Java 26 is now available, featuring HTTP/3 support, enhanced G1 garbage collector performance, faster JVM startup, and new APIs.

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Privacy battles; page-cache-timing protections; null filesystems; Fedora Sandbox; safer kmalloc(); BPF in io_uring.
• Briefs: AppArmor vulnerabilities; snapd vulnerability; Sashiko; DPL election; Fedora Asahi 43; GIMP 3.2; Marknote 1.5; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

I’ve been calling this project Cursor for LibreOffice to myself, but I knew I couldn’t use the name forever, so I researched and chose WriterAgent. It supports Calc, and Draw as well, but I didn’t like OfficeAgent, which sounds like some Soviet-era KGB job title.

Strong forces tempting humans out of the AI loop, and reducing the experience needed to supervise and reviewQCon London AI is in a dangerous state where it is too useful not to use, but where by using it, developers are giving up the experience they need to review what it does, said a speaker at QCon London, a vendor-neutral developer conference underway this week.…

AMD engineers are experimenting with a proof-of-concept implementation of a Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) implementation atop the DRM_GPUSVM framework…

An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended…

Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and
she gave the Saturday morning keynote at SCALE 23x in Pasadena
about some of the work she and others have done to help protect online
rights, especially digital privacy. The talk recounted some of the history
of the court cases that the organization has brought over the years to try
to dial back privacy invasions. One underlying theme was the
role that attendees can play in protecting our rights, hearkening back to
earlier efforts by the technical community.

If you miss Arc’s design and want something similar on Linux — but open source and without the AI baggage — Flow Browser is worth a look.

Version 4.24.0 of the Samba SMB filesystem implementation has been
released. There are a number of significant changes, including audit
support for authentication information, remote password management, a
number of Kerberos improvements, asynchronous-I/O rate limiting, and more.

GNOME 50 has been
released. Notable changes in this release include enhancements to the
Orca screen-reader application, interface and performance improvements
for GNOME’s file manager (Files), a “massive set of stability and
performance updates” for its display-handling technologies, and
much more. See also the “What’s new
for developers” article that covers changes of interest to GNOME
and GNOME application developers.

GNOME 50 is out today, on-schedule and just in time for being the default desktop of the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44…

Qualys has discovered
a local-privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability affecting Ubuntu
Desktop 24.04 and later:

This flaw (CVE-2026-3888) allows an unprivileged local attacker to
escalate privileges to full root access through the interaction of two
standard system components: snap-confine and systemd-tmpfiles.

More details are available in the security
advisory. Canonical has published updated packages as well as instructions
for verifying if a system is vulnerable and how to upgrade if so.

Fedora Asahi Remix 43 is
now available:

This release incorporates all the exciting improvements brought by
Fedora
Linux 43. Notably, package management is significantly
upgraded with RPM 6.0 and the new
DNF5 backend for PackageKit for Plasma Discover and GNOME Software
ahead of Fedora Linux 44. It also continues to provide extensive
device support. This includes newly added support for the Mac Pro,
microphones in M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, and 120Hz refresh rate for
the built-in displays for MacBook Pro 14/16 models.

The kernel’s asynchronous

io_uring interface maintains two shared ring buffers:
a submission queue for sending requests to the kernel, and a completion queue
containing the results of those requests. Even with shared memory removing much
of the overhead of communicating with user space, there is still some overhead
whenever the kernel must switch to user space to give it the opportunity to
process completion requests and
queue up any subsequent work items. A

patch set from Pavel Begunkov minimizes this overhead by letting
programmers extend the io_uring event loop with a BPF program that can enqueue
additional work in response to completion events. The patch set has
been in development for a long time, but has
finally been accepted.

We are happy to announce the general availability of Fedora Asahi Remix 43. This release brings Fedora Linux 43 to Apple Silicon Macs. Fedora Asahi Remix is developed in close collaboration with the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project. This release incorporates all the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 43. Notably, package management is significantly upgraded with RPM 6.0 […]

It’s been a while since having any improvements to talk about for the MGLRU multi-gen LRU functionality for the Linux kernel to optimize page reclamation and help with system performance especially when enduring memory pressure. But this week a Tencent engineer posted some very promising patches for further enhancing this kernel feature…

Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support…

Systemd 260 drops SysV scripts, raises kernel and dependency requirements, and brings key internal changes across the stack.

Google engineers have been spending the past number of months developing Sashiko as an agentic AI code review system for the Linux kernel. It’s now open-source and publicly available and will continue to do upstream Linux kernel code review thanks to funding from Google…

A newly disclosed set of vulnerabilities has sent shockwaves through the Linux security community. Dubbed “CrackArmor,” these flaws affect AppArmor, one of the most widely used security modules in Linux, potentially exposing millions of systems to serious compromise.