2026-03-31 23:40:56
Discussion of a memory-management patch set intended to clean up a helper function for handling huge pages spiraled into something else entirely after it was posted on March 19. Memory-management maintainer Andrew Morton proposed making changes to the subsystem's review process, to require patch authors to respond to feedback from Sashiko, the recently released LLM-based kernel patch review system. Other sub-maintainers, particularly Lorenzo Stoakes, objected. The resulting discussion about how and when to adopt Sashiko is potentially relevant to many other parts of the kernel.
2026-03-31 21:52:50
In early March, Dylan M. Taylor submitted a pull request to add a field to store a user's birth date in systemd's JSON user records. This was done to allow applications to store the date to facilitate compliance with age-attestation and -verification laws. It was to be expected that some members of the community would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats. Such behavior is not just problematic; it is also deeply misguided given the actual nature of the changes.
2026-03-31 21:26:42
There is a blog post on sockpuppet.org arguing that we are not prepared for the upcoming flood of high-quality, LLM-generated vulnerability reports and exploits.
Now consider the poor open source developers who, for the last 18 months, have complained about a torrent of slop vulnerability reports. I'd had mixed sympathies, but the complaints were at least empirically correct. That could change real fast. The new models find real stuff. Forget the slop; will projects be able to keep up with a steady feed of verified, reproducible, reliably-exploitable sev:hi vulnerabilities? That's what's coming down the pipe.Everything is up in the air. The industry is sold on memory-safe software, but the shift is slow going. We've bought time with sandboxing and attack surface restriction. How well will these countermeasures hold up? A 4 layer system of sandboxes, kernels, hypervisors, and IPC schemes are, to an agent, an iterated version of the same problem. Agents will generate full-chain exploits, and they will do so soon.
Meanwhile, no defense looks flimsier now than closed source code. Reversing was already mostly a speed-bump even for entry-level teams, who lift binaries into IR or decompile them all the way back to source. Agents can do this too, but they can also reason directly from assembly. If you want a problem better suited to LLMs than bug hunting, program translation is a good place to start.
2026-03-31 21:09:56
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, kernel, and kernel-rt), Debian (phpseclib and roundcube), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, freerdp, mingw-expat, musescore, nss, ntpd-rs, perl-YAML-Syck, php-phpseclib3, polkit, pyOpenSSL, python3.12, rust, rust-cargo-rpmstatus, rust-cargo-vendor-filterer, stgit, webkitgtk, and xen), SUSE (dovecot24, ImageMagick, jupyter-nbclassic, kernel, libjxl, libsuricata8_0_4, obs-service-recompress, obs-service-tar_scm, obs-service-set_version, openbao, perl-Crypt-URandom, plexus-utils, python-pyasn1, python-PyJWT, strongswan, traefik, traefik2, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, imagemagick, pillow, pyasn1, pyjwt, and roundcube).
2026-03-31 01:25:40
SystemRescue 13.00 has been released. The SystemRescue distribution is a live boot system-rescue toolkit, based on Arch Linux, for repairing systems in the event of a crash. This release includes the 6.18.20 LTS kernel, updates bcachefs tools and kernel module to 1.37.3, and many upgraded packages. See the step-by-step guide for instructions on performing common operations such as recovering files, creating disk clones, and resetting lost passwords.
2026-03-31 01:12:44
Version 4.0.0 of the Rspamd spam-filtering system has been released. Notable new features include HTML fuzzy phishing detection, support for up to eight flags with fuzzy hashes, and more. See the changelog for more on improvements, breaking changes, and bug fixes.