Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc3 Linus has released https://lwn.net/Articles/1034876/ (called "3.17-rc3" in the email, but the tag in the repository is correct) for testing. "Anyway, things seem fairly normal for this phase in the release cycle, nothing stands out. Please keep testing," https://lwn.net/Articles/1034877/

Stable kernel 6.16.3 The https://lwn.net/Articles/1034856/ stable kernel update has been released. It contains a set of ext4 filesystem fixes that are probably a good thing for any 6.16 ext4 user to have. https://lwn.net/Articles/1034857/

FFmpeg 8.0 released https://ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8.0 of the FFmpeg audio and video toolkit has been released. Thanks to several delays, and modernization of our entire infrastructure, this release ended up being one of our largest releases to date. In short, its new features are: Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728 VVC decoder improvements: IBC, ACT, Palette Mode Vulkan compute-based codecs: FFv1 (encode and decode), ProRes RAW (decode only) Hardware accelerated decoding: Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, OpenHarmony H264/5 Hardware accelerated encoding: Vulkan AV1, OpenHarmony H264/5 Formats: MCC, G.728, Whip, APV Filters: colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, Whisper, and others https://lwn.net/Articles/1034813/

[$] The "impossibly small" Microdot web framework The https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/microdot?tab=readme-ov-file#microdot web framework is quite small, as its name would imply; it supports both standard CPython and https://micropython.org/ , so it can be used on systems ranging from internet-of-things (IoT) devices all the way up to large, cloudy servers. It was developed by Miguel Grinberg, who gave a presentation about it at https://ep2025.europython.eu/ . His name may sound familiar from his well-known Flask Mega-Tutorial, which has introduced many to the https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/ lightweight Python-based web framework. It should come as no surprise, then, that Microdot is inspired by its rather larger cousin, so Flask enthusiasts will find much to like in Microdot—and will come up to speed quickly should their needs turn toward smaller systems. https://lwn.net/Articles/1034121/

Security updates for Friday Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (tomcat), Debian (squid), Fedora (matrix-synapse, rust-slab, socat, and webkitgtk), SUSE (firefox-esr, gdk-pixbuf, gdk-pixbuf-devel, govulncheck-vulndb, rust-keylime, and wicked2nm), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, php7.0, php7.2, php7.4, python3.13, python3.12, python3.11, python3.10, python3.9, python3.8, python3.7, python3.6, python3.5, python3.4, and ruby-webrick). https://lwn.net/Articles/1034755/

Arch Linux recent service outages The Arch Linux project has posted an update about recent service outages that have affected its infrastructure: The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums. We are aware of the problems that this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards. The post contains information on workarounds to use during the service disruption, and notes that Arch is not sharing technical details about the attack or mitigation while the attack is still ongoing. https://lwn.net/Articles/1034716/

[$] Bringing restartable sequences out of the niche The https://lwn.net/Articles/697979/ feature, which was added to the 4.18 kernel in 2018, exists to enable better performance in certain types of threaded applications. While there are users for restartable sequences, they tend to be relatively specialized code; this is not a tool that most application developers reach for. Over time, though, the use of restartable sequences has grown, and it looks to grow further as the feature is tied to new capabilities provided by the kernel. As restartable sequences become less of a niche feature, though, some problems have turned up; fixing one of them may involve an ABI change visible in user space. https://lwn.net/Articles/1033955/

Security updates for Thursday Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libarchive, mingw-sqlite, pki-deps:10.6, and tomcat), Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (python3.6 and suricata), Oracle (go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, libarchive, mingw-sqlite, tomcat, and xterm), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (aws-efs-utils, docker-machine-driver-kvm2, nova, pluto, polaris, and python310), and Ubuntu (ceph, gcc-10, gcc-11, gcc-12, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-oem-6.14, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-iot, poppler, and tiff). https://lwn.net/Articles/1034650/

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 21, 2025 Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: https://lwn.net/Articles/1033740/ : Debian; CPython; huge zero folio; kexec handover; FHS; Koka programming language https://lwn.net/Articles/1033742/ : PyPI domain checks; Firefox 142.0; Git v2.51; Ghostty; LibreOffice 25.8; Zig 0.15.1; Quotes; ... https://lwn.net/Articles/1033743/ : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. https://lwn.net/Articles/1033740/

Adding stubble to Ubuntu's generic Arm64 Desktop ISOs Tobias Heider has https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/what-s-new-for-generic-arm64-desktop-isos-in-25-10/66559 an article that explains changes that are coming for Ubuntu's generic Arm64 desktop ISO images in the 25.10 release. The current solution, Heider says, depends on GRUB features that are unavailable in secure boot mode and require adding device-specific logic to multiple packages. The new solution, called https://github.com/canonical/stubble?tab=readme-ov-file#stubble , is derived from https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-stub.html : A bundled stubble image contains stubble itself, a Linux kernel, a HWID lookup table to map devices to device trees and multiple device trees. When grub loads this "kernel", stubble executes first, reads the SMBIOS table to generate HWIDs, looks for a match in the embeeded lookup table and loads a matching device tree before passing control to the actual Linux kernel. The elegance in this approach lies in how it interacts with the rest of the system. Integrating stubble happens entirely at build time in the kernel package. The stubble package is a build dependency for the kernel. After building the kernel itself, we bundle it with stubble and our DTBs and ship the combined binary instead. The resulting stubble + kernel + dtb bundle can be loaded by grub like any other Ubuntu kernel. No further changes in grub or other packages are necessary to make it work. https://lwn.net/Articles/1034579/