Category Archives: Linux

Chromium 140.0.7339.80 Security Update Released: Critical Vulnerability Fixes for Linux Users

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The Chromium 140.0.7339.80 security update has rolled out across major Linux distributions, delivering critical vulnerability fixes that strengthen browser security for millions of open-source desktop users. Released on September 12, 2025, this latest Chromium browser update addresses four significant security flaws while maintaining the performance and compatibility that makes Chromium the foundation for numerous web browsers in the Linux ecosystem.

[$] Fighting human trafficking with self-contained applications

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Brooke Deuson is the developer behind

Trafficking Free Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that
produces free software to help law enforcement combat human trafficking. She is
a survivor of human trafficking herself.
She spoke at RustConf 2025 about her
mission, and why she chose to write her anti-trafficking software in Rust.
Interestingly, it has nothing to do with Rust’s lifetime-analysis-based memory-safety —
instead, her choice was motivated by the difficulty she faces getting police
departments to actually use her software. The fact that Rust is statically
linked and capable of cross compilation by default makes deploying Rust software
in those environments easier.

Varnish 8.0.0 and bonus project news

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Version
8.0.0 of Varnish Cache
has been released. In addition to a number
of changes to varnishd parameters, the ability to access some
runtime parameters using the Varnish Configuration Language, and other
improvements, 8.0.0 comes with big news; the project is forming an
organization called a forening
that will set out formal governance for the project.

The move also comes with a name change due to legal difficulties in
securing the Varnish Cache name:

The new association and the new project will be named “The Vinyl
Cache Project”, and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the
“Varnish Cache” name. The next release, in March will be under the new
name, and will include compatility scripts, to make the transition as
smooth as possible for everybody.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this is 100% a mess of my
making: I should have insisted on a firm written agreement about the
name sharing, but I did not.

I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings
between Varnish Software and the FOSS project.

Varnish Software has always been, and still is, an important and
valued contributor to the FOSS project, but sometimes even friends can
make a mess of a situation.

[$] New kernel tools: wprobes, KStackWatch, and KFuzzTest

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The kernel runs in a special environment that makes it difficult to use
many of the development tools that are available to user-space developers.
Kernel developers often respond by simply doing without, but the truth is
that they need good tools as much as anybody else. Three new tools for the
tracking down of bugs have recently landed on the linux-kernel mailing
list; here is an overview.

The Performance Cost To Ubuntu WSL2 On Windows 11 25H2

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It’s been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.

Ubuntu 25.10’s Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings

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Ubuntu 25.10’s transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps…