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Linux Weekly News (LWN) on Kernel and Homebrew
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LWN ☛ A struct sockaddr sequel
One of the many objectives of the Linux Kernel Self-Protection Project (KSPP), which just completed ten years of work, is to ensure that all array references can be bounds-checked, even in the case of flexible array members, the size of which is not known at compile time. One of the most challenging flexible array members in the kernel is not even declared as such. Almost exactly one year ago, LWN looked at the effort to increase safety around the networking subsystem's heavily used sockaddr structure. One year later, Kees Cook is still looking for a way to bring this work to a close.
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LWN ☛ Hot-page migration and specific-purpose NUMA nodes
For better or for worse, the NUMA node is the abstraction used by the kernel to keep track of different types of memory. How that abstraction is used, though, is still an active area of development. Two patch sets focused on this problem are currently under review; one addresses the perennial problem of promoting heavily used folios from slower to faster memory, while the other aims to improve the kernel's handling of nodes containing special memory installed for a specific purpose.
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LWN ☛ Pouring packages with Homebrew
The Homebrew project is an open-source package-management system that comes with a repository of useful packages for Linux and macOS. Even though Linux distributions have their own package management and repositories, Homebrew is often used to obtain software that is not available in a distribution's repository or to install more current versions of projects than are available from long-term-support (LTS) distributions. Homebrew 5.0.0, released on November 12, 2025, expanded Linux support to include 64-bit Arm packages in addition to x86_64, and turned on concurrent downloads by default to speed up package downloads.
The project began in 2009 as a package-management system for Mac OS X, later macOS, which did not (and still does not) have a package manager as such. It allowed users to easily install and manage software not included with the operating system or available in Apple's App Store; in particular, it is popular for installing open-source applications that are either unavailable with macOS or shipped with the operating system but severely outdated.