces using BPF
Jordan Rife's work involves writing BPF programs for Cilium that interface with Kubernetes networking. As part of that work, he wants to enable BPF programs with appropriate permissions to iterate through the sockets of a different network namespace. He led a session about the idea at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit where the BPF developers in attendance were quick to suggest a number of related alternatives.
Rhythmbox 3.5 lets you sync your podcast listening across apps
Rhythmbox 3.5.0 is out and it now lets you sync podcast subscriptions and listening progress across apps – the standout feature in the music player’s first major release in nine months You're reading Rhythmbox 3.5 lets you sync your podcast listening across apps , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With Flutter Directly Embedded
The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities...
[$] FUSE status and plans
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion about the subsystem at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit . In it, he talked about maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the FUSE community these days it seems.
Nelson: rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy
Jynn Nelson describes the Rust language team's new LLM policy on the Inside Rust blog. No one except the author is required to read LLM output unless they choose to: LLM output isn't allowed in public docs, PR descriptions, or Github comments unless it's clearly marked; reviewers aren't required to look at LLM PRs if they don't want to. No one is required to use LLMs to contribute to rust-lang/rust : policies must be written first for humans, and only summarized for machines; LLM reviews cannot substitute for human review or self-review. You are allowed to generate LLM content that only you see, without disclosure, as long as you do not post it anywhere that you expect us to read or review.
This New Open Source Project Wants to Be the AI-First Alternative to Microsoft Office
Built by a single engineer using open source components, GenOffice bundles editors like Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDF.
Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI "Operating System"
Cloudflare today announced the open-sourcing of Cloudflare OS as an "open platform for agents, apps, and work." Cloudflare OS is an AI "operating system" but not in the traditional OS sense...
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, kernel-rt, p11-kit, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-DBI, and thunderbird), Debian (aom, botan3, and kernel), Fedora (abrt, coreutils, doctl, kernel, open62541, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, and polymake), Mageia (acl and php), Oracle (firefox, frr, kernel, libreswan, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, perl-Archive-Tar, php:7.4, php:8.2, rsync, and thunderbird), Red Hat (compat-libtiff3, libpq, libtiff, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql18, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, and postgresql:18), Slackware (stunnel), and SUSE (alloy, alsa, bind, chromedriver, corepack24, ffmpeg-4, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, kubevirt, libgcrypt, libpng16, multipath-tools, netty, netty-tcnative, nodejs26, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-YAML-Syck, podman, python-sh, python-ujson, rsyslog, spice-vdagent, thrift, valkey, wpa_supplicant, and xen).
Linux To Avoid Confusing Processor Firmware With Newer Intel CPUs Sporting DEC
A patch for the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver is pending to avoid confusing the processor firmware on newer platforms like Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" where Dynamic Efficiency Control (DEC) is supported...
While Torvalds Makes Peace With AI in Linux, Greg Kroah-Hartman Draws a Line (Sort of)
His new policy keeps AI patches out of drivers/staging, the tree meant for newcomers to learn kernel development.
Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents
There continues to be a lout of cleaning up of the kernel source tree to deal with noise generated by AI / LLM coding agents sending in reports and patches for old drivers that are likely not actively used by anyone on modern upstream kernel builds. Rather than continuing to carry these old drivers around with the uptick in AI/LLM-generated noise, kernel maintainers are finding it better to just retire the old drivers...
AMD Preps HDMI FRL Fixes, New Knob For Disabling Older AMD GPU DCE Display Support
Overnight AMD engineers sent out their latest round of AMDGPU DC display code updates for their Linux driver. This week's round of display code updates include some additional fixes for their recently introduced HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support as part of the work toward their HDMI 2.1 implementation finally coming together for their open-source, upstream Linux driver...
FEX 2608 Released With More Fixes For Running x86_64 Binaries On ARM64
FEX 2608 is now available as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source emulator sponsored by Valve for running x86_64 binaries on ARM64, including Steam and Windows games with Steam Play (Proton)...
AMD Posts Proposal & Linux Patches For eSPI Subsystem
AMD has posted patches proposing a new Linux subsystem for the Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI) standard that was in turn originally developed by Intel. With AMD now making use of eSPI, they are proposing a new subsystem for it within the Linux kernel, which includes a new driver for their hardware...
An LLM agent attempts to compromise a project on GitHub
The AI Security Institute has released a detailed report on an security incident of its own making. The Institute set some LLM agents loose on the Internet with a security challenge; soon they were creating malware-laden pull requests and sock-puppet accounts to promote them. The agent opened a malicious pull request (PR) to ⟨REPO_A⟩ and pursued a number of strategies to get it merged: Repeatedly commented on the PR with sockpuppet accounts to manufacture consensus and pressure the maintainer into approving with minimal review. Opened a GitHub Issue in another repository (also owned by ⟨PERSON_A⟩) containing a prompt injection for other coding agents. The malicious instructions were addressed to issue-triage AI coding agents and invisible to humans viewing the website. Sent multiple emails to ⟨PERSON_A⟩ and ⟨PERSON_B⟩, with different pretexts to get them to run malicious code. Over the course of the sample, the agent sent five emails, some containing malware, others aimed at persuading a maintainer to accept the pull request. It would be surprising if this were the only incident of this type; the only real difference here is that the people involved are documenting what happened.
[$] Fedora considers conflict-of-interest policy
The Fedora Council is considering a conflict-of-interest (COI) policy for its decision-making bodies, such as the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), special-interest groups (SIGs), and any other groups or individuals that report to the council and are responsible for decisions that impact the Fedora project. The current draft does not, however, apply to the council itself. The public discussion for the COI policy began on July 23 and seems to be nearing completion, with the council set to discuss the topic again during its meeting on August 13.
Linux's Favorite Music Player Rhythmbox 3.5 Lands After Nearly a Decade in the 3.4 Series
The release also adds lrclib.net, sidecar .lrc files, and embedded Ogg lyrics as new sources.
Paprius icon set gets first update in a over year with 80+ new icons
Fan of the the Papirus icon theme will be pleased to hear there a new update – the first since May 2025. For Papirus’s first update in 2026 (the tardiness of which its maintainer, Serhii Yeremenko, apologises) brings over 80 new icons or updated icons spanning apps, games and user-interface icons, plus new file mimetypes and revised symlinks. Frequent updates are why Papirus icons are popular with Linux users, and have been for such a long time. Often, Linux icon packs debut with a big bang, the momentum fuels a few revisions but then things go quiet as people and maintainers move […] You're reading Paprius icon set gets first update in a over year with 80+ new icons , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Another NPM worm
StepSecurity is reporting the emergence of a new worm affecting NPM packages. The design of the worm is nothing new, but the rapidity with which it is exploiting captured NPM packager credentials is noteworthy. TL;DR: A self-propagating worm, which we are calling ChainDrop, is spreading rapidly through the npm ecosystem. So far 435 packages and more than 1,550 compromised versions have been flagged, starting with keyv@6.0.0. If you are using any of the packages listed below, assume your environment is compromised. We are still investigating the full scope; check back on this post for updates.
AMD openSIL & Coreboot Pull Requests For Phoenix AM5 Support
Last week the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm released the first open-source firmware for a modern AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with their work to port AMD openSIL and Coreboot in their downstream Dasharo flavor to an MSI desktop ATX motherboard. Now that it's working out well, 3mdeb is working to upstream their AM5 platform support and Phoenix SoC support into upstream AMD openSIL as well as Coreboot...
NVIDIA Becomes A Premier Sponsor Of LVFS / Fwupd
Now this is a pleasant and very unexpected surprise... NVIDIA has become the latest premier sponsor of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...
[$] The beginning of a process-builder API
The recent discussion on "spawn templates" raised questions about whether it was time to provide an alternative to the classic Unix fork() / exec() pattern for process creation. One idea that was raised there was to shift the template pattern into an interface that could be used to efficiently assemble new processes from bare cloth, without duplicating the parent process. Preferably, that interface would be able to implement posix_spawn() . Li Chen, the author of the spawn-template work, has now responded with a patch series (written with significant LLM assistance) showing what a process-builder API for Linux might look like.
Linux Foundation Announces Tokenomics Foundation For "Economics & ROI Of AI Value"
Last month the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents as their latest AI play. That followed other "AI" initiatives from dealing with AI exploits to AI asset and data exchange. Today they have another AI foray being announced with the creation of the Tokenomics Foundation...
GNOME Boxes Won't Look Ancient Anymore Thanks to a Glow-Up
A full rewrite moves it to GTK4 and Libadwaita, with Windows 11 support being tidied up.