[$] Even more formal verification for BPF
BPF offers useful safety guarantees, but Kumar Kartikeya
Dwivedi wants BPF programs to be even safer. At the 2026 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he led a session (slides)
discussing the possibility of adding domain-specific invariants to BPF programs.
It was not a discussion intended to lead to the implementation of any particular
kernel feature, but rather an overview of why additional formal verification
might be needed, and how it could work with the existing BPF ecosystem.
Django moves to an annual release cycle
The Django Python web-framework project has announced that
it has accepted an annual release cycle proposal. This means that the project is
moving from a somewhat complicated schedule that interspersed short-lived
feature releases and long-term-support (LTS) releases to a simpler annual cycle
where each release is supported for three years.
Every feature release gets
three years of support: one year of mainstream bugfixes, then two years of
security and data-loss fixes. The "LTS" label is retired — every feature release
now carries that same, unique commitment.
No more LTS gap: no racing a
deadline to jump two years of changes at once. Upgrade one year at a time,
whenever suits you within the support window. Three versions are supported at
any time, giving third-party packages a clear, rolling target.
This will
take effect with the upcoming Django 2028 release, expected in
January 2028.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox,
gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libgcrypt, and LibRaw), Debian (bind9, ca-
certificates, chromium, dnsdist, icinga2, kitty, libheif, openjdk-21, pdns,
pdns-recursor, thunderbird, and xen), Fedora (bird, erlang, kernel, mingw-glib2,
nghttp2, p11-kit, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, pgadmin4, polymake,
python-nh3, python-wsgidav, python3.12, rabbitmq-server, rust-ammonia,
seamonkey, and udisks2), Mageia (python-starlette), Oracle (gnutls, kernel, and
LibRaw), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), Slackware (wpa_supplicant), and SUSE
(azure-storage-azcopy, bouncycastle, ffmpeg-4, fuse-overlayfs, gleam, gstreamer-
plugins-bad, libssh2-1, libssh2_org, libwireshark19, libXfont2-2, perl-Mojo-JWT,
perl-Mojolicious, podman, python310, python313-Django4, and tekton-cli).
Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc7
The 7.2-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. It is
still bigger than Linus would like, but he said nonetheless: "I don't currently
see any value in delaying the 7.2 release, so I would expect that to happen next
weekend unless something really bad pops up."
Four weekend stable kernel updates
The 7.1.8, 6.18.44, 6.12.103, and 6.6.151 stable kernels
have been released; each contains a fair number of important fixes.