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[$] The NNCPNET email network
Running a modern mail server is a complicated business. In part, this complication is caused by the series of incrementally developed practices designed to combat the huge flood of spam that dominates modern email communication. An unfortunate side effect is that it prevents people from running their own mail servers, concentrating people on a few big providers. NNCPNET is a suite of software written by John Goerzen based on the node-to-node copy (NNCP) protocol that aims to make running one's own mail servers as easy as it once was. While the default configurations communicates only with other NNCPNET servers, there is a public relay that connects the system to the broader internet mail ecosystem.
[$] A look at the SilverBullet note-taking application
SilverBullet is a MIT-licensed note-taking application, designed to run as a self-hosted web server. Started in 2022, the project is approaching its 2.0 release, making this a good time to explore the features it offers. SilverBullet stores notes as plain Markdown files, and provides a Lua scripting API to customize the application's appearance and behavior.
[$] 6.17 Merge window, part 1
As of this writing, just over 4,000 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository during the 6.17 merge window. When he announced the merge-window opening, Linus Torvalds let it be known that, due to a busy personal schedule, he was likely to pull changes more quickly than usual this time around; that has been borne out to some extent. Changes merged so far are focused on core-kernel and filesystem work; read on for the details.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 31, 2025
Posted Jul 31, 2025 1:15 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 31, 2025 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Becoming a Python contributor; Graphene OS; Fedora quality team; 6.16 Development statistics; Proxy execution; Run-time verification; Confidential VMs.
- Briefs: HeliumOS 10; European Tech Funding; GNU C Library 2.42; OpenPrinting; Wayback 0.1
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Extending run-time verification for the kernel
There are a lot of things people expect the Linux kernel to do correctly. Some of these are checked by testing or static analysis; a few are ensured by run-time verification: checking a live property of a running Linux system. For example, the scheduler has a handful of different correctness properties that can be checked in this way. Nam Cao posted a patch series that aims to extend the kinds of properties that the kernel's run-time verification system can check, by adding support for linear temporal logic (LTL). The patch set has seen eleven revisions since the first version in March 2025, and recently made it into the linux-next tree, from where it seems likely to reach the mainline kernel soon.
[$] On becoming a Python contributor
In the first keynote at EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Savannah Bailey described her path to becoming a CPython core developer in November 2024. She started down that path a few years earlier and her talk was meant to inspire others—not to slavishly follow hers, but to create their own. In the talk, entitled "You don't have to be a compiler engineer to work on Python", she had lots of ideas for those who might be thinking about contributing and are wondering how to do so.
[$] A proxy-execution baby step
Priority inversion comes about when a low-priority task holds a resource that is also needed by a high-priority task, preventing the latter from running. This problem is made much worse if the low-priority task is unable to gain access to the CPU and, as a result, cannot complete its work and free the resources it holds. Proxy execution is a potential solution to this problem, but it is a complex solution that has been under development for several years; LWN first looked at it in 2020. The 6.17 kernel is likely to contain an important step forward for this long-running project.
[$] Some 6.16 development statistics
The 6.16 development cycle was another busy one, with 14,639 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline — just 18 commits short of the total for 6.15. The 6.16 release happened on July 27, as expected. Also as expected, LWN has put together its traditional look at where the code for this release came from.
[$] Smaller Fedora quality team proposes cuts
Fedora's quality team is looking to reduce the scope of test coverage and change the project's release criteria to drop some features from the list of release blockers. This is, in part, an exercise in getting rid of criteria, such as booting from optical media, that are less relevant. It is also a necessity, since the Red Hat team focusing on Fedora quality assurance (QA) is only half the size it was a year ago.
[$] Rethinking the Linux cloud stack for confidential VMs
There is an inherent limit to the privacy of the public cloud. While Linux can isolate virtual machines (VMs) from each other, nothing in the system's memory is ultimately out of reach for the host cloud provider. To accommodate the most privacy-conscious clients, confidential computing protects the memory of guests, even from hypervisors. But the Linux cloud stack needs to be rethought in order to host confidential VMs, juggling two goals that are often at odds: performance and security.
More malware uploaded to Arch Linux AUR (Linuxiac)
Linuxiac reports that another malicious package has been uploaded to the Arch User Repository (AUR). This time around the package was google-chrome-stable, which installed a remote-access trojan along with Google Chrome.
The good news—if you can call it that—is that the google-chrome-stable package was available on the AUR only for a few hours before the malware hidden inside was discovered. Still, it did get a few upvotes, which suggests at least some users ended up installing it.
The Arch Linux project had to warn users about a similar attack less than a month ago when a user uploaded three browser packages that also installed a malicious script identified as a remote-access trojan.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox and thunderbird), Debian (libcommons-lang-java, node-form-data, redis, and sope), Fedora (chromium), Mageia (slurm), Oracle (apache-commons-beanutils, firefox, kernel, redis:6, and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, and redis), SUSE (chromium, docker, ffmpeg-7, gnutls, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, libgcrypt, rav1e, and sccache), and Ubuntu (linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8).
Three more stable kernel updates
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.15.9, 6.12.41, and 6.6.101 stable kernels.
Garrett: Secure boot certificate rollover is real but probably won't hurt you
Matthew Garrett has posted a detailed followup to our recent article on the coming expiration of Microsoft's Secure Boot signing key.
The upshot is that nobody actually enforces these expiry dates - here's the reference code that disables it. In a year's time we'll have gone past the expiration date for 'Microsoft Windows UEFI Driver Publisher' and everything will still be working, and a few months later 'Microsoft Windows Production PCA 2011' will also expire and systems will keep booting Windows despite being signed with a now-expired certificate. This isn't a Y2K scenario where everything keeps working because people have done a huge amount of work - it's a situation where everything keeps working even if nobody does any work.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, java-21-openjdk, kernel, thunderbird, and unbound), Debian (chromium and systemd), Fedora (libtiff), Oracle (java-21-openjdk, libtpms, nodejs:22, redis:7, thunderbird, and unbound), Red Hat (firefox, redis, and thunderbird), SUSE (apache2, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, java-11-openjdk, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestf, libarchive, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, redis, and rmt-server), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.14, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.14, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-oem-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure, linux-fips, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-realtime, and sqlite3).
We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund (GitHub blog)
GitHub director of developer policy, Felix Reda, has published
a blog post about a GitHub-commissioned study by Open Forum Europe, Fraunhofer ISI and
the European University
Institute. The study finds, not surprisingly, "a profound
mismatch between the importance of open source maintenance and the
public attention it receives
"; it calls for a European sovereign
tech fund (STF) modeled after Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency.
The study proposes two alternative institutional setups for the EU-STF: either the creation of a centralized EU institution (the moonshot model), or a consortium of EU member states that provide the initial funding and apply for additional resources from the EU budget (the pragmatic model). In both cases, to make the fund a success, the minimum contribution from the upcoming EU multiannual budget should be no less than €350 million. This would not be enough to meet the open source maintenance need, but it could form the basis for leveraging industry and national government co-financing that would make a lasting impact.
The European Union is currently starting negotiations for its 2028-2034 budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework; GitHub and others hope to persuade EU legislators to include a European STF in that framework.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, icu, kernel-rt, libtpms, redis:6, redis:7, and sqlite), Fedora (chromium and cloud-init), Oracle (icu, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, nodejs:22, perl, and sqlite), SUSE (docker, java-1_8_0-openj9, libxml2, python-starlette, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cloud-init, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and perl).
HeliumOS 10 released
The HeliumOS project has announced the release of HeliumOS 10. It is relatively new image-based ("atomic") desktop distribution based on packages from CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux, with a goal of providing 10 years of support. HeliumOS 10 uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, Zsh as its default shell, and Btrfs as its default filesystem.
GNU C Library 2.42 released
Version 2.42 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include the addition of a number of new math functions, support for arbitrary baud rates in the termios.h interface, support for SFrame-based stack tracing (described in this article), support for memory guard pages, and a handful of security fixes.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, git-lfs, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, icu, ipa, iputils, krb5, libvpx, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, perl, python-tornado, qt6-qtbase, sqlite, unbound, valkey, wireshark, and yggdrasil), Debian (libfastjson and php8.2), Fedora (glibc), Oracle (firefox, icu, perl, and unbound), Red Hat (389-ds-base, glib2, icu, libtpms, redis:6, redis:7, and yelp), SUSE (boost, forgejo-longterm, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, nginx, and salt), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, poppler, and sqlite3).