The 6.14.7, 6.12.29, 6.6.91, 6.1.139, and 5.15.183 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems.

The Asahi Linux project, which supports Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, has published a progress report ahead of the 6.15 kernel's release.

We are pleased to announce that our graphics driver userspace API (uAPI) has been merged into the Linux kernel. This major milestone allows us to finally enable OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support for Apple Silicon in upstream Mesa. This is the only time a graphics driver's uAPI has been merged into the kernel independent of the driver itself, which was kindly allowed by the kernel graphics subsystem (DRM) maintainers to facilitate upstream Mesa enablement while the required Rust abstractions make their way upstream. We are grateful for this one-off exception, made possible with close collaboration with the kernel community.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, kernel, kernel-rt, redis:6, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Debian (chromium), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, kernel, and thunderbird), and SUSE (nbdkit, open-vm-tools, and rustup).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a somewhat belated memorial for John Young, the founder of Cryptome.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public's right to know.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release of the Rust language, version 1.87.0 was announced live today at the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands. Notable changes include the addition of anonymous pipes to the standard library and the ability for inline assembly (asm!) to jump to labeled blocks within Rust code.

Leon Romanovsky began his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) by explaining that the improved DMA-mapping API that he has been working on is a group effort. He, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Christoph Hellwig, Jason Gunthorpe, and others are proposing to modernize the API and to "make it more suitable for current kernels". He told the assembled storage and filesystem developers that the progress on the proposal has stalled, but that it was the basis for further work in various areas, so he hoped to find a way to move forward with it.

The Tor project has announced the oniux utility which provides Tor network isolation, using Linux namespaces, for third-party applications.

Namespaces are a powerful feature that gives us the ability to isolate Tor network access of an arbitrary application. We put each application in a network namespace that doesn't provide access to system-wide network interfaces (such as eth0), and instead provides a custom network interface onion0.

This allows us to isolate an arbitrary application over Tor in the most secure way possible software-wise, namely by relying on a security primitive offered by the operating system kernel. Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.

The Tor project cautions that oniux is considered experimental as the software it depends on, such as Arti and onionmasq, are still new.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (open-vm-tools), Fedora (dnsdist), Gentoo (Node.js and Tracker miners), Red Hat (kernel and xdg-utils), SUSE (audiofile, go1.22-openssl, go1.24, grub2, kernel-devel, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and python311-Django), and Ubuntu (ruby-rack).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Home Assistant; YaST; bpfilter; Flatpak; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Screen security; Guix on Codeberg; Postgres I/O; GNOME executive director; Nextcloud blog; Podman 5.5.0; OSL sustainability; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.