2026-04-03 23:12:34
GNU GRUB 2, mostly just referred to as GRUB these days, is the most widely used boot loader for x86_64 Linux systems. It supports reading from a vast selection of filesystems, handles booting modern systems with UEFI or legacy systems with a BIOS, and even allows users to customize the "splash" image displayed when a system boots. Alas, all of those features come with a price; GRUB has had a parade of security vulnerabilities over the years. To mitigate some of those problems, Ubuntu core developer and Canonical employee Julian Andres Klode has proposed removing a number of features from GRUB in Ubuntu 26.10 to improve GRUB's security profile. His proposal has not been met with universal acclaim; many of the features Klode would like to remove have vocal proponents.
2026-04-03 22:12:56
On April 1, the Gentoo Linux project published a blog post announcing that it was switching to GNU Hurd as its primary kernel as an April Fool's joke. While that is not true, the project has followed up with an announcement of a new Gentoo port to the Hurd:
Our crack team has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that they've succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage. You can try Gentoo GNU/Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU [...]
We have developed scripts to build this image locally and conveniently work on further development of the Hurd port. Release media like stages and automated image builds are future goals, as is feature parity on x86-64. Further contributions are welcome, encouraged, and needed. Be patient, expect to get your hands dirty, anticipate breakage, and have fun!
Oh, and Gentoo GNU/Hurd also works on real hardware!
Text for the April Fool's post is available at the bottom of the real announcement.
2026-04-03 21:24:27
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, grafana, kernel, rsync, and thunderbird), Debian (chromium, inetutils, and libpng1.6), Fedora (bind9-next, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and openbao), Mageia (firefox, nss and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (conftest, dnsdist, ignition, libsoup, libsoup2, LibVNCServer, libXvnc-devel, opensc, ovmf-202602, perl-Crypt-URandom, python-tornado, python311-ecdsa, python311-Pygments, python315, tar, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (cairo, jpeg-xl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.17, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-raspi-realtime).
2026-04-03 04:21:14
Denver Gingerich of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has published an article on the impact of the ban on the sale of all new home routers not made in the United States issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The SFC, of course, is the organization behind the OpenWrt One router.
Since software updates to already-FCC-approved devices do not require a new FCC approval, it appears the FCC is trying to move beyond its usual authorization procedures to restrict what manufacturers are allowed to push to existing routers. However, the FCC notably does not restrict software changes made by owners of routers in the U.S. In particular, there is no indication that updates people make to their own routers, using software they have sourced themselves, would run afoul of any past or present FCC rule.
As a result, we do not believe that this new FCC decision affects whether and how people can run OpenWrt or other user-selected firmware updates on routers they have already purchased. Not only is this an important right in relation to our ownership and control of our own devices, it also ensures that people can keep their routers secure for far longer than the manufacturer may choose to provide security updates, by allowing them to install up-to-date community software that supports routers for 10, 15, or even more years after their initial release date, as OpenWrt does for many devices.
He also notes that, as the OpenWrt One is already FCC-approved, there should be no impact on its availability in the US. The SFC has asked the FCC for clarification and plans to provide updates when they receive a reply.
2026-04-02 23:07:35
The kernel provides a number of ways for processes to communicate with each other, but they never quite seem to fit the bill for many users. There are currently a few proposals for interprocess communication (IPC) enhancements circulating on the mailing lists. The most straightforward one adds a new system call for POSIX message queues that enables the addition of new features. For those wanting an entirely new way to do interprocess communication, there is a proposal to add a new subsystem for that purpose to io_uring. Finally, the bus1 proposal has made a return after ten years.
2026-04-02 21:27:33
Brian "bex" Exelbierd has published a blog post exploring follow-up questions raised by the recent debate about the use of the LLM-based review tool Sashiko in the memory-management subsystem. His main finding is that Sashiko reviews are bi-modal with regards to whether they contain reports about code not directly changed by the patch set — most do not, but the ones that do often have several such comments.
Hypothesis 1: Reviewers are getting told about bugs they didn't create. Sashiko's review protocol explicitly instructs the LLM to read surrounding code, not just the diff. That's good review practice — but it means the tool might flag pre-existing bugs in code the patch author merely touched, putting those problems in their inbox.
Hypothesis 2: The same pre-existing bugs surface repeatedly. If a known issue in a subsystem doesn't get fixed between review runs, every patch touching nearby code could trigger the same finding. That would create a steady drip of duplicate noise across the mailing list.
I pulled data from Sashiko's public API and tested both.