LWN's Latest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 01, 2026

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • LWN ☛ Compiling the kernel with gccrs

    Pierre-Emmanuel Patry and Arthur Cohen gave a talk at RustConf 2026 on the status of the Rust frontend for GCC (gccrs), with a particular eye toward the goal of compiling the Linux kernel. Patry gave a follow-up talk for a more kernel-focused audience at Kangrejos the next week, which Cohen could not attend. The gccrs project is making good progress overall, but it will still be some time until the compiler is usable.

    Cohen began the RustConf talk by stating that the title of the presentation, "Compiling the Linux kernel with gccrs", was a lie. Gccrs cannot currently compile the Linux kernel, for multiple reasons. One such reason, Cohen said, is that he and Patry were laid off and couldn't dedicate all of their time to gccrs — although Open Source Security has since picked up their contracts. Another reason, which Patry brought up at Kangrejos, was that their current goal was really to ""miscompile the Linux kernel"". The project needs to get to the point of emitting a binary that can be tested and validated to be said to be "compiling" anything; almost certainly, there will be a delay between the point where gccrs accepts the kernel's Rust code without complaint, and where the output it produces is actually a usable kernel. Nevertheless, the two of them have made substantial progress.

  • LWN ☛ Thread-identity switcheroo for io_uring

    The io_uring subsystem is all about asynchronous execution; applications count on it to not block — unless explicitly requested to. Within io_uring, maintaining the "never blocks" guarantee has sometimes been a challenge, given that many paths in the kernel were never designed for asynchronous execution. This problem has been worked around, but at a significant cost to performance. Now, io_uring maintainer Jens Axboe has posted an RFC patch set with a somewhat radical (and potentially scary) solution to the problem.

    A process in user space can submit one or more operations to io_uring by describing them in submission-queue entries (SQEs) in the submission ring, then calling io_uring_enter(). The kernel will initiate processing on all of the entries that were placed into the ring. If possible, the kernel will execute them immediately within the io_uring_enter() call. For example, if a read request can be satisfied with data that is already in the page cache and the user-space buffer is entirely resident within RAM, then the requested data can be copied immediately without blocking.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • LWN ☛ Testing compat_linux on NetBSD with the Linux Test Project

      NetBSD has long had support for running Linux binaries via its kernel-level compat_linux feature, but test coverage for it was less complete than some might hope. In order to provide better testing for compat_linux, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant Henrique Brito opted to work on enabling the Linux Test Project (LTP) test suite to compile and run on NetBSD. At EuroBSDCon 2026, Brito's mentor, Stephen Borrill, provided a report on the project, and the status of LTP on NetBSD. The work has already resulted in some minor fixes, and a good list of additional problems to solve.

      I did not attend EuroBSDCon 2026 in person, but had the opportunity to watch Borrill's presentation shortly after it was live-streamed. The video is available along with the other EuroBSDCon 2026 videos on a PeerTube instance, and the slides are linked from his web site.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • LWN ☛ Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

    Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer conference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimed at convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design.

    He introduced himself as someone who has been doing UX for a long time, much of that time at Google. He said that over that time he had noticed a cultural shift, ""because back in 2005 when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the right thing"". He had worked on the Chrome team for a while, which he said was ""filled with people who wanted nothing but open-source, open-web"" projects. Things had changed radically, which led him to leave Google, ""but I'm trying to atone for my sins working for these companies"".

    He now does work for Mastodon and Home Assistant, ""just kind of trying to squeeze a little bit more good UX design into open source"". Jenson said he did not want to be confrontational, but he thought that open source needs a lot of help in the area of UX design. That is challenging, because open-source projects are understaffed.

  • Programming/Development

    • LWN ☛ Looking forward to Git 2.56 — and 3.0

      The Git source-code management system is at the core of development processes worldwide, so changes, especially incompatible changes, are of great interest to the developers involved. The Git 2.56 release, which can be expected around the end of September, is currently available in release-candidate form. It is not the most earth-shaking of releases, but the one that follows, which might be the long-awaited Git 3.0, may well be.

      [...]

      Update: at Kernel Recipes, Steinhardt described the plan that had been agreed to regarding releases. The December 2026 release will be called 2.98, as a signal that the 3.0 transition is coming. The 2.99 release will follow in April 2027; that will be a long-term-support release. Git 3.0 will also be released at the same time, and will be the base for all subsequent releases.