A function's return type is supposed to indicate the kind of data that it produces. Rust's "never" type, which is denoted by an exclamation mark ("!"), is the type the language uses to mark a function that never returns and other places where a value can never occur. For a long time, the never type was used internally by the compiler, but was considered an unstable feature. On August 24, after more than two years of work, Rust-compiler-contributor "waffle" finally managed to stabilize the type. It took so long, in part, because it involved a small breaking change to previous Rust editions, which the compiler maintainers needed to ensure did not impact much real code.

Version 12 of the Jellyfin media-management system has been released. Notable changes include database performance improvements, an upgrade to FFmpeg 8.1 for media transcoding, as well as better handling of book and comic media. See the release notes for the web client and server for a full list of changes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (expat, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, kernel-rt, python3.14-cryptography, redis:6, skopeo, and xmlrpc-c), Debian (jbig2dec and strongswan), Fedora (baresip, chirp, chromium, corosync, emacs, GitPython, libre, libsoup3, nsd, perl-Net-OAuth, and perl-XML-Bare), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, exiv2, freerdp, python-pyasn1, and tor), Red Hat (buildah, cockpit-image-builder, container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, delve, linux-sgx, osbuild-composer, pcs, and runc), SUSE (amazon-cloudwatch-agent, aws-nitro-enclaves-cli, bzip2, c-ares, curl, dracut, emacs, fuse-overlayfs, gegl, GraphicsMagick, httpcomponents-client, java-1_8_0-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, lcms2, libidn, libusb-1_0, LibVNCServer, microcode_ctl, multipath-tools, NetworkManager, nghttp2, openexr, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, perl-URI, php-composer2, postgresql15, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-GitPython, python-tornado6, python313-pip, redis, redis7, ucode-intel, wget, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (gzip and php7.0).

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, usually just called CERN, is not only the birthplace of the World Wide Web, it is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. As such, its computing environment is both truly unique and of great interest to people outside of CERN who hope to find lessons applicable to their own computing needs. The upcoming migration of some of CERN's systems from CentOS Linux to Debian, which was the topic of a talk at the recent MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026, is of particular interest.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

The restartable sequences feature is one of the stranger corners of the kernel's user-space interface; it provides a way for user space to carry out simple lockless operations and be informed if it is preempted over the course of an operation (and must, thus, restart). Work merged in the 6.19 release to improve the performance of restartable sequences broke the TCMalloc allocator, which was relying on an undocumented (and unintended) kernel behavior. Now, Olivier Dion is proposing an addition to the restartable-sequences API that will bring TCMalloc back into the fold; it does not make the restartable-sequences API any less strange, though.

Version 2026.08 of the Buildroot embedded Linux system builder has been released. Buildroot 2026.08 includes nearly 1,000 changes from 100 contributors; some of the notable changes include support for Linux 7.1.x, Binutils 2.46.1, GCC 16.2.0, glibc 2.44, as well as adding the M68K and IBM Power 10/11 architectures.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, freerdp, gegl04, go-fdo-client, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, and pipewire), Debian (aom, chromium, libde265, libssh2, thunderbird, and tryton-server), Fedora (chromium, composer, cosmic-greeter, gegl04, greetd, ibus-table, jss, libheif, lightdm, lxdm, memcached, perl-DBD-Pg, plasma-login-manager, rust-webbrowser, sddm, selinux-policy, slitherer, and tkimg), Mageia (expat, mingw-expat, mbedtls, microcode, python-linkify-it-py, and tomcat), Oracle (buildah, container-tools:ol8, dbus-broker, freerdp, go-toolset:ol8, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-uek, nodejs24, php, and pipewire), Slackware (libpcap, libxml2, mozilla-firefox, mozilla-thunderbird, and util-linux), SUSE (bson-devel, busybox, bzip2, c-ares, cpio, cups-filters, dracut, ffmpeg-7, ffmpeg-8, file-roller, firefox, firefox-esr, glances-common, grafana, hauler, helm, helm3, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, lcms2, libcupsfilters, libheif, libmsgpack-c2, libsoup, libsoup2, libusb-1_0, libvirt, LibVNCServer, mcphost, ollama, opencode, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, php-composer2, podman, postgresql15, postgresql17, postgresql18, python, python-aiohttp, python-h2, python-sqlparse, python310, rpcbind, sssd, thunderbird, trivy, ucode-intel, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-7.0, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-hwe-7.0, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-fips, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-realtime, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gcp-7.0, linux-oem-7.0, minetest, and miniupnpd).

The Asahi Linux project has announced that support for Apple's M3-series chips has been added to the Asahi installer.

Linux support for M3 series SoCs and the machines powered by them is now in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works. This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10 Gb/s), hardware accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more! The only major exceptions remain full DCP support and the GPU, which we will have more news on in the coming months. Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now.

See the blog post for other current limitations of M3 support.

The 7.3-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said:

This didn't *feel* like a particularly busy rc2, but it clearly was. rc2 is usually the quietest time when people take a breather after the merge window and it takes a while to start finding bugs. But not this time - this is a "full fat" rc release. [...]

Nothing looks particularly odd, even if the rc2 timing is a bit unusual. It might be just random, but we'll obviously all blame it on AI, because whether that's really the cause or not, it's an easy thing to blame ;)

Python's support for multithreaded programs has improved considerably over the last few years with the advent of the "free-threaded" version of the language. But testing multithreaded programs is notoriously difficult, because the underlying host system determines the thread-execution ordering, which adds an element of non-determinism. At PyCon US, Larry Hastings gave a talk (YouTube video) about his blanket project, which is meant to provide mechanisms for deterministic testing of multithreaded Python code.

Version 2026.09, code-named "Hättiwaritätti", of the Debian-based Grml live Linux distribution for system administrators has been released. It is based on packages from the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky") release. Notable changes include an update to the Linux 7.1.8 kernel, support for booting from exfat-formatted USB devices, and an update to GNU Screen 5.0.1.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, and pcre2), Fedora (cockpit, expat, freeipa, kbd, kernel, mrtg, python-pip, and valkey), Mageia (libopenmpt and python-gitpython), Oracle (dbus-broker, freerdp, gegl, gegl04, gimp:2.8, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, gzip, image-builder, iperf3, kernel, libssh, libxml2, microcode_ctl, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, openssl-fips-provider, pam, php:7.4, php:8.2, tar, and wget), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, apptainer, busybox, cpio, cups-filters, curl, dracut, ffmpeg, file-roller, glibc, grafana, kubevirt, virt-pr-helper-container, lcms2, libtree-sitter0_26, libvirt, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql18, suseconnect-ng, terraform-provider-susepubliccloud, and yast2-users), and Ubuntu (FFmpeg, gnupg2, librabbitmq, libssh2, openssh, and spice-vdagent).

Tiered-memory systems are built with multiple types of memory, each of which has different performance characteristics. In addition to the usual DRAM, a tiered system might also provide faster high-bandwidth memory or slower CXL memory. On these systems, the placement of memory allocations has a significant effect on the performance that a workload will obtain. While work on tiered-memory improvements has been ongoing for years, it feels like the pace has slowed a bit recently. Even so, there are a few efforts underway, but they are facing questions about whether the tiering design makes sense.

Version 4.0 of the Audacity audio editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include a rewritten interface using Qt, ability to save user-interface layouts as "Workspaces", improvements in working with audio clips, and a new .aup4 project format.

The release is not fully feature-compatible with the Audacity 3.x series; see the compatibility notes for a list of missing features.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, go-fdo-server, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:24, perl-DBI, and php), Debian (firefox-esr, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, and libass), Fedora (dracut, exiv2, firefox, freerdp, gvfs, mingw-expat, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-openexr, nss, proftpd, and syncthing), Mageia (apr-util, bubblewrap, libalsa2, libarchive, perl-Net-OAuth, perl-Text-CSV_XS, perl-XML-Bare, and perl-YAML-Syck), Oracle (freerdp, gimp, golang, iperf3, nginx:1.24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, pipewire, wget, xmlrpc-c, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, apptainer, apr-util, bzip2, c-ares, cosign, dhcpcd, dovecot22, emacs, erlang, gegl, gopass, gzip, httpcomponents-client, incus, kernel-devel, libgpg-error, libsoup2, mozillafirefox, mozilla-nss, mozilla-nspr,, MozillaFirefox, mozilla-nss, mozilla-nspr, rust-cbindgen, nodejs20, orthanc, orthanc-authorization, orthanc-postgresql,, postgresql14, python-cryptography, python-msgpack, quagga, snpguest, snphost, texlive, tuxguitar, udisks2, vim, wget, and yast2-users), and Ubuntu (apr-util, biosig, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-oracle-5.4, sssd, and tika).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Python JIT; rnull block driver; steal time; GNOME governance; 7.3 merge window; LUKS.
• Briefs: Kernel infrastructure; Debian AI; Dolphin 26.08; Firefox 155; Incus 7.4; OpenShot 4.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

When a laptop is asleep, its memory is not unreadable. The right tooling can attach to the computer's memory bus and read out its contents, and cold-boot attacks can theoretically read values from memory for a short time after the computer loses power. That is really an unavoidable fact about the hardware, but some users would still like to ensure that, even if this happens, their long-term encryption keys, such as the key for full-disk encryption, remain unreadable. In June 2026, Ingo Blechschmidt discovered that Linux kernel versions after 6.9 (released in May 2024) were not erasing disk-encryption keys when a laptop was put to sleep, even when configured to do so. He quickly identified a potential fix, which has been merged, but it was not a comprehensive solution.

Emmanuele Bassi kicked off a project to improve GNOME's technical governance with a presentation about his ideas (video) at GUADEC 2025. His nudging has led the project to, slowly, work on creating more formal structures for technical governance. It is adopting a teams structure and looking toward creating a steering committee, as well as bootstrapping a Request for Comments (RFC) process. If adopted, GNOME would require RFCs for design, user experience, architectural, and other changes that carry a major impact on the project.

Version 7.4 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this release include UEFI Secure Boot key management, "near-live" migration of containers between Incus instances, as well as burst I/O limits for disk and network devices.