Kernel Watch
Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.6-rc4, noting that the latest set of fixes were small and predicting larger sets of updates before the final 6.6 release. Thorsten Leemhuis’s Regzbot regression tracking efforts say “there’s not much to report wrt [with respect to] … regressions introduced during the current cycle, as many of those I tracked were fixed”. Fedora is on a quest to “confirm that the License field of all the RPMs is correct”, and this extends to the kernel package. Prarit Bhargava let everyone know that “during our investigation we discovered two files in the kernel … which from their descriptions imply that the code contained is not GPL”. The offending files are firmwares for AppleTalk network devices, the drivers for which have not been updated since 2006. Given that AppleTalk is long since dead, the fast path option was to remove the drivers, but Jilayne Lovejoy also added links to a way that developers can request help adding correct licensing information in future situations.