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The nature and role of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB) is not well-understood, though a recent LWN article shed some light on its role and history. At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), the TAB held a question and answer session to address whatever it was the community wanted to know (video). Those questions ended up covering the role of large language models in kernel development, what it is like to be on the TAB, how the TAB can help grease the wheels of corporate bureaucracy, and more.

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Aleksa Sarai, as the maintainer of the runc container runtime, faces a constant battle against security problems. Recently, runc has seen another instance of a security vulnerability that can be traced back to the difficulty of handling file paths on Linux. Sarai spoke at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference (slides; video) about some of the problems runc has had with path-traversal vulnerabilities, and to ask people to please use libpathrs, the library that he has been developing for safe path traversal.

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The calendar has flipped over to 2026; a new year has begun. That means the moment we all dread has arrived: it is time for LWN to put out a set of lame predictions for what may happen in the coming year. Needless to say, we do not know any more than anybody else, but that doesn't stop us from making authoritative-sounding pronouncements anyway.

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Graphite is an effort to unify illustration, raster editing, desktop publishing, and animation in one browser-based application. The project has been in development since 2021 and announced its first alpha release in 2022. According to creator Keavon Chambers, the project's mission is to become "the 2D counterpart to Blender", by bringing a node-based, non-destructive workflow to 2D graphics. The project, currently still in alpha, is a long way from complete; but it is worth testing for anyone involved with open-source-graphics production. Current builds, from September 2025, include vector-illustration tools, a node-based compositor, and early brush tooling, with broader pixel-based- and photo-editing work still in progress.

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Another year has reached its conclusion. That can only mean one thing: the time has come to take a look back at the predictions we made in January and evaluate just how badly they turned out. Much to our surprise, not all of our predictions were entirely accurate. It has been a wild year in the Linux community and beyond, to say the least.

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The systemd v259 release was announced on December 17, just three months after v258. It is a more modest release but still includes a number of important changes such as a new option for the run0 command (an alternative to sudo), ability to mount user home directories from the host in virtual machines, as well as under-the-hood changes with dlopen() for library linking, the ability to compile systemd with musl libc, and more.

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Arnd Bergmann began his 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference session on the future of 32-bit support in the Linux kernel by saying that it was to be a followup to his September talk on the same topic. The focus this time, though, was on the kernel's "high memory" abstraction, and when it could be removed. It seems that the kernel community will need to support 32-bit systems for some time yet, even if it might be possible to remove some functionality, including support for large amounts of memory on those systems, more quickly.

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The BPF verifier works, on a theoretical level, by considering every possible path that a BPF program could take. As a practical matter, however, it needs to do that in a reasonable amount of time. At the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference, Mahé Tardy and Paul Chaignon gave a detailed explanation (slides; video) of the main mechanism that it uses to accomplish that: state pruning. They focused on two optimizations that help reduce the number of paths the verifier needs to check, and discussed some of the complications the optimizations introduced to the verifier's code.

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At Open Source Summit Japan 2025, Erin McKean talked about the challenges to producing good project documentation, along with some tooling that can help guide the process toward success. It is a problem that many projects struggle with and one that her employer, Google, gained a lot of experience with from its now-concluded Season of Docs initiative. Through that program, more than 200 case studies of documentation projects were gathered that were mined for common problems and solutions, which led to the tools and techniques that McKean described.

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