Pahole (originally "Poke-a-hole") is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved in the kernel's build process to rearrange the information produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although there are plans to render it unnecessary. Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF summit. Interested readers can find his slides here.
[Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1016243/) ## Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security (Queue) **Category:** Linux **Tags:** General **Published:** Mon, 07 Apr 2025 19:56:36 +0000 **TL;DR:** Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences: The ACM Queue article discusses the security problem in the context of a report published in 1974 on Multics security, highlighting that many of the same issues persist today despite advances in software reuse. The article emphasizes the need for continuous improvements to open source software supply chain security to make attacks more difficult and expensive, reflecting the fundamental nature of these problems. ACM Queue looks at the security problem in the light of a report on Multics security that was published in 1974.
We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real. Modern programming environments such as Go, Node, and Rust have made it trivial to reuse work by others, but our instincts about responsible behaviors have not yet adapted to this new reality.[Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1016715/) ## [$] Three ways to rework the swap subsystem **Category:** Linux **Tags:** Linux **Published:** Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:01:21 +0000 **TL;DR:** Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences: The Linux swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized, but has some issues that need to be addressed for modern workloads. Three presenters at the 2025 Linux Summit discussed problems they're trying to solve with the swap subsystem, including proposing additional layers of indirection in the kernel's swap map and enabling large folio swapping. The kernel's swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized — though not always optimized for today's workloads. In three adjacent sessions during the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Kairui Song, Nhat Pham, and Usama Arif all talked about some of the problems that they are trying to solve in the Linux swap subsystem. In the first two cases, the solutions take the form of an additional layer of indirection in the kernel's swap map; the third, which enables swap-in of large folios, may or may not be worthwhile in the end. [Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1016136/) ## [$] The rest of the 6.15 merge window **Category:** Linux **Tags:** General **Published:** Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:42:38 +0000 **TL;DR:** Here is a 2-sentence summary: Linus Torvalds released version 6.15-rc1 and closed the 6.15 merge window on April 6, with a total of 12,633 non-merge changesets incorporated into his repository. This represents a significant increase in changes compared to the entire 6.14 development cycle, with around 6,000 additional changesets merged after the first-half summary was written. Linus Torvalds released 6.15-rc1 and closed the 6.15 merge window on April 6. By that time, 12,633 non-merge changesets had found their way into his repository; that is substantially more than were merged during the entire 6.14 development cycle. Just under 6,000 of those changesets were merged after the first-half merge-window summary was written. [Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1016119/) ## Five new stable kernels **Category:** Linux **Tags:** Linux **Published:** Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:48:00 +0000 **TL;DR:** Here is a summary of the text in 2 sentences: The Linux kernel has released several new stable versions, including 6.14.1, 6.13.10, 6.12.22, 6.6.86, and 6.1.133. These updates contain a small but important collection of fixes across the entire kernel tree. The 6.14.1, 6.13.10, 6.12.22, 6.6.86, and 6.1.133 stable kernels have all been released. They contain a relatively small collection of important fixes across the kernel tree. [Read more](https://lwn.net/Articles/1016664/)The fact that the 1974 Multics review anticipated many of the problems we face today is evidence that these problems are fundamental and have no easy answers. We must work to make continuous improvements to open source software supply chain security, making attacks more and more difficult and expensive.