2026-05-15 03:02:35
The kernel's control-group subsystem works well for resource management, Chris Li said at the beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Control groups work less well for other use cases, though. He was there to present his proposed enhancement, called "policy groups", that would address some of the shortcomings that he has encountered. A consensus on how this feature should look still seems distant, though.
2026-05-14 22:54:26
In back-to-back sessions at the start of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (which spilled over into a third slot), the atomic-buffered-writes feature was discussed. In the first session, Pankaj Raghav and Andres Freund set the stage with an introduction to the problem, along with a use case for its solution: the PostgreSQL database system. In the second, Ojaswin Mujoo described a potential way forward for the feature using an approach based on writethrough, which effectively means that the kernel immediately writes the data to disk instead of waiting for writeback from the page cache to occur. As might be expected, there was quite a bit of discussion among the assembled filesystems and storage developers during the combined sessions for those tracks.
2026-05-14 22:44:32
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 stable kernels. These kernels do not include a patch for the Fragnesia local-privilege-escalation exploit that came to light on May 13, but do include many other important fixes throughout the tree. Users are, as always, advised to upgrade.
2026-05-14 21:14:30
The kernel's reverse-mapping machinery is charged with locating the
page-table entries that refer to a given page in memory. The reverse
mapping of anonymous pages is handled differently than for file-backed
pages. The kernel's implementation of reverse mapping for anonymous pages
is, according to Lorenzo Stoakes in his proposal
for a memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, "a very broken
abstraction
", due to its complexity. It also has some performance
problems. Stoakes was there to present, in raw form, a proposed
replacement that he calls a "COW context".
2026-05-14 21:09:38
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, jq, and yggdrasil), Debian (nghttp2 and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, freerdp, GitPython, kernel, kernel-headers, krb5, nano, nix, nodejs20, php, python-click, python-django5, SDL2_image, and xen), Mageia (dnsmasq, flatpak, kernel, kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, perl-XML-LibXML, and redis), SUSE (dnsmasq, firefox, jupyter-jupyterlab, kernel, krb5, libvinylapi3, log4j, Mesa, mozjs60, NetworkManager, OpenImageIO, python-Mako, python-Pillow, and python39), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq and nginx).
2026-05-14 09:04:18
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: