[Development] Posted Feb 20, 2026 14:32 UTC (Fri) by daroc

The closed-source chat platform Discord announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their ages in order to access some content — although the company quickly added that the "vast majority" of users would not have to. That reassurance has to contend with the fact that the UK and other countries are implementing increasingly strict age requirements for social media. Discord's age verification would be done with an AI age-judging model or with a government photo ID. A surprising number of open-source projects use Discord for support or project communications, and some of those projects are now looking for open-source alternatives. Mastodon, for example, has moved discussion to Zulip. There are some alternatives out there, all with their own pros and cons, that communities may want to consider if they want to switch away from Discord.

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[Kernel] Posted Feb 19, 2026 15:20 UTC (Thu) by corbet

The kernel's unloved but performance-critical swapping subsystem has been undergoing multiple rounds of improvement in recent times. Recent articles have described the addition of the swap table as a new way of representing the state of the swap cache, and the removal of the swap map as the way of tracking swap space. Work in this area is not done, though; this series from Nhat Pham addresses a number of swap-related problems by replacing the new swap table structures with a single, virtual swap space.

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[Kernel] Posted Feb 18, 2026 15:38 UTC (Wed) by corbet

The "More Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification" (AccECN) mechanism is defined by this RFC draft. The Linux kernel has been gaining support for AccECN with TCP over the last few releases; the 7.0 release will enable it by default for general use. AccECN is a subtle change to how TCP works, but it has the potential to improve how traffic flows over both public and private networks.

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[Development] Posted Feb 17, 2026 15:22 UTC (Tue) by jzb

Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have been rapidly pervading all aspects of open-source development. Many developers are embracing LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pull requests, as well as fabricated bug and security reports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks that effectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming an open-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemed a bit too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happened recently after a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.

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[Security] Posted Feb 16, 2026 19:13 UTC (Mon) by jzb

The curl project has found AI-powered tools to be a mixed bag when it comes to security reports. At FOSDEM 2026, curl creator and lead developer Daniel Stenberg used his keynote session to discuss his experience receiving a slew of low-quality reports and, at the same time, realizing that large language model (LLM) tools can sometimes find flaws that other tools have missed.

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[Development] Posted Feb 16, 2026 14:32 UTC (Mon) by jake

At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo, Stephen Brennan gave a presentation on the debuginfo format, which contains the symbols and other information needed for debugging, along with some alternatives. Debuginfo files are large and, he believes, are a bit scary to customers because of the "debug" in their name. By rethinking debuginfo and the tools that use it, he hopes that free-software developers "can add new, interesting capabilities to tools that we are already using or build new interesting tools".

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[Kernel] Posted Feb 13, 2026 15:32 UTC (Fri) by daroc

The merge window for Linux 7.0 has opened, and with it comes a number of interesting improvements and enhancements. At the time of writing, there have been 7,695 non-merge commits accepted. The 7.0 release is not special, according to the kernel's versioning scheme — just the release that comes after 6.19. Humans love symbolism and round numbers, though, so it may feel like something of a milestone.

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[Development] Posted Feb 13, 2026 15:17 UTC (Fri) by joabj

At FOSDEM 2026 Petya Kangalova, a senior tech partnership and engagement manager for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) spoke about how the project helps people map their surroundings to assist in disaster response and humanitarian aid. The project has developed a stack of technology to help volunteers collectively map an area and add in local knowledge metadata. "One of the core things that we believe is that when we speak about disaster response or people having access to data is that they really need accessible technology that's free and open for anyone to use."

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[Development] Posted Feb 12, 2026 16:55 UTC (Thu) by daroc

Web sites are being increasingly beset by AI scraperbots — a problem that we have written about before, and which has slowly ramped up to an occasional de-facto DDoS attack. This has not gone uncontested, however: web site operators from around the world have been working on inventive countermeasures. These solutions target the problem posed by scraperbots in different ways; iocaine, a MIT-licensed nonsense generator, is designed to make scraped text less useful by poisoning it with fake data. The hope is to make running scraperbots not economically viable, and thereby address the problem at its root instead of playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.

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[Development] Posted Feb 20, 2026 14:26 UTC (Fri) by jzb

Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar and alarm program Remind, has announced the release of The Book of Remind. As the name suggests, it is a step-by-step guide to learning how to use Remind, and a useful supplement to the extensive remind(1) man page. The book is free to download.

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[Security] Posted Feb 20, 2026 14:04 UTC (Fri) by jzb

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (gegl, inetutils, libvpx, nova, and python-django), Fedora (azure-cli, chromium, microcode_ctl, python-azure-core, python3.14, and roundcubemail), Red Hat (grafana and osbuild-composer), SUSE (apptainer, dnsdist, istioctl, libsoup, openCryptoki, python-nltk, python311, python313, rclone, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libvpx, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, and linux-intel-iotg).

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[Distributions] Posted Feb 19, 2026 14:46 UTC (Thu) by jzb

Douglas DeMaio has announced that Jeff Mahoney's new governance proposal for openSUSE, which was published in January, is moving forward. The new structure would have three governance bodies: a new technical steering committee (TSC), a community and marketing committee (CMC), as well as the existing openSUSE board.

The discussions during the meeting proposed that the Technical Steering Committee should begin with five members with a chair elected by the committee. The group would establish clear processes for reviewing and approving technical changes, drawing inspiration from Fedora's FESCo model. Decisions for the TSC would use a voting system of +1 to approve, 0 for neutral, or -1 to block. A proposal passes without objection. A -1 vote would require a dedicated meeting, where a majority of attendees would decide the outcome. Objections must include a clear, documented rationale.

Discussions related to the Community and Marketing Committee would focus on outreach, advocacy, and community growth. It could also serve as an initial escalation point for disputes. If consensus cannot be reached at that level, matters would advance to the Board.

[...] No timeline for final adoption was announced. Project contributors will continue discussions through the GitLab repository and future community meetings.

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[Security] Posted Feb 19, 2026 14:11 UTC (Thu) by jzb

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (edk2, glibc, gnupg2, golang, grafana, nodejs:24, and php), Debian (gimp and kernel), Fedora (fvwm3), Mageia (microcode and vim), Oracle (edk2, glibc, kernel, nodejs:24, and php), Red Hat (python-s3transfer), SUSE (abseil-cpp, avahi, azure-cli-core, fontforge, go1.24, go1.25, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, libpcap, libsoup2, libxml2-16, mupdf, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openjpeg2, patch, python-aiohttp, python-Brotli, python-pip, python311-asgiref, rust1.93, and traefik), and Ubuntu (inetutils, libssh, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, and trafficserver).

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[Distributions] Posted Feb 18, 2026 15:11 UTC (Wed) by jzb

Justin Wheeler writes in Fedora Magazine that Fedora is now available in Syria once again:

Last week, the Fedora Infrastructure Team lifted the IP range block on IP addresses in Syria. This action restores download access to Fedora Linux deliverables, such as ISOs. It also restores access from Syria to Fedora Linux RPM repositories, the Fedora Account System, and Fedora build systems. Users can now access the various applications and services that make up the Fedora Project. This change follows a recent update to the Fedora Export Control Policy. Today, anyone connecting to the public Internet from Syria should once again be able to access Fedora.

[...] Opening the firewall to Syria took seconds. However, months of conversations and hidden work occurred behind the scenes to make this happen.

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[Distributions] Posted Feb 18, 2026 14:39 UTC (Wed) by corbet

The Asahi Linux project, which is working to implement support for Linux on Apple CPUs, has published a detailed 6.19 progress report.

We've made incredible progress upstreaming patches over the past 12 months. Our patch set has shrunk from 1232 patches with 6.13.8, to 858 as of 6.18.8. Our total delta in terms of lines of code has also shrunk, from 95,000 lines to 83,000 lines for the same kernel versions. Hmm, a 15% reduction in lines of code for a 30% reduction in patches seems a bit wrong…

Not all patches are created equal. Some of the upstreamed patches have been small fixes, others have been thousands of lines. All of them, however, pale in comparison to the GPU driver.

The GPU driver is 21,000 lines by itself, discounting the downstream Rust abstractions we are still carrying. It is almost double the size of the DCP driver and thrice the size of the ISP/webcam driver, its two closest rivals. And upstreaming work has now begun.

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[Security] Posted Feb 18, 2026 14:35 UTC (Wed) by jzb

Adam Harvey, on behalf of the crates.io team has published a blog post to inform users of a change in their practice of publishing information about malicious Rust crates:

The crates.io team will no longer publish a blog post each time a malicious crate is detected or reported. In the vast majority of cases to date, these notifications have involved crates that have no evidence of real world usage, and we feel that publishing these blog posts is generating noise, rather than signal.

We will always publish a RustSec advisory when a crate is removed for containing malware. You can subscribe to the RustSec advisory RSS feed to receive updates.

Crates that contain malware and are seeing real usage or exploitation will still get both a blog post and a RustSec advisory. We may also notify via additional communication channels (such as social media) if we feel it is warranted.

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[Security] Posted Feb 18, 2026 14:03 UTC (Wed) by jzb

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ceph, gimp, gnutls28, and libpng1.6), Fedora (freerdp, libpng, libssh, mingw-libpng, mingw-libsoup, mingw-python3, pgadmin4, python-pillow, thunderbird, and vim), Mageia (postgresql15), Red Hat (python-urllib3), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, frr, gpg2, kubernetes, kubernetes-old, libsodium, libsoup-2_4-1, libssh, libtasn1, libxml2, nodejs22, openCryptoki, openssl-3, and python311-pip), and Ubuntu (frr, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gkeop, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oem-6.17, linux-realtime, linux-raspi-realtime, nova, and pillow).

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[Development] Posted Feb 17, 2026 15:04 UTC (Tue) by jzb

Version 6.6.0 of KDE's Plasma desktop environment has been released. Notable additions in this release include the ability to create global themes for Plasma, an "extract text" feature in the Spectacle screenshot utility, accessibility improvements, and a new on-screen keyboard. See the changelog for a full list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

The release is dedicated to the memory of Björn Balazs, a KDE contributor who passed away in September 2025. "Björn's drive to help people achieve the privacy and control over technology that he believed they deserved is the stuff FLOSS legends are made of."

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