Linux Foundation Newsletter: July 2025

Linux Foundation
3 months ago

Welcome to the July 2025 edition of the Linux Foundation Newsletter.

This month, our global community of developers, maintainers, and members came together in Denver for Open Source Summit North America. Thank you to our attendees for a vibrant week of innovation, collaboration, and connection! (In case you missed it,SiliconANGLE rounded up 13 key takeaways from the event.)

Here are more of this month’s highlights:

  • Agent2Agent Protocol Project Launches at the Linux Foundation
    The LF announced the launch of the Agent2Agent Protocol Project, an open standard developed by Google to enable secure, interoperable communication between AI agents.
    Read more about the project in Forbes and VentureBeat. 
  • Introducing the OpenSTX Foundation
    The Joint Development Foundation (JDF) launched the OpenSTX Foundation, a new effort to standardize Synchronous Transmission (STX)-based wireless networking. It’s the latest milestone in JDF’s 10-year legacy of enabling impactful open standards.
  • 2025 State of Tech Talent Report Now Available
    LF Research and Linux Foundation Education released the 2025 State of Tech Talent Report, shedding light on AI’s growing impact on technical roles, how organizations are preparing for the shift, and the role of open source and upskilling in bridging the gap.
    Read coverage in ZDNet and The New Stack.
  • Schedule Now Live: Open Source Summit Europe 2025
    The full agenda for Open Source Summit Europe is now available! Join us in Amsterdam, August 25–27, and be sure to check out AI_dev: The Open Source GenAI & ML Summit, co-located on August 28–29.
  • New Leadership for Cloud & Infrastructure Initiatives
    The LF announced the appointment of Jonathan Bryce as Executive Director and Chris Aniszczyk as CTO of Cloud & Infrastructure. Together, they will oversee some of the LF’s largest projects—including CNCF, where Bryce will also serve as Executive Director. 

Read on for more news, research, and opportunities from across the Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation

How Rust’s Debut in the Linux Kernel is Shoring Up System Stability

Linux Journal
3 months ago
by George Whittaker

When Rust first made its way into the Linux kernel in late 2022 (mainline inclusion began with version 6.1), it didn’t merely introduce a new programming language, it marked a profound shift in how we ensure operating system resilience. This article dives into why that matters, how it’s being implemented, and what it could mean for Linux’s long-term robustness.

Tackling the C Legacy: A Fragility Problem

For over three decades, the Linux kernel has been maintained in C, a language that offers both raw control and notorious pitfalls. Manual memory juggling in C leads to high-risk bugs: buffer overflows, phantom pointers, heap corruption, and race conditions. In fact, memory safety issues account for around two-thirds of all kernel vulnerabilities.

Enter Rust: a systems language designed to eliminate whole classes of these errors through strict compile-time checks, without sacrificing low-level efficiency.

Rust’s Safety Toolkit: What Sets It Apart

Rust’s most powerful features for kernel reliability include:

  • Ownership semantics & the borrow checker These enforce rules about who owns a piece of memory at compile-time, no dangling pointers, no double frees.

  • No runtime garbage collector All abstractions compile down to efficient machine code, ensuring performance remains rock-solid.

  • Race elimination for free Rust-language concurrency prevents data races statically, eliminating a whole breed of timing-related bugs.

Combined, these attributes strip away entire categories of vulnerabilities that plague C-based code.

A New Layer: The Rust-for-Linux Framework

The groundwork for Rust modules in Linux was laid with kernel 6.1, and by version 6.8, the first experimental Rust drivers, covering areas like network PHYs and panic QR logging, were accepted. These drivers coexist with traditional C components, forming a hybrid architecture where Rust is used for new drivers while C remains the backbone.

Crucially, this integration includes:

  • A Rust bindings crate to interface safely with C internals.

  • A kernel crate that wraps core kernel structures and APIs for Rust consumption.

This layering enables gradual Rust adoption, developed drivers, not wholesale rewrites.

Early Results: Fewer Bugs, More Confidence

Evidence is already showing promise:

  • Memory safety vulnerabilities drop out as code gets written in Rust, tackling roughly two-thirds of past CVEs.

  • Kernel maintainers are noticeably more comfortable merging Rust patches, citing the added rigor from the borrow checker.

Go to Full Article
George Whittaker

[Testing Update] 2025-07-15 - Kernels, KDE Frameworks, NetworkManager, Poppler, UMU

Manjaro Linux
3 months ago

Hello community, here we have another set of package updates.

Current Promotions
  • Find out all about our current Gaming Laptop the Hero with Manjaro pre-installed from Spain!
  • Protect your personal data, keep yourself safe with Surfshark VPN: See current promotion
Recent News Valkey to replace Redis in the [extra] Repository (click for more details) Previous News Finding information easier about Manjaro (click for more details) Notable Package Updates Additional Info Python 3.13 info (click for more details) Info about AUR packages (click for more details)

Get our latest daily developer images now from Github: Plasma, GNOME, XFCE. You can get the latest stable releases of Manjaro from CDN77.

Our current supported kernels
  • linux54 5.4.295
  • linux510 5.10.239
  • linux515 5.15.188
  • linux61 6.1.145
  • linux66 6.6.98
  • linux612 6.12.38
  • linux615 6.15.6
  • linux616 6.16.0-rc5
  • linux61-rt 6.1.134_rt51
  • linux66-rt 6.6.94_rt56
  • linux612-rt 6.12.28_rt10
  • linux615-rt 6.15.0_rt2

Package Changes (Tue Jul 15 09:23:53 CEST 2025)

  • testing core x86_64: 6 new and 6 removed package(s)
  • testing extra x86_64: 1050 new and 1046 removed package(s)
  • testing multilib x86_64: 4 new and 4 removed package(s)

Overlay Changes

  • testing core x86_64: 9 new and 9 removed package(s)
  • testing extra x86_64: 58 new and 59 removed package(s)

A list of all changes can be found here.

Click to view the poll.

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philm

How Linux Services and Daemons Work (and How to Control Them)

Techmint
3 months 1 week ago
The post How Linux Services and Daemons Work (and How to Control Them) first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

When starting out with Linux, you may encounter the terms “services” and “daemons” quite frequently, which refer to background processes

The post How Linux Services and Daemons Work (and How to Control Them) first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.
Ravi Saive

[Stable Update] 2025-07-12 - Kernels, Systemd, GNOME, NVIDIA, Plasma, Firefox, VLC splits

Manjaro Linux
3 months 1 week ago

Hello community, here we have another set of package updates.

Current Promotions
  • Find out all about our current Gaming Laptop the Hero with Manjaro pre-installed from Spain!
  • Protect your personal data, keep yourself safe with Surfshark VPN: See current promotion
Recent News Valkey to replace Redis in the [extra] Repository (click for more details) Previous News Finding information easier about Manjaro (click for more details) Notable Package Updates Additional Info Python 3.13 info (click for more details) Info about AUR packages (click for more details)

Get our latest daily developer images now from Github: Plasma, GNOME, XFCE. You can get the latest stable releases of Manjaro from CDN77.

Our current supported kernels
  • linux54 5.4.295
  • linux510 5.10.239
  • linux515 5.15.187
  • linux61 6.1.144
  • linux66 6.6.97
  • linux612 6.12.37
  • linux615 6.15.6
  • linux616 6.16.0-rc5
  • linux61-rt 6.1.134_rt51
  • linux66-rt 6.6.94_rt56
  • linux612-rt 6.12.28_rt10
  • linux615-rt 6.15.0_rt2

Package Changes (Thu Jul 10 20:45:34 CEST 2025)

  • stable core x86_64: 81 new and 78 removed package(s)
  • stable extra x86_64: 2628 new and 2743 removed package(s)
  • stable multilib x86_64: 48 new and 48 removed package(s)

A list of all changes can be found here.

Click to view the poll.

Check if your mirror has already synced:

103 posts - 58 participants

Read full topic

philm