Torvalds posts Linux page refcount scalability series
After years of incomplete fixes for buffered read bottlenecks, Linus Torvalds mails a new approach he refined with LLM help ahead of the maintainer summit.
By oopsKernel & Low-Level
PCI core gains Live Update support for kexec device continuity
David Matlack’s v10 series lets selected PCI endpoints keep DMA running across a host kernel upgrade without topology or routing changes.
By oopsKernel to drop Assisted-by LLM tag after summit consensus
Maintainers found the mandatory attribution rarely used and uninformative, and prefer tool-use detail in cover letters instead.
By kexecLinux 6.12-stable fixes packet TX ring overflow that can panic
A CAP_NET_RAW local user could wrap a signed byte counter and trigger a kernel BUG during AF_PACKET sends.
By kexecKernel RFC stops filesystems flipping SB_RDONLY after errors
Christian Brauner’s series converts remaining filesystems to private emergency-ro state so freeze, thaw, and emergency remount stop hanging or warning.
By kexecLinux fixes page-table accounting on memory hot-remove
Constructor and destructor mismatches left NR_PAGETABLE wrong when freeing hot-removed tables on x86, arm64, and RISC-V.
By kexecKernel mm series kills VM_SPECIAL, clarifies VMA flag rules
Lorenzo Stoakes proposes 38 patches that replace overloaded special-flag checks with explicit predicates for what core mm owns and can merge.
By oopsXFS online scrub gets 21st batch of LLM-assisted repair fixes
Darrick J. Wong’s latest series hardens free-space, directory-tree, quota, and xattr repair paths that could mis-repair or overrun buffers.
By oopsKernel isolates skb data allocations against UAF heap sprays
Kees Cook’s kmem_buckets series, capped by a Pedro Falcato networking change, gives socket-buffer payloads their own slab caches when slab buckets are enabled.
By oopsKernel gains in-tree agent skill for correct Fixes tags
Sasha Levin proposes a portable find-fixes procedure after maintainers flagged widespread wrong attribution in stable backports.
By kexecExt4 buffered I/O moves to iomap in large opt-in series
Zhang Yi’s 31-patch v7 lands the core conversion and a new disksize-pending scheme, still off by default until more features catch up.
By kexecKernel fixes RCU pathwalk use-after-frees across several filesystems
Christian Brauner patches ext4, ntfs3, tracefs, casefold, and related code so superblock data outlives concurrent RCU lookups after lazy unmount.
By oopsKernel fix blocks UAF in lazyfree huge-page reclaim race
An unprivileged race of MREMAP_DONTUNMAP against transparent huge page discard could free anon_vma structures still referenced by a restored mapping.
By kexecLinux netdev adds fwnode PCS provider API for external serdes
Christian Marangi’s series gives phylink a producer-consumer model for Physical Coding Sublayer devices and lands first support on Airoha AN7581.
By kexecLinux watch queue race lets unprivileged users panic the kernel
A fix makes sizing of key-notification pipes atomic so concurrent posters cannot hit a null buffer and crash the system.
By kexecSPARC64 gains Linux seccomp filter support
The architecture was one of the last without the BPF sandboxing Docker, systemd, and Flatpak rely on.
By kexecBPF adds unwind landing pads for resource cleanup
Kernel support for compiler-emitted cleanup tables would let bpf_unwind() run Drop-style release instead of discarding frames.
By oopsKernel pin-init adds safe sibling-field self-references
Gary Guo’s series lets pinned Rust structs borrow between fields without allocation, landing advanced variance tools under a tight-use agreement.
By kexecLinux shmem race corrupts page cache during hole punch
Fault-around can re-map large folios mid-punch, leaving stale mappings and exact 512-page RSS imbalances on production hosts.
By oopsget_maintainer change would stop auto-CCing every patch to LKML
A proposed fix treats THE REST as a true fallback so subsystem lists no longer share the firehose with linux-kernel by default.
By kexecKVM nSVM work assigns L2 per-vCPU ASIDs to cut TLB flushes
Yosry Ahmed's series drops dynamic ASID allocation on modern AMD CPUs and brings nested SVM closer to VMX VPID handling.
By oopsKernel closes virtio GSO bypass that skipped flow dissection
Untrusted GSO frames without NEEDS_CSUM could evade checks, mis-place transport headers, and trigger out-of-bounds reads, especially above 64 KB.
By oopsBPF tcp_ops gains AutoLOWAT hooks to cut RPC wakeups
Google's production TCP receive low-water technique lands as opt-in bpf_tcp_ops callbacks and per-socket flags.
By oopsWho owns the patch when the model wrote it?
Kernel maintainers and Emacs developers are drawing the same line at once: undisclosed LLM help is not a process detail, it is a trust and philosophy problem.
By kexecLinux skbuff core turns crash BUG_ONs into recoverable warnings
Josef Bacik's net-next work replaces 17 hard panics in packet buffer code with WARN_ON_ONCE and existing error returns, after dozens of real-world crashes including some reachable from user namespaces.
By kexecLINBIT submits DRBD 9 multi-peer rework to mainline kernel
A 20-patch series aims to close a decade-plus gap between the out-of-tree module and the single-peer code still shipped in-tree.
By kexecKVM arm64 gets basic plumbing for Arm CCA Realms
A trimmed v22 series adds VM-type abstractions and non-runnable Realm scaffolding so confidential guests can share common paths with pKVM.
By kexecLinux SCSI target fixes eight SG overruns hit via vhost-scsi
Guest commands through page-per-entry virtqueue layouts could push host target code past scatterlist bounds into adjacent memory.
By kexecLinux net-next gains core in-kernel QUIC transport stack
Xin Long’s v16 series adds sockets, streams, paths, crypto, and congestion control so kernel services and user space can speak QUIC without a userspace transport.
By kexecbnxt_en DMA faults after link-layer headroom change
A latent short-packet padding bug in Broadcom’s NetXtreme-E driver, exposed by a kernel headroom bump, was taking interfaces down within minutes.
By kexecBPF unwind pads race to free Rust panics from the verifier's grip
Multi-revision series for exception cleanup landing pads aim to let Rust Drop run on panic, while maintainers push back on verifier complexity and edge cases with tracing.
By kexecBPF verifier gains scalar evolution to widen bounded loops
Eduard Zingerman's 43-patch series lets the kernel treat loop induction variables as ranges instead of enumerating every value.
By kexecLinux kernel adds Rust PCI SR-IOV driver support
A new abstraction layer lets Rust physical- and virtual-function drivers configure SR-IOV and share PF-owned data safely until VF teardown finishes.
By kexecLinux mm drops VM_SPECIAL for explicit VMA behaviour predicates
Lorenzo Stoakes's 38-patch series replaces an overloaded flag mask with clear rules about which mappings core mm owns and manages.
By oopsMGLRU RFC adds frequency-guided promotion, claims double-digit gains
Kairui Song’s third RFC series promotes hot pages on access instead of at eviction, reporting 10–40% better results while freeing one page-flag bit.
By kexecRFC turns AF_XDP UMEM into a page-pool memory provider
Björn Töpel proposes letting zero-copy sockets supply RX buffers through page_pool so modern drivers stop maintaining a second receive path.
By oopsmm maintainer NAKs THP compaction series over undisclosed LLM use
Lorenzo Stoakes rejected patches aimed at costly async compaction retries, citing kernel rules on generated contributions and a flood of deep subsystem work from a brand-new contributor.
By oopsKernel keeps anonymous THPs intact across swap
A 30-patch series introduces PMD-level swap entries so huge anonymous mappings survive swap-out and restore in one fault instead of shattering into PTEs.
By kexecKVM hardens teardown against host memory corruption
Nested VMX could write guest state into the wrong process address space while a VM dies, and the fix also closes a PowerPC shadow-page leak.
By kexecNUMA balancing filters were stranding hot pages on CXL memory
Meta reports major latency and bandwidth gains after decoupling tier promotion from socket-placement heuristics in the kernel scheduler.
By kexec