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Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced
leadership updates for Mozilla. This includes a Mozilla Leadership
Council made up of executives from each Mozilla organization, and new
board chairs for the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, the
Mozilla Corporation, and Mozilla.ai. The announcement also
indicates a desire to further “diversify” Mozilla’s focus:

We’ve recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both
financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of
what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in
privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term;
developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product
relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns
that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long
run. Mozilla’s impact and survival depend on us simultaneously
strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND
manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we’re working hard
on all of these fronts.

Steven Rostedt recently posted

a patch set that could help improve the performance of certain user-space
applications by giving the scheduler more context about when they are safe to
interrupt. The patch set lets programs request a small grace window
before they can be interrupted so that they can relinquish any locks, decreasing the
amount of time that other threads have to spend waiting. Rostedt shared
performance numbers suggesting that the patch might cut the amount of time spent
acquiring locks in half for some programs — although, since his test was
specifically tuned for this case, real-world projects should expect a somewhat
less dramatic improvement. The change received some pushback from scheduler
maintainer Peter Zijlstra, who objected to the patch set’s approach.

The Fedora Project has announced
two milestones in its journey to supporting the RISC-V architecture: a
dedicated RISC-V Koji build system instance is live in the Fedora data
center, and Fedora
41-based images are now available for RISC-V. It is also possible
to run Fedora RISC-V images using QEMU for those without supported
hardware.

Debian Developer Thomas Lange has written a blog post
in the attempt to help users find the right Debian image for their
systems.

It’s difficult to find the right Debian image. We have thousands of
ISO files and cloud images and we support multiple CPU architectures
and several download methods. The directory structure of our main
image server is like a maze, and our web pages for downloading are
also confusing.

Pi-hole v6 has been released. The
latest version of the popular ad-blocking software sports a redesigned
user interface, has support for subscribing to allowlists, and brings
a new REST API and embedded web server. Its Docker/OCI image is now
based on Alpine Linux
rather than Debian to reduce image
size. See the announcement for guidance on upgrading existing Pi-hole
installations.

[Bernhard] Wiedemann took on this 4-month-long project to create a
fork of openSUSE that has 100% bit-reproducible packages. So far
ring0 (aka bootstrap) and ring1 with 3,300 software packages have
all successfully been patched and tested.

This build is not yet recommended for production use, though.

Kernel developers have been working to convert various internal interfaces to
use

folios; while this process has been progressing, there is still the
occasional regression introduced by the change. In December 2024, it was
discovered that installing a

Flatpak application could trigger a filesystem bug in
the kernel that would cause the software to read incorrect data from the disk.
The problem was quickly fixed — only for an another problem caused by the folio
rewrite to pop up in the same kernel subsystem. This was discovered by an Arch
Linux user, who noticed that selecting files in a Flatpak application was
causing kernel crashes. Now both bugs are fixed, but there may be more bugs to find.

It is a standard practice to use milestones to reflect on the
achievements of a project, such as the anniversary of its first
release or first commit. Usually, these are observed at five and
ten‑year increments; the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release, or 25
years since from the first public announcement, etc. Lennart
Poettering, however, took a different approach at FOSDEM 2025 with a keynote
commemorating 14 years of systemd,
and a brief look ahead at his goals and systemd’s challenges for the future.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three more stable kernels:
6.13.3,
6.12.14, and
6.6.78.
There was a bit of confusion that resulted in the patch for
CVE 2025-21687
getting applied twice — but that doesn’t result in any problems for users of the
kernel, just a bit of extra noise in the CVE database, so Kroah-Hartman has
decided to leave the releases as-is instead of rushing another point release.

So the first few weeks of the 6.14 release development were
smaller-than-usual, but rc3 is actually right in line with normal
releases at this point. Probably just timing of pull requests, and
we’ll see how next week goes. But nothing looks worrisome.

Along with the usual stream of fixes, this release includes the “faux bus“, designed
for simple drivers that just need some sort of virtual bus to be associated
with; this bus come with Rust bindings from the
outset.

Memcached is a memory-based
data-caching daemon that has a long history. More than twenty years after its first public
release, Memcached strives to remain relevant in a vastly changed
computing landscape, balancing new features with a commitment to the original
principles that separate it from newer alternatives like Redis and Hazelcast.