Linux Weekly News: 7 New Articles Outside Paywall

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 05, 2026

• GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

    • LWN ☛ The end of __get_user() and __put_user()

      Linus Torvalds rarely writes significant amounts of kernel code these days, so the merging of a 48-part patch series from him is an unusual event. This series, destined for the 7.4 kernel release, performs some long-delayed kernel cleanup by removing a couple of the primitives used to access user-space memory from the kernel. What was once a best practice has long been superseded, but it can take time for such changes to work their way through a body of code this large.

      Kernel code often must access data that lies in user space; these operations must, of course, be done carefully. When the kernel is acting on behalf of a user-space process, it must not perform any accesses that the process itself cannot do. For this reason, the primitives for user-space access have been carefully written with a number of rules about their use.

    • LWN ☛ Guidelines for panics in kernel code

      Alexandre Courbot spends most of his time working on the kernel doing code reviews. Recently, he's been wondering about what the standards should be for when Rust code is allowed to panic, and how it should do error handling more generally. Unlike many of the other talks at Kangrejos 2026, his talk was not presenting some existing work, but rather hoping to solicit opinions on the topic from the assembled Rust for Linux developers. He brought along a collection of tricky cases that he had run into recently to prompt discussion.

    • LWN ☛ The first part of the 7.4 merge window

      Since the merge window for 7.4 opened, there have been 6,753 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline repository. Many more are expected, especially given the possibility that this merge window will be extended to three weeks. Still, even this initial set brought in a number of new features, in addition to the continued general cleanups and security fixes that the kernel has seen recently.

    • LWN ☛ Seeking smaller kernel stacks

      Memory has always been a scarce resource in computing systems, but the problem seems to have worsened recently. In particular, the worldwide shortage of memory chips has led to a renewed focus by systems developers on reducing memory usage. During the memory-management microconference at the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, Will Deacon discussed one specific consumer of memory that is being re-examined: kernel stacks.

      On 64-bit Arm and x86 systems, each thread has its own kernel stack that consumes 16KB of non-pageable memory. That may not seem like much memory, but some systems run with large numbers of threads; Android devices, for example, may host 2-3,000 system threads, and thousands more for running apps, adding up to 5,000 threads on an idle device. The result can be many megabytes of memory tied up in kernel stacks — memory that might well be put to better uses. Cloud environments have a similar problem; a data center can host millions of threads, leading to petabytes of memory use for kernel stacks over a large fleet of systems. This memory is highly underutilized, but overflowing the kernel stack is fatal for the system involved.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • LWN ☛ The campaign to push Northstar into Linux distributions [Ed: Why did LWN deem slop-ware (spewed out by LLMs) newsworthy?]

      There is not a broad selection of mature, open-source web-browser engines for Linux users. Most of the browsers available for Linux are based on one of just three projects: Chromium's Blink, Firefox's Gecko, or WebKit. A new entrant would generally be seen as a welcome alternative, but the recent campaign to push one of the LLM-written Nordstjernen browsers into Debian and Arch Linux has raised some questions about the project's development and security processes.

  • Programming/Development

    • Python

      • LWN ☛ Python's experimental JIT to be removed

        Python's experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which was added to CPython in 2024 for the 3.13 release, is on its way out. In June, the Python steering council announced that it was pausing work on the JIT in CPython's main branch until there was an accepted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that addressed concerns about maintenance, compatibility, and set clear success metrics as well as a timeline for completion. After creating PEP 836 ("JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython") to try to meet the council's request, and after months of discussion, the JIT maintainers have withdrawn the PEP. For now, it appears that development on the once-promising project has come to an end.

    • Rust

      • LWN ☛ Rust features in the future

        There are several Rust features that kernel developers have been hoping to stabilize, but Josh Triplett wanted to describe all of the other features that the Rust project is currently working on. He spoke about the topic at Kangrejos 2026, leaving the assembled kernel developers with several ideas about how to use these upcoming Rust features in the kernel. The features included refinements to the type system, small syntax improvements, and a smarter borrow checker.

        Triplett began by cautioning that these features were works in progress, some more than others. ""That means that you have more opportunity to shape how things work out,"" he said. He encouraged anyone interested in working on or further developing the features to get in touch with him. Even just letting the Rust developers know which features would solve a real problem in the kernel would help with prioritization.