2025-12-20 02:43:36
The FreeBSD Foundation has a blog post about the progress it has made in 2025 on the Laptop Support & Usability Project for FreeBSD. The foundation committed $750,000 to the project in 2025 and has made progress on graphics drivers, Wi-Fi 4 and 5 support, audio improvements, sleep states, and more.
The installer for FreeBSD has gained a couple of new features that benefit laptop users. In 15.0 the installer now supports downloading and installing firmware packages after the FreeBSD base system installation is complete. Coming in 15.1 it will be possible to install the KDE graphical desktop environment during the installation process. Grateful thanks to Bjoern Zeeb and Alfonso Siciliano respectively. [...]
The project continues into 2026 with a similar sized investment and scope. Key targets include completing work on sleep states (modern standby and hibernate), adding support for graphics drivers up to Linux 6.18, Wi-Fi 6 support, USB4 and Thunderbolt support, HDMI improvements, UVC webcam support, and Bluetooth improvements.
A substantial testing program will also start in January, aiming to test all the functionality together across a range of hardware. Community testers are very welcome to help out, the Foundation will release a blog post and send an invite to help to the Desktop mailing list some time in January 2026.
2025-12-19 23:08:50
The BPF verifier is complicated. It needs to check every possible path that a BPF program's execution could take. The fact that its determination of whether a BPF program is safe is based on the whole lifetime of the program, instead of simple local factors, means that the cause of a verification failure is not always obvious. Ihor Solodrai and Jordan Rome gave a presentation (slides) at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo about the BPF verifier visualizer that they have been building to make diagnosing verification failures easier.
2025-12-19 22:16:56
Security updates have been issued by Debian (roundcube), Fedora (checkpointctl, containernetworking-plugins, mingw-libpng, NetworkManager, php, python3-docs, python3.13, and webkitgtk), Oracle (kernel, keylime, and libssh), and SUSE (apache2, clair, colord, flannel, gnutls, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, grafana, grub2, helm, ImageMagick, libpng16, netty, openssl-3, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, python36, salt, uyuni-tools, and venv-salt-minion).
2025-12-19 00:40:50
Stephen Rothwell, who has maintained the kernel's linux-next integration tree from its inception, has announced his retirement from that role:
I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026. Mark Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge. He has helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so hopefully knows what he is getting in to. I hope you will all treat him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received.It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has been helpful to others. It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's "I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little did I know what I was heading for.
Over the last two decades or so, the kernel's development process has evolved from an unorganized mess with irregular releases to a smooth machine with a new release every nine or ten weeks. That would not have happened without linux-next; thanks are due to Stephen for helping to make the current process possible.
2025-12-18 23:17:22
Linus Torvalds is famously averse to presenting prepared talks, but the wider community is always interested in what he has to say about the condition of the Linux kernel. So, for some time now, his appearances have been in the form of an informal conversation with Dirk Hohndel. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan, the pair followed that tradition for the 29th time. Topics covered include the state of the development process, what Torvalds actually does, and how machine-learning tools might fit into the kernel project.
2025-12-18 22:48:32
Systemd v259 has been released. Notable changes include a new "--empower" option for run0 that provides elevated privileges to a user without switching to root, ability to propagate a user's home directory into a VM with systemd-vmspawn, and more. Support for System V service scripts has been deprecated, and will be removed in v260. See the release notes for other changes, feature removals, and deprecated features.