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[$] A look at the Quickshell desktop-component toolkit
Quickshell is a toolkit for building desktop components, such as toolbars or menus. It uses QML, which is a declarative language for designing GUI applications. Quickshell helps developers create graphical tools for common desktop use cases with a focus on ease of development. It offers a convenient method for writing user interfaces and has been adopted by a number of projects, such as caelestia-shell and DankMaterialShell, that provide desktop environments for minimal window managers like Sway and niri.
[$] The beginning of the 7.3 merge window
As of this writing, 2,346 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 7.3 kernel release. That, clearly, is a mere down payment on the flood that is to come. Even so, those early pulls brought in some noteworthy changes, including (but not limited to) a significant reworking of how group scheduling works on multiprocessor systems.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 20, 2026
Posted Aug 20, 2026 0:05 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 20, 2026 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Debian AI GR; Python pathlib; bootstrappable builds; Fedora and AF_ALG; Arm 128-bit PTEs; BPF CI; 7.2 statistics.
- Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community.
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Debian weighs eight options in vote on LLM usage
The Debian Project is voting on the usage of large language models (LLMs) to make contributions to the project. The first proposal, sent in late July by Matthias Geiger, would expressly forbid any contributions to Debian that are created by or with the assistance of LLMs. That kicked off a firestorm of discussion and a flood of alternate proposals. Debian developers are now voting on eight proposals in total that range from banning LLM-assisted contributions to explicitly approving them, as well as the standard "none of the above" option that would leave Debian with no agreed policy.
[$] Representing Python paths using pathlib
At the outset of his PyCon US 2026 talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib instead. That's kind of a tall order, at least for longtime Python users, since string-based paths have been pervasive—and mostly work. It is that "mostly" part that makes Hunner want to see things change, of course, so he set out to describe a lesser-known corner of the language and to try to change some minds.
[$] Fedora prepares for the end of AF_ALG
The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabilities. It was deprecated earlier this year. Eric Biggers, and other kernel developers, have been working to remove it from the kernel. With that in mind, the Fedora Project is planning to restrict use of AF_ALG in the next Fedora release in the hopes of nudging remaining users of the API to prepare for its eventual removal.
[$] Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel
Linus Torvalds released
the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes
coming in was still "bigger than I would have wished for
". In fact,
7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history,
adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics
to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.
[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why
This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds, which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN did look at the topic just over two years ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.
[$] BPF, continuous testing, and stable kernels
Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to test BPF updates in stable kernels more thoroughly. The BPF subsystem's CI tests are in a good place, they said; even so, Solodrai and Yu have a handful of possible avenues toward enabling better test coverage in the future.
[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm
The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some Arm systems, for example, can use 56 of those bits to access up to 72PB of memory. So it might be surprising that the Arm architecture is evolving to support even larger page-table entries (PTEs). This patch set from Anshuman Khandual adds support for 128-bit PTEs, but who will benefit from this capability is not entirely clear.
KDE Gear 26.08 released
Version 26.08 of the KDE Gear collection of applications has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements in the signing features of Okular, improved file-grouping features in the Dolphin file manager, and a number of enhancements to the Kdenlive video editor. See the changelog for a full list of updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.
Supply chain attack on arrayref (Rust blog)
The Rust blog reports on a malicious crate, called proc-macro1, that was uploaded to the crates.io repository.
Furthermore, we discovered that the popular arrayref crate had recently been republished and made to depend on this crate, with the most recent versions yanked. We have removed the malicious version and unyanked the maliciously-yanked versions. Other crates by that author (internment, append-only-vec) were also affected so we have done the same for those, and locked the account as a precaution. We do not believe the author of arrayref to be acting maliciously, but their computer or credentials are likely compromised, and we are attempting to contact them.
RPM 6.1.0 released
Version 6.1.0 of the RPM Package Manager has been released. Notable changes include the ability to provide modifiers to RPM macros at definition time, improved build and verification error handling, support for signing files with PKCS11 tokens using rpmsign, as well as the addition of several new man pages. The 6.1.0 release also debuts a new release model inspired by the Linux kernel's.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind9.18, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel-rt, libcupsfilters, mysql8.4, mysql:8.4, pcp, perl-Date-Manip, php8.4, php:7.4, php:8.2, php:8.3, python3, and yggdrasil), Debian (designate, firefox-esr, and swift), Gentoo (acl, attr, Emacs, libssh2, and quickjs-ng), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, attr, bind9.18, curl, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libXfont2, mysql8.4, nghttp2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, pam, pcp, perl-Date-Manip, php8.4, python3, sg3_utils, and yggdrasil), Slackware (mozilla-firefox and mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (open-iscsi, podman, python311, and python313), and Ubuntu (bind9, capnproto, curl, libheif, libpng, libpng1.6, libssh, nginx, and tiff).
Go 1.27 released
Go 1.27, the most recent version of the Go programming language, has been released with a number of new tools, the addition of support for the ML-DSA post-quantum algorithm, new JSON-processing packages, language updates, and more.
Seven stable kernels for Wednesday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.9, 6.18.45, 6.12.104, 6.6.152, 6.1.183, 5.15.216, and 5.10.265 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Tuba 0.11 released
Version 0.11 of the Tuba fediverse client has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Mastodon collections and quotes, ability to create custom thumbnails for attachments, a new emoji picker, a build for Android, as well as many other enhancements.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, attr, curl, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, haproxy, kernel, libssh, libXfont2, nodejs22, pam, php, php8.4, sg3_utils, and unbound), Debian (librabbitmq, ruby-grape, spip, srt, and swift), Fedora (GitPython, lemonldap-ng, libgit2, libnfs, perl-Imager, perl-List-SomeUtils-XS, python3.12, python3.14, and radsecproxy), Oracle (.NET 10.0, 389-ds-base, 389-ds:1.4, bind, curl, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, haproxy, libssh, libXfont2, nodejs22, nodejs:22, pcp, and unbound), Red Hat (golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, osbuild-composer, and rhc), SUSE (erlang, forgejo-cli, go1.25, go1.26, htop, python-pypdf2, python313-tablib, and snphost), and Ubuntu (c3p0, dotnet8, dotnet10, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-aws-hwe, linux-fips, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gkeop, linux-oracle, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-xilinx, linux-hwe-7.0, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.17, and linux-oracle-6.8).
Firefox 154.0 released
Version 154.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include extending local network access protections to WebSocket connections, more flexible, per-site configuration of cookie and data clearing, and more.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, 389-ds:1.4, bind, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, libXfont2, nghttp2, and unbound), Debian (calibre, expat, ironic, and linux-6.12), Fedora (coturn, linux-firmware, php-phpseclib, and sqlite), Red Hat (fence-agents, osbuild-composer, pam, resource-agents, and sg3_utils), SUSE (ffmpeg, jetty-minimal, open-iscsi, python, python313-h2, python313-pysaml2, redis, redis7, rsync, sccache, texlive, and wasm-bindgen), and Ubuntu (engrampa, linux-aws-7.0, and linux-azure-fde-5.15).