Linux inventor (and chief maintainer) Linus Torvalds says that the kernel is getting more reliable, and he is not anxious about it being used in safety-critical systems. Torvalds, being interviewed on stage at the Open Source Summit in Lyon yesterday, told onlookers: "I don't do speeches any more." The Finnish-American …

Linus Torvalds has stuck to his “no swearing” resolution with his regular Sunday night Linux kernel release candidate announcement. Probably the most important aspect of the weekend's release candidate is that it, in a way, improves the performance of STIBP, which is a mitigation that stops malware exploiting a Spectre security …

The new, improved, and chilled-out Linus Torvalds emitted the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.20 over the weekend. He decided not to repeat the jump from 3.19 to 4.0 that happened last year, thus avoiding leaping from 4.19 to 5.0, because “I didn't want to make a pattern of it,” he told the kernel's official …

Woke Linus Torvalds has returned from a four-week exile to once again steer the Linux kernel, the widely used software project he founded nearly 30 years ago. The American-Finnish ex-firebrand programmer is back as its official custodian, according to temporary lead Greg Kroah-Hartman in an announcement for version 4.19 of the …

Linux kernel firebrand Linus Torvalds has apologized for his explosive rants, and vowed to take a break from the open-source project and seek help. In a mailing list message on Sunday, Torvalds admitted his "flippant attacks in emails" to fellow Linux programmers and project contributors "have been both unprofessional and …

The Linux Kernel Maintainers' Summit was planned for Vancouver, Canada, in October – but it's been moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. Because kernel chief Linus Torvalds slipped up and booked a family holiday there. No, really – the change of plan was announced in this post to the Kernel Summit Discussion mailing list by core …

Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has taken the rare step of reverting a kernel release candidate – after it went sour. All looked sunny enough on Sunday evening, when he set Linux 4.18-rc7 free to roam: “Unless something odd happens, this should be the last rc for 4.18,” the chief penguinista wrote. Something odd did, …

Linus Torvalds has given the Linux kernel development community a bit of a touch-up, after finding some contributions to Linux 4.18 complicated the kernel development process. In his post announcing release candidate 2 of Linux kernel 4.18, Torvalds mentioned “some noticeable filesystem updates, particularly to cifs.” “I'm …

Linus Torvalds has decided the world’s not ready for version 5.0 of the Linux Kernel, so he’s given us version 4.17 instead. Torvalds toyed with the idea of calling this release 5.0, because it passed the six million git objects mark. But he also said version numbers are meaningless and he might not call it 5.0. The latter …

Linus Torvalds has suggested that the next Linux kernel could earn the number “5.0”. Torvalds’ suggestion came in his announcement of the first release candidate for version 4.17, which he said “does not seem to be shaping up to be a particularly big release, and there seems to be nothing particularly special about it.” …

Linus Torvalds has pulled the trigger and released version 4.16 of the Linux kernel, thereby killing off his own suggestion this release might need an extra week to mature. And here's some fair warning: version 4.17 is set to remove support for eight CPU architectures. That would mean Linux will no longer officially work on …

Linus Torvalds is pretty sure he’ll release version 4.16 of the Linux kernel next week. The development cycle for this version has been quiet. So quiet that Linus’ weekly pronouncements have been brief, dull and unremarkable, just like each weekly code rollup. But in the last week, Torvalds told the kernel mailing list on …

The folk at OpenWall have called for assistance to create a security module to watch Linux kernels for suspicious activity. In the company's explanation, the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is described as a module that “attempts to post-detect and hopefully promptly respond to unauthorised modifications to the running Linux …

Linus Torvalds has hit the Go button on version 4.15 of the Linux kernel, blaming the Meltdown and Spectre CPU design flaws for the delay and warning of more pain to come as fixes trickle out for silicon architectures. “This obviously was not a pleasant release cycle, with the whole meltdown/spectre thing coming in in the …

Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux 4.15 needs a ninth release candidate, making it the first kernel release to need that much work since 2011. Torvalds flagged up the possibility of an extra release candidate last week, with the caveat that “it obviously requires this upcoming week to not come with any huge surprises” after …

Linus Torvalds last week rushed a patch into the Linux kernel, after researchers discovered the patch for 2016's Dirty COW bug had a bug of its own. Dirty COW is a privilege escalation vulnerability in Linux's “copy-on-write” mechanism, first documented in October 2016 and affecting both Linux and Android systems. As The …

Linus Torvalds has offered a lengthy explanation of his thoughts on security, in which he explained a calmer and more detailed version of his expletive-laden thoughts on the topic earlier this week. Torvalds was angry that developers wanted to kill dangerous processes in Linux, a measure that would have removed potential …

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has apologised – a bit – for calling some security-centric kernel contributors “f*cking morons”. Torvalds unleashed a profanity-laden rant at Google developer Kees Cook, over the latter's proposal to harden the kernel. Another Google security chap, Matthew Garrett, asked Torvalds: “Can you …