LWN.net

OpenShot 4.0 released

jzb — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:03:32 +0000

Version 4.0 of the OpenShot video editor has been released.

OpenShot 4.0 has arrived, bringing some of the biggest creative workflow upgrades in our history. You can now record your screen, webcam, microphone, and system audio directly into a project. You can correct and grade footage with color wheels, curves, LUTs, and professional video scopes. You can also isolate subjects with locally run machine learning models and create everything from animated audio visualizations to cinematic film looks.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Netdev 0x1A videos and slides are now live

jzb — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:44:44 +0000

The Netdev 0x1A conference was held in Rome, Italy from July 13 through July 16. Conference organizer Jami Hadi Salim has let us know that the videos and slides for all sessions are now available. Topics include Linux QUIC, shared memory socket transport, eBPF-based DDoS protection, and more.

[$] The rest of the 7.3 merge window

corbet — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:12:19 +0000

By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.3-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release, 15,267 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository. That is the second-highest commit count for an -rc1 release in the kernel's history; only the 6.7-rc1 release, which included nearly 3,000 commits of bcachefs history, had more. About 13,000 of those commits entered the mainline after the first 7.3 merge-window summary was written so, needless to say, there are a lot of changes to cover.

Security updates for Monday

jzb — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:07:18 +0000

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libarchive, libdbi-perl, libnet-dns-perl, librabbitmq, roundcube, starlette, and xrdp), Fedora (bluez, postgresql16-anonymizer, pyOpenSSL, python-cryptography, python-pynitrokey, and rust-h2), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Freenet, and Tor), Mageia (golang and python-nltk), Red Hat (nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, and nodejs:24), SUSE (7zip, apptainer, broot, cadvisor, coredns, coturn, distribution-registry, gh, git-lfs, grafana, gzip, java-25-openjdk, libopenssl-3-devel, libsoup-3_0-0, mozjs102, OpenRGB, openssl-3, openvpn, podman, pyenv, python, python-PyPDF2, python310, python312, python313-Authlib, python36, rekor, rsync, rsyslog, tor, trivy, v2ray-core, vim, wget, and wicked), and Ubuntu (bzip2 and openjdk-26).

Kernel prepatch 7.3-rc1

corbet — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:52:23 +0000

Linus has released 7.3-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. "Nothing really stands out - except for the fact that it's big. It's not the biggest rc1 we've ever had, but it's certainly up there, at least in number of commits." He pulled 15,267 commits during this merge window, making it the second busiest ever; only 6.7 has exceeded it.

Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

corbet — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:58:52 +0000

The results of the Debian general-resolution vote on the use of large language models have been posted; the winner is choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI.

Debian neither endorses nor prohibits the use of generative AI tools in the development, maintenance, or documentation of software, packaging, documentation, and other media published within the Debian Project. We recognize that such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors when used responsibly, allowing volunteers to spend more of their limited time on work that requires technical expertise, judgment, review, and collaboration.
The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian.

Ryabitsev: Creepy crawlies

jzb — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:32:34 +0000

Konstantin Ryabitsev has written a blog post with hard numbers about the impact of AI crawlers on the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org:

Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.

It's impossible to tell with certainty which of these are bots and which are real humans — but chances are, if it's asking for an old commit in a random old fork, it's probably not a real developer trying to do their work.

With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.

Car: Dolphin 26.08 and KIO performance improvements

jzb — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:00:27 +0000

Méven Car has written a pair of interesting blog posts (part 1, part 2). The first post is largely about some of the recent new features and performance work that have gone into the Dolphin file manager 26.08 release, as well as the KIO framework. The second looks at the performance improvements and benchmarks for previous, current, and upcoming releases.

Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would expect: the fix is to the per-file overhead, and once each file carries a megabyte of actual I/O the overhead stops being what you are waiting for.

There is still a gap with cp, discussed at length in the July post. KIO is doing more than cp does, but not five times more, and the batching work that closes most of the rest of that gap is still in progress.

[$] The "rnull" Rust block driver

daroc — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:26:23 +0000

The null block driver (null_blk) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal version of the "rnull" driver is already present in the mainline kernel, but Hindborg's patch set brings it up to feature parity with the C version.

Eight stable kernels with fix for a single vulnerability

jzb — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:42:06 +0000

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.2, 7.1.12, 6.18.48, 6.12.107, 6.6.155, 6.1.186, 5.15.219, and 5.10.268 stable kernels.

Each of these contains a single fix for a vulnerability (CVE-2026-80590) that allows marking IPv4 or IPv6 fragments as GSO, which can allow an unprivileged user to cause a kernel panic. This vulnerability has been present since Linux 2.6.27. Users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates for Friday

jzb — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:16:19 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (assertj-core, golang, httpd, kernel, and libxml2), Debian (chromium and suricata-update), Fedora (rust-h2), Mageia (avahi and python-django), Oracle (kernel and mingw-openssl), SUSE (c-ares-devel, dracut, gh, gstreamer-plugins-bad, java-11-openjdk, liboqs, librest0_7, openssl, openssl-3, pcp, python313-mistune, python36-pip, qt6-svg, rmt-server, rsync, suseconnect-ng, texlive, tor, wicked, and xmlrpc-c), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-azure-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-fips, linux-gke, linux-gcp-fips, opencryptoki, and pam).

[$] Using steal time to moderate CPU demands

corbet — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:11:52 +0000

Virtualization can increase CPU utilization by allowing a large number of virtual CPUs to share a smaller number of physical CPUs. The amount of CPU time that is actually available does not change, though, so heavy activity on too many virtual CPUs can lead to contention and significant performance loss. The steal governor patch series from Shrikanth Hegde is an attempt to address that problem with a mechanism that allows virtual machines to voluntarily reduce the number of virtual CPUs they use when contention is high.

Eight stable kernels for Thursday

jzb — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:10:02 +0000

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.1, 7.1.11, 6.18.47, 6.12.106, 6.6.154, 6.1.185, 5.15.218, and 5.10.267 stable kernels. Each of these has important updates throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates for Thursday

jzb — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:00:18 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (assertj-core, attr, firefox, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, kernel, mingw-openssl, mod_http2, nginx, nginx:1.24, pam, polkit, and sqlite), Debian (bubblewrap, cockpit, emacs, gimp, libdbi-perl, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, wireshark, and xrdp), Fedora (bluez, curl, emacs, golang, knot, libopenmpt, libsoup3, openbao, openssh, rsync, rust-anstyle-hyperlink, rust-anstyle-progress, rust-cargo, rust-cargo-c, rust-cargo-credential-libsecret, rust-cargo-util, rust-cargo-util-schemas, rust-cargo-util-terminal, rust-crates-io, and rust-rustfix), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge. Opera, and OpenRGB), Oracle (abrt, assertj-core, attr, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, nodejs24, and polkit), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, buildah, curl, docker, dracut, evince, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, go1.27, gstreamer-plugins-bad, kernel, kubernetes, kubernetes-old, libarchive, LibVNCServer, libwireshark19, pcp, python310-pip, qemu, rootlesskit, rsync, snpguest, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (bind9, libheif, and openssl, openssl1.0).

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 27, 2026

jzb — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:54:48 +0000

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: AGPL violations; OpenMDW license; quantum computing and encryption; 7.3 merge window; Remind; Quickshell.
Briefs: arrayref; RIP Steve French; Armbian 26.8; Vanilla OS 3; Emacs 31.1; KDE Gear 26.08; LibreOffice 26.8; RPM 6.1.0; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.