Jake

The famfs filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and memory-management session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a follow-up to the famfs session at last year's summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem by using other kernel features.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, mariadb-10.5, and openssh), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (mariadb), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, glib2, ImageMagick, libsoup, libsoup2, libva, openvpn, sqlite3, and weblate), and Ubuntu (libsoup3, php-horde-css-parser, and python-django).

In a combined filesystem and memory-management session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Joanne Koong led a discussion on improving the writeback performance for the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) layer. Writeback is how data that is written to the filesystem is actually flushed to the disk; it is the process of writing dirty pages from the page cache to storage. The current FUSE implementation allocates unmovable memory, then copies the dirty data to it before initiating writeback, which is slow; Koong wanted to change that behavior. Since the session, she has posted a patch set that has been applied by FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi.

The 6.12.27 and 6.1.137 stable kernels have been released to fix build problems in their predecessors. Only those who are having build troubles with 6.12.26 or 6.1.136 need to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ansible, containerd, and vips), Fedora (chromium, java-17-openjdk, nodejs-bash-language-server, nodejs-pnpm, ntpd-rs, redis, rust-hickory-proto, thunderbird, and valkey), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, fcgi, graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, pam, poppler, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox, libsoup, nodejs:20, redis:6, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xmlrpc-c, and yelp), and SUSE (audiofile, ffmpeg, firefox, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libva, libxml2, and thunderbird).

At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) Kanchan Joshi and Keith Busch led a combined storage and filesystem session on data placement, which concerns how the data on a storage device is actually written. In a discussion that hearkened back to previous summits, the idea is to give hints to enterprise-class SSDs to help them make better choices on where the data should go; hinting was most recently discussed at the summit in 2023. If SSDs can group data with similar lifetimes together, it can lead to longer life for the devices, but there is a need to work out the details.

After a somewhat tumultuous switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL) in March 2024, Redis has backtracked and is now offering Redis under the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) starting with Redis 8, CEO Rowan Trollope announced. The change back to an open-source license was led by Redis creator Salvatore "antirez" Sanfillipo, who also contributed the new Vector Sets feature for the release. He said:

I'll be honest: I truly wanted the code I wrote for the new Vector Sets data type to be released under an open source license. Writing open source software is too rooted in me: I rarely wrote anything else in my career. I'm too old to start now. This may be childish, but I wrote Vector Sets with a huge amount of enthusiasm exactly because I knew Redis (and my new work) was going to be open source again.

I understand that the core of our work is to improve Redis, to continue building a good system, useful, simple, able to change with the requirements of the software stack. Yet, returning back to an open source license is the basis for such efforts to be coherent with the Redis project, to be accepted by the user base, and to contribute to a human collective effort that is larger than any single company. So, honestly, while I can't take credit for the license switch, I hope I contributed a little bit to it, because today I'm happy. I'm happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

Since last year's license switch, though, the Valkey project has sprung up as a fork under the original 3-clause BSD license.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat, fig2dev, firefox-esr, golang-github-gorilla-csrf, jinja2, libxml2, nagvis, qemu, request-tracker4, request-tracker5, u-boot, and vips), Fedora (firefox, giflib, and thunderbird), Mageia (imagemagick), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (amber-cli, libjxl, and redis), and Ubuntu (h2o, poppler, and postgresql-10).

Version 3.25.0 of the Valgrind dynamic-analysis tool has been released. It has lots of new features, including initial support for RISC-V on Linux, handling zstd-compressed debug sections, integration of the Linux Test Project test suite, support for lots more Linux system calls, and more. It also has plenty of bug fixes, of course.