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🎲 PHP version 8.4.26RC1 and 8.5.11RC1

Posted by Remi Collet on 2026-09-11 04:32:00 UTC

Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and as base packages.

RPMs of PHP version 8.5.11RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 43-45 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.26RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 43-45 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

ℹ️ PHP version 8.3 is now in security mode only, so no more RC will be released.

ℹ️ Installation: follow the wizard instructions.

ℹ️ Announcements:

Parallel installation of version 8.5 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php85

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php84

Update of system version 8.5:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.5
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

Update of system version 8.4:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

ℹ️ Notice:

  • version 8.5.11RC1 is in Fedora rawhide for QA
  • version 8.6.0beta3 is also available in the repository
  • EL-10 packages are built using RHEL-10.2 and EPEL-10.2
  • EL-9 packages are built using RHEL-9.8 and EPEL-9
  • EL-8 packages are built using RHEL-8.10 and EPEL-8
  • oci8 extension uses the RPM of the Oracle Instant Client version 23.26 on x86_64 and aarch64
  • intl extension uses libicu 74.2
  • RC version is usually the same as the final version (no change accepted after RC, exception for security fix).
  • versions 8.4.19 and 8.5.4 are planed for March 12th, in 2 weeks.

Software Collections (php84, php85)

Base packages (php)

The syslog-ng Insider 2026-09: Performance; Openssl; Containers; Learning;

Posted by Peter Czanik on 2026-09-10 11:50:35 UTC

Dear syslog-ng users,

This is the 141st issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

New performance tuning possibilities in syslog-ng

On April’s fool’s day, I shared that syslog-ng can reach 7 million EPS. This test lab result was in part possible thanks to a few performance enhancements coming to syslog-ng version 4.12. How 7 million EPS is possible? Before diving deeper, let me repeat it: 7 million EPS is just a lab testing result, not (yet) possible in the real world. However, the technologies enabling this are already available on the development branch of syslog-ng, or have been available for ages, just not tested or promoted enough.

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/new-performance-tuning-possibilities-in-syslog-ng

Nightly syslog-ng containers based on Alma Linux

For many years, the syslog-ng project provided container images based on Debian. Most of our users run syslog-ng on RHEL & compatibles, and have asked for an RPM-based container. So, nightly containers based on Alma Linux are now also available. A while ago, I prepared a small test project to run syslog-ng in an Alma Linux container: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/experimental-syslog-ng-container-image-based-on-alma-linux However, that was only an experiment which I never updated. Fast forward to today: nightly syslog-ng containers based on the latest syslog-ng git snapshot package builds are now available on the Docker Hub!

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/nightly-syslog-ng-containers-based-on-alma-linux

The status of OpenSSL 4.0 support in syslog-ng

OpenSSL 4.0 was released just over a month ago. So, how is its support progressing in syslog-ng? Well, Git master already supports it, and the patch is easy to backport to earlier releases. At the same time, version 4.12 will support OpenSSL 4.0 out of the box.

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-status-of-openssl-4-0-support-in-syslog-ng

Learning syslog-ng

How can you learn syslog-ng? There are many possibilities, depending on your time and budget. Possibilities range from tutorial series through reading the documentation to instructor-led training. Find out which one is for you!

https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/learning-syslog-ng

syslog-ng logo

Your feedback and news, or tips about the next issue are welcome. To read this newsletter online, visit: https://syslog-ng.com/blog/

SystemIO conflicts are not firmware bugs

Posted by Matthew Garrett on 2026-09-09 18:15:55 UTC

I’m looking at something entirely unrelated, but tripped over some search results that made me realise that a lot of people still think getting errors like ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x0000000000001828-0x000000000000182F conflicts with OpRegion 0x0000000000001800-0x000000000000187F indicate a firmware bug. This is generally untrue. We need to dive a little into what ACPI is to clarify why.

The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface1 specification defines a whole bunch of stuff, but what’s interesting to us here is the hardware abstraction it performs. While PCs are nominally a well-defined platform that’s really not true at the hardware level once you get beyond a certain level of complexity. When you suspend a system you want to power down the hardware in the correct order, for instance, and knowing what that order is requires you to know details about the specific motherboard design. The approach taken in the embedded world is to just bake that knowledge into the OS in some form, which is how we end up with Devicetree. ACPI takes an alternative approach - rather than provide that information as data that has to be consumed by OS drivers, it distributes it as code.

The ACPI Source Language, or ASL, is a simple language that gets compiled into a bytecode that’s then interpreted by the OS at runtime. One of the features of this language is the ability to define “Operation Regions”, effectively structure definitions that describe access to underlying hardware. Let’s imagine a simple device with two exposed registers. The first is an index register - it describes which internal register we want to access. The second is a data register, where reading it gives us the value of the internal register whose address is currently in the index register, and writing to it modifies that register. An example operation region declaration would look something like

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OperationRegion(OPR1, SystemIO, 0x400, 0x2)
Field(OPR1, ByteAcc, NoLock, Preserve)
{
  INDX, 8
  DATA, 8
}

This defines an operation region called “OPR1” at IO port 0x400, 2 bytes long. Inside it are two 8-bit fields, INDX and DATA. These are to be accessed one at a time, do not need the ACPI interpreter to take a global lock when accessing them, and if a subset of the register is modified then the other values should be preserved (irrelevant in this case since the fields are only a byte wide). Now any references to INDX or DATA in this scope will trigger accesses to those registers. So, a method to read the value of register 0x03 would look something like:

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Method (RD03) {
  INDX = 0x3
  Return (DATA)
}

ie, set INDX to 3, and then read the value of DATA and return it. But! What if another ACPI method is running at the same time? Let’s say we have one that writes to register 0x05:

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Method (WR05, 1) {
  INDX = 0x05
  DATA = Arg1
}

What happens if RD03 executes while we’re part-way through WR05? INDX might get reset to 0x03, and now WR05 will modify register 0x03 instead of 0x05. Oh no! But we can avoid this - we declare a mutex (Mutex (MUTX, 0x00)), and update our methods to be something like:

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Method (RD03) {
  Acquire (MUTX, 0xFFFF)
  INDX = 0x3
  Local0 = DATA
  Release (MUTX)
  Return (Local0)
}

Method (WR05, 1) {
  Acquire (MUTX, 0xFFFF)
  INDX = 0x05
  DATA = Arg1
  Release (MUTX)
}

Each method takes a lock (waiting up to 0xffff milliseconds and then erroring out if it doesn’t), and performs the access. There’s now no chance of a race. Phew!

Now suppose someone writes a Linux driver for this piece of hardware. It accesses the hardware directly, with no knowledge of ACPI. What stops the driver from racing against one of the ACPI access methods? Nothing at all. Oh no! Again! This isn’t hypothetical, by the way - here’s a relatively harmless example, but back in the day we did trip over cases where temperature monitoring chips would be accessed by the firmware and Linux simultaneously and as a result you might end up thinking you’re reading a temperature when you’re actually reading a status flag, resulting in an impossibly high temperature and an immediate thermal shutdown.

In this case, the kernel saves you from this (potentially hardware damaging) outcome by printing a message like ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x0000000000000400-0x000000000000401 conflicts with OpRegion 0x0000000000000400-0x0000000000000401 (OPR1), telling you that the kernel has detected that a driver is attempting to allocate IO ports 0x400-0x401, but that there’s an ACPI operation region called OPR1 that is claiming the same addresses. The kernel isn’t in a position to know what type of access the firmware might perform in that region, so assumes that it might be dangerous and blocks the driver from loading.

But all is not lost! The kernel also prints some helpful advice, ACPI: If an ACPI driver is available for this device, you should use it instead of the native driver. And ACPI tables will often actually have a definition that looks like this:

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Device (HDW1)
{
  Name (_HID, "VEND0001")
  OperationRegion(OPR1, SystemIO, 0x400, 0x2)
  Field(OPR1, ByteAcc, NoLock, Preserve)
  {
    INDX, 8
    DATA, 8
  }
  Mutex (MUTX, 0)
  Method (RD03) {
    Acquire (MUTX, 0xFFFF)
    INDX = 0x3
    Local0 = DATA
    Release (MUTX)
    Return (Local0)
  }

  Method (WR05, 1) {
    Acquire (MUTX, 0xFFFF)
    INDX = 0x05
    DATA = Arg1
    Release (MUTX)
  }
}

which defines an ACPI device and associated methods. The _HID field defines the device type, and a Linux driver can be written that will be automatically loaded if a device with type VEND0001 is seen. That driver can then call ACPI methods associated with the device and access the resources in a way that matches the firmware’s expectations.

(Interested in writing such a driver? I wrote a guide back in 2009)

The firmware did absolutely nothing wrong here2, but trying to load the native driver will generate an error and the internet will tell you that PC firmware developers are incompetent3 and you should pass a kernel argument that overrides this behaviour and it never did them any harm, and it probably won’t do you any harm either but it might and you might never know why your system occasionally wedges or catches fire.

  1. The ACPI spec used to live at acpi.info, but sadly that seems to have vanished some time after UEFI took over stewardship of the spec ↩︎

  2. You might argue that the firmware should simply not do anything at runtime because it is not the firmware’s job to do that, and I do understand that and you can certainly boot with acpi=off if you want to and no ACPI code will be executed at runtime. Let me know how that goes. ↩︎

  3. I’m not going to present an opinion on that here, merely say that this provides no supporting evidence for that assertion ↩︎

From August 31 to September 06

Posted by Aurélien Bompard on 2026-09-09 08:53:00 UTC

A dominant focus across multiple Fedora working groups this week is the preparation for the Fedora 45 Beta release, with teams like Quality, Release Engineering, Server, and various architecture SIGs actively managing blocker bugs, freeze exceptions, and candidate composes. Simultaneously, groups are laying the groundwork for Fedora 46, evaluating new Change Proposals—such as the integration of the Crystal programming language—and kicking off the F46 wallpaper design process. Another major common theme is process and infrastructure refinement; the Council, FESCo, and Infrastructure teams are establishing new policies for Fedora Forge repository usage, Matrix moderation, and Change Proposal discussions. Finally, significant effort is being directed toward system cleanup and consolidation, highlighted by the Docs and Localization teams archiving obsolete, end-of-life documentation, the Rust and EPEL groups retiring outdated packages, and the Atomic and CoreOS communities forming a joint working group to unify base image development.

Announcements

In exciting hardware news for the broader Linux community, the Framework Laptop 12 Arrives with Fedora Pre-installed, offering a hardware-validated, out-of-the-box experience featuring the Fedora KDE edition. For users looking to proactively protect their hardware, a newly published guide explains how to Monitor Your Drive Health with Performance Co-Pilot on Fedora, allowing administrators to catch SSD and NVMe failures via temperature spikes and error counts before catastrophic data loss occurs.

For contributors and developers, three Change Proposals have been announced for upcoming Fedora releases. Packagers need to be aware of the F46 Change Proposal: Libical4 (system-wide), which transitions to the 4.x series and introduces API/ABI breakages that will require dependent applications to be rebuilt or patched. To help optimize the build ecosystem, packagers are encouraged to test the F46 Change Proposal: Thin LTO Build Flag (self-contained) (noted as intended for F47), which proposes a new %slim macro to reduce RAM requirements and compilation times compared to standard fat LTO objects. Finally, the F46 Change Proposal Crystal Language (system-wide) aims to introduce official native support for the Crystal programming language, bringing its compiler, shards dependency manager, and a highly secure, offline "Shard-as-RPM" packaging model into the Fedora ecosystem.

Council

The Fedora Council focused heavily on policy, governance, and infrastructure guidelines this week. Key discussions included defining the Fedora Forge usage policy, where a compromise was reached to require a "tickets" repository for organizational contact rather than implementing automatic archiving of inactive repositories. The Council is also reviewing a proposed Authorized Analytics Volunteer Agreement to ensure GDPR compliance for community members analyzing contributor data, which will soon be escalated to Red Hat Legal.

In addition to infrastructure policies, the Council is evaluating how to handle trademark guidelines for internally modified Fedora images, seeking to clarify rules around remixes that are not distributed publicly. Furthermore, with the transition of the Fedora Community Architect role, the Council is deliberating whether to formally maintain and reassign Fedora's Digital Public Goods Alliance representative responsibility or drop the commitment altogether.

Decisions

  • A consensus was reached on the Fedora Forge usage policy to drop automatic repository archiving in favor of mandating a "tickets" repository for all organizations to ensure a public point of contact. The policy is now advancing to a formal ratification vote.
  • The Council accepted a temporary workaround for handling private issues on Fedora Forge, determining that it satisfies their immediate requirements for restricted communications and clearing the ticket from their perspective.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo focused extensively on evaluating the F45 Incomplete Changes Report during their meeting (URL), determining which features are safe to land late and which must be postponed. Several changes were punted to next week due to absent owners, while others like Libxml215 were formally deferred to Fedora Linux 46.

FESCo also processed major tickets, finalizing a shift in the Fedora Changes discussion process and officially gating stable release updates on rmdepcheck. Additionally, new Change Proposals for Fedora 46 and 47 were introduced on the forums for community feedback, including the introduction of the Crystal programming language.

Decisions

  • Change Proposal discussions will now occur exclusively on the devel mailing list, with Discourse acting as a read-only mirror (URL).
  • Stable release updates will now be gated on rmdepcheck (URL).
  • The Libxml215 Change was deferred to Fedora Linux 46. FESCo requires the creation of a libxml2_2.13 compatibility package as a separate source package (URL).
  • The Enable Shadow Stack by Default on x86_64 Change is officially approved for Fedora 46, but requires Nvidia and PyPI Python wheel compatibility fixes before the F46 contingency deadline (URL).
  • The Relocate RPM repository configs to /usr Change's remaining parts are permitted to land before the final freeze (URL).
  • The Filter Fedora Flatpaks for Atomic Desktop v2 Change is officially declared completed (URL).

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

The Packaging Committee held a meeting and processed several tickets this week, focusing heavily on reviewing new packaging guidelines for the Crystal programming language. The committee worked closely with the proposal's author to define standard naming conventions, dependency resolution strategies, and unbundled shard-as-RPM models to prepare for Crystal's integration into Fedora 46.

Additionally, the committee merged guidelines regarding a limited aws-lc exception for cryptographic policies, closed tickets clarifying that RPM Provides tags are not inherited, and updated guidelines to mandate the %openpgpverify macro. Progress was also made on defining multi-version guidelines for NodeJS streams.

Decisions

  • Approved merging the guidelines documenting an exception for limited aws-lc use within CryptoPolicies (PR #1566).
  • Agreed that the upcoming Crystal compiler should be packaged under the source package name crystal-lang rather than reclaiming the 15-year-old crystal package name to avoid messy git history. Crystal shard source RPMs will be unconditionally prefixed with crystal- (Meeting).
  • Merged and closed PR #1562 to adopt the %openpgpverify macro by default in the packaging guidelines.
  • Merged and closed PR #1563, adding a note to the guidelines clarifying that Provides tags are not inherited by subpackages or source RPMs.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, the Mindshare committee focused heavily on expanding Fedora's global footprint by reviewing 10 tickets centered around event presence, travel support, and swag distribution. A dominant theme across the community was the preparation for late-2026 regional FOSS conferences, with the committee working to balance budget requests against the need for in-person advocacy. Discussions highlighted a push to empower local ambassadors and foster deeper connections with enterprise Linux users, students, and broader open-source enthusiasts across the globe.

In addition to event planning, administrative efforts were made to improve how the committee tracks its quarterly budget and activities. A recurring priority within the committee's evaluations is the need for comprehensive post-event reporting and the active recruitment of local contributors to represent Fedora. This strategy aims to reduce travel costs while organically expanding the local ambassador network, ensuring that Fedora maintains a sustainable and high-visibility presence at regional events.

Decisions

  • Approved a $150 budget request to cover event operations and localized swag for Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026 in the Philippines.
  • Approved a travel and hotel budget request for representation and speaking at LinuxDays 2026 in Prague.
  • Approved travel funding for the Fedora Podcast to attend, record on-site interviews, and provide coverage at Texas Linux Fest 2026.
  • Approved travel and accommodation support to run a Fedora sub-booth focusing on APAC adoption at IndiaFOSS 2026 in Bangalore.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Diversity & Inclusion

Preparations for the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity have officially kicked off. Following a recent call for volunteers and ideas for the upcoming virtual event, the organizers posted a brief status update to the planning discussion confirming that work is underway and more information will be shared shortly.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group addressed critical regressions, evaluated Flatpak metadata certification, and prepared for upcoming releases this week. A major fix was pushed to Fedora 44 for a GDM auto-login regression, eventually culminating in a new upstream GDM 50.3 release. In meetings, the Working Group discussed the Fedora 46 Beta freeze, noting standard GNOME 51 test results, and investigated Rawhide compositor issues alongside Fedora 45 blocker bugs.

Additionally, the community was invited to test a newly proposed Google Drive integration for GNOME. Discussions also took place regarding the enablement of the new in-kernel NTFS driver in kernel 7.1, with community members sharing alternative akmod packaging solutions in the interim.

Decisions

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group focused on preparations for Fedora 45, including identifying topics for the upcoming Fedora Magazine "What's New" article and participating in the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting.

Additionally, the team is tracking two significant bugs in Fedora Kinoite: a Mesa green/purple tint issue related to AV1 hardware acceleration in Chrome on AMD GPUs, and a Discover crash regression that prevents updates from auto-installing.

Decisions

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

During the week of August 31 to September 6, 2026, the Server Working Group primarily focused on restructuring the Fedora Server documentation and reviewing Fedora 45 release testing. The QA team introduced a proposal to reduce the list of release-blocking storage interfaces during installation, aiming to drop legacy interfaces like PATA, SCSI, and Hardware RAID while retaining modern ones like SATA, NVMe, and SAS. Additionally, Fedora 45 Beta preparations are underway with a Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for September 7.

Decisions

  • The Server documentation will feature a new main section titled "Postinstallation Customizations", which will be placed second in the navigation tree immediately after the "Installation" guide (decided in the weekly meeting).
  • The top-level documentation navigation bar names, including "Virtualization" and "Containerization", will remain unchanged, leading to the closure of ticket #224.
  • The naming of sub-articles within the new Postinstallation Customizations section will be decided via a formal two-week vote in the Working Group's ticket tracker rather than by an immediate vote during the meeting.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team focused on server migrations, infrastructure improvements, and routine maintenance. A significant effort is underway to transition services like Mailman to RHEL 10 and to prepare storage provisioning for the production Forgejo dist-git instance. The Matrix moderation bot is being officially hosted on Fedora infrastructure, bringing new proposed policies for official Matrix rooms that group owners should review.

Additionally, developers tackled compatibility issues with Ansible and Python's deprecated ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1 on Fedora 45 during staging deployments. The team also reviewed AWS resource usage for August and issued a warning for owners to tag their AWS resources with FedoraGroup to avoid deletion. Several user-reported issues were resolved, including proxy bugs affecting Matrix Fractal clients, upstream login errors in Libravatar, and clarifications on MirrorManager's geographic mirror selection logic.

Decisions

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, Release Engineering focused heavily on the Fedora 45 cycle, which remains in Beta Freeze. QA and Releng coordinated on multiple Blocker Review Meetings and successfully produced several F45 Beta candidate composes (including Beta 1.1 and 1.2), alongside handling stable push requests for blockers and freeze exceptions.

Beyond the F45 release tasks, Releng resolved significant issues blocking updates, such as a database timeout bug in Bodhi that stalled the Fedora 44 Flatpak (F44F) updates-testing compose, and an issue with compose-tracker not opening tickets. Other routine operations involved un-stalling EPEL package assignments, handling branch requests, generating detached signatures for the ignition release, and preparing Koji infrastructure (like updating koji-image-builder and coordinating a new GPG key for ELN).

Decisions

  • Accepted Bug 2524952 (kmscon) and Bug 2526398 (anaconda failure reporting) as Beta Blockers during the F45 Blocker Review meeting.
  • Accepted Bug 2526278 (initial-setup on RPi4) as a Beta Freeze Exception, while rejecting Bug 2524726 (pcmanfm-qt) as a Freeze Exception. (F45 Blocker Review meeting)
  • Delayed decision (punted) on Bug 2524940 (plasma-login-manager) to request more logs from reporters, and closed Bug 2502678 (plasma-discover update notifications) as NOTABUG. (F45 Blocker Review meeting)
  • Decided to use a Koji side-tag and proven packager merges for the libical 4.x rebuild rather than relying solely on the F46 mass rebuild to handle incompatible updates. (Ticket 13504)

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group focused heavily on Fedora 45 Beta readiness, resolving blocker bugs as the beta go/no-go date approaches. A major community criteria change proposal was initiated to drop older, untestable storage interfaces (like PATA and HW RAID) from the release-blocking list.

In addition, the team finalized their requirements for the upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, and successfully returned issuebot to production for managing Ask Fedora common issues. Guidelines were also discussed for attributing LLM/AI-generated analysis in bug reports to avoid unwarranted confidence.

Decisions

  • Accepted Bug 2526398 as a Beta Blocker since Anaconda fails to report crashes to Bugzilla.
  • Accepted Bug 2524952 as a Beta Blocker due to a kmscon null pointer dereference crashing the text-mode initial setup.
  • Accepted Bug 2526278 as a Beta Freeze Exception regarding wrong DRM card selection on Raspberry Pi 4.
  • Rejected Bug 2524726 (pcmanfm-qt update) as a Beta Freeze Exception.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

The Design team kicked off the F46 Wallpaper project, choosing mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck as the inspiration and establishing a schedule running through December 2026. A call for contributors is open for sketches and ideas around themes like minimal surfaces and geometric analysis. Additionally, the team progressed on the Fedora Design Docs Revamp by posting drafts for the "How to Join" guide and FAQs, which will remain under review before publication, and decided to simplify the design for Ticket 40. Notably, the final badge design request accepted through the ticket queue was completed for the EPEL steering committee.

Decisions

  • The team will no longer accept badge design requests through their ticket queue, following the completion of the EPEL steering committee badge. (design#60)
  • Publication of the newly drafted FAQ and "How to Join" documentation is deferred until the end of the current or next sprint to allow for sufficient review. (Meeting Log)
  • Ticket 40 will be reverted to an earlier, simplified version of the design to improve clarity by reducing the amount of information displayed. (Meeting Log)

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs group engaged in community discussions around system optimization and focused heavily on cleaning up outdated documentation. On the forums, users shared helpful resources, including a tutorial on using powertop2tuned for better battery life on minimal Fedora installations and a bash script to display active and installed kernels.

Behind the scenes, the team is working on archiving and removing obsolete documentation. This includes an ongoing effort to clear out hundreds of ancient Docs-related pages from the Fedora Wiki, utilizing a newly developed script to identify pages older than seven years. Additionally, a new ticket was opened to remove or archive documentation for End-Of-Life (EOL) Fedora releases.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) teams are preparing for the upcoming Fedora 45 i18n test week starting September 7, which will feature a new section for testing installation-related issues. Additionally, three i18n changes submitted for Fedora 45 are now in the ON_QA testing phase, as confirmed during the group's weekly meeting.

In localization news, the team prepared an article proposal detailing the successful migration of the MATE Desktop translation project from Transifex to Fedora's Weblate instance, simplifying collaboration for the project's 200,000 words. The team is also managing routine repository maintenance, including centralizing documentation issue trackers, managing translation memory for retired atomic desktop variants, and clearing archived guides from Weblate to free up resources.

Decisions

  • The archived and unpublished Sysadmin and Install guides will be removed from Weblate to free up system resources, but their git repositories containing the translations will be preserved. (Ticket #74)
  • Requests to hide End-of-Life (EOL) Fedora documentation releases from Weblate will not be handled by the Localization team; they must be directed to the Fedora Docs team, as Weblate mirrors their publication choices. (Ticket #75)
  • Translation errors found in upstream software (such as KDE Plasma) will not be fixed downstream in Fedora; users reporting these bugs are directed to collaborate with the respective upstream project's translation team. (Ticket #76)

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

Jilayne Lovejoy notified the Legal group about a proposed update to the SPDX license inclusion guidelines that could allow linux-firmware licenses to receive an SPDX license ID.

Contributors submitting requests to the SPDX license list are also reminded to explicitly mention if the license is from or included in Fedora, as this helps the SPDX team prioritize those requests.

Learn more about the Legal team.

COPR

Copr has begun migrating existing projects to use Pulp for storing build results, processing them in alphabetical order by owner name (excluding Packit projects). As a result of this migration process, users' builds may temporarily get stuck in a pending state. Users can check if their accounts are currently affected by looking at the blocked_owners field in the Copr backend configuration file.

Decisions

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group focused on major package updates and repository lifecycle management. Notably, ffmpeg is being updated from version 5 to 7 in EPEL 9 Next, with a compatibility package provided for applications unable to migrate yet. Additionally, significant work is underway to retire EPEL 10.1 and 10.2, archiving them while shifting focus to EPEL 10.3.

The team also addressed infrastructure issues, fixing a symlink churn problem that was serving the incorrect EPEL 10 release package to RHEL users. Regular meetings indicated smooth operations overall, with several package updates merging successfully, including major updates for cef and obs-studio.

Decisions

  • Update ffmpeg in EPEL 9 Next (for CentOS Stream) from version 5 to 7, while introducing an ffmpeg5 compatibility package to prevent breakages. (Source)
  • Archive EPEL 10.1 and transition towards the retirement of EPEL 10.2 in favor of EPEL 10.3.
  • Update cef (Chromium Embedded Framework) and obs-studio to align with the latest upstream releases. (Source)

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN SIG held a brief meeting this week. Due to light attendance, there were no specific topics discussed beyond a general check-in. The next meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at 12:00 EDT.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic Initiative focused heavily on a proposal to unify base image development between the CoreOS and Atomic/bootc communities. A working group is being formed to collaborate on shared artifacts and technical processes, aiming for tangible results by the Fedora 46 release.

In addition to organizational efforts, the group addressed several technical support requests and policy discussions. Key topics included resolving a missing GPG key error during Fedora 45 upgrades, clarifying that tuned should handle power management instead of including powertop by default, and discussing how derived builds handle /opt//usr/local symlinks and Fedora trademark compliance.

Decisions

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

This week, the CoreOS group held a meeting and saw updates regarding the newly proposed systemd-sysexts SIG. A major highlight is the ongoing effort to unify CoreOS and Image Mode/Bootc in Fedora; after a positive reception at the Fedora Bootc community meeting, dedicated sessions are being scheduled to explore proposals. In the forums, the proposal to create a systemd-sysexts SIG took a step forward with the creation of an official Fedora Project Wiki page for the group.

During their weekly meeting, the team reviewed various Fedora 45 change proposals, confirming that CoreOS is largely unaffected by changes like disabling the CRYPTO USER API or removing the NIS profile. They noted that Ignition Native Butane Support is rolling out to the next stream for early feedback, and identified the need to release updates for coreos-installer, afterburn, and zincati to support OpenSSL 4.0.

Decisions

  • The group decided to roll out Ignition Native Butane Support to the next stream (which is Fedora 44-based) to gather early feedback before promoting it to testing. Source
  • New releases of coreos-installer, afterburn, and zincati will be prioritized in the upcoming sprint to ensure compatibility with OpenSSL 4.0. Source

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The Fedora IoT Working Group held a meeting to review branch statuses during the Fedora 45 freeze period. OpenQA tests for the stable branch (F44) are mostly green, aside from a known Clevis issue, and upgrades from F44 to F45 have tested successfully. A minor rebase timeout failure was noted but deemed safe to ignore.

Regarding other branches, Rawhide (F46) recently failed due to a Koji authentication error (GSSAPIAuthError), which the team will continue to monitor. Additionally, a known bug affecting ignition-edge has been resolved by a new upstream version, which now needs to be built and integrated into the distribution.

Decisions

  • A recent F45 rebase test failure will be ignored, as it was attributed to a timeout and previous manual tests were successful.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

This week, the Fedora ARM group's activity was centered around hardware compatibility inquiries and upcoming quality assurance coordination. A community member inquired about the availability of an installable Fedora 45 image for the Raspberry Pi 5 Rev 1.1, following earlier troubleshooting of older releases.

Additionally, the Fedora QA team announced the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting for the upcoming Beta release. The meeting is intended to review proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions, with community voting heavily encouraged beforehand to expedite the process.

Learn more about the ARM team.

RISC-V

The Fedora RISC-V group is on target to release the F45 rebuild alongside primary architecture images, maintaining strong sync parity with upstream. Discussions during the September 1st meeting highlighted current hardware stability issues, specifically GCC internal compiler errors on K1/K3 boards that are likely linked to new glibc vector optimizations and kernel/OpenSBI limits. LLVM last-mile integration work is also progressing.

In hardware news, SiFive announced the 32-core P870-D "Big Sky" development server. While pricing and shipping dates remain unannounced, preliminary remote testing by community members indicates it is a highly capable platform for future RISC-V datacenter and build farm usage.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security group held a meeting this week to discuss the drafting of a proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG. The focus was on defining a technical, non-ideological scope for the SIG, which would involve privacy-related packaging, analyzing packages for privacy issues, maintaining a list of problematic packages, and potentially providing counter-packages or configuration overrides.

During the open floor, the group also addressed the high rate of misfiled CVEs affecting Fedora, stemming from the abandonment of a prototype vulnerability scanner by Red Hat ProdSec. The group discussed ongoing efforts to improve CVE mapping to Fedora packages through PURL generators for various language ecosystems, and agreed to create a master tracking bug to monitor this progress.

Decisions

  • Agreed to create a master tracking bug to monitor the progress of Package URL (PURL) metadata generation, which will serve as a reference point for Red Hat ProdSec to help address the high false-positive rate of misfiled CVEs.
  • Agreed to refine the draft proposal for the Fedora Privacy SIG by establishing a strictly technical scope that explicitly excludes legal compliance evaluation.

Learn more about the Security team.

Gaming

The developer of Inertia Blast II, an open-source remake of the ZX Spectrum game Thrust II built with LÖVE2D, has successfully tested the game and several other ports on a phone running Fedora PocketBlue Remix. The games run natively on the platform with full touch control support.

Due to time constraints, the developer is unable to create and maintain official Fedora packages, AppImages, or Flatpaks themselves. They are reaching out to the broader Fedora community to find volunteers interested in packaging, distributing, or beta testing these titles.

Learn more about the Gaming team.

Perl

During this week, the Perl group updated the perl-Date-Manip package to upstream release 7.00. Automated pull requests were generated by Packit Bot for both the Fedora 45 branch and the Rawhide branch, both of which were subsequently merged by Jitka Plesnikova.

Decisions

  • Merged PR #12 to update perl-Date-Manip for f45 to upstream release 7.00 (Source).
  • Merged PR #13 to update perl-Date-Manip for rawhide to upstream release 7.00 (Source).

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

Carl Byington continued a discussion regarding a Fedora packaging question for dupeguru. Because the upstream project is unresponsive regarding their use of generic folder names (like core) that occupy the global Python module space, Carl created a fork incorporating open pull requests. He reorganized the source tree by moving the folders down one level, safely moving the installed code into a /usr/lib64/python3.14/site-packages/dupeguru namespace to prevent conflicts with other packages.

Decisions

  • Because upstream is unresponsive, it was decided to use a custom fork of dupeguru that reorganizes the source tree into a specific dupeguru namespace, preventing the package from polluting the global Python module space and conflicting with other packages.

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

The Rust group focused heavily on mitigating security vulnerabilities and cleaning up unmaintained packages this week. Major actions included submitting repository updates across multiple Fedora and EPEL branches to address security advisories in lru, and tracking newly disclosed vulnerabilities in hickory-dns.

Additionally, the team is actively porting packages away from several unmaintained crates, retiring the orphaned const-cstr package, and initiating a large cleanup of outdated GTK Rust bindings to remove technical debt from the repositories.

Decisions

  • Retired the orphaned and unmaintained const-cstr package, which had an active security advisory (issue #2).
  • Submitted updates for lru across Rawhide, Fedora 43-45, and EPEL 9-10 to resolve RUSTSEC-2026-0253 (issue #39).
  • Initiated the deprecation and removal process for the outdated gtk-rs-core v0.20 and gtk4-rs v0.9 compatibility packages by filing tracking bugs for affected downstream applications (issue #40).

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

Orphaning packages

Package updates

Contribution opportunities

Testing and Quality Assurance: There are numerous accessible testing opportunities for general users to help stabilize upcoming releases. Non-group members are highly encouraged to vote on proposed Fedora 45 blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app prior to review meetings for Workstation, KDE, ARM, and Release Engineering. Contributors can participate in the Kernel 7.2 Test Week, the I18n / Anaconda WebUI Test Day (announcement), and upcoming test days for CoreOS, GRUB EFI, and Anaconda F45. Users can also test the proposed Google Drive integration in GNOME, EPEL 10 Mailman server builds in COPR, ffmpeg 7 in EPEL 9 Next, the Robosignatory replacement, or verify performance for the mobile game Inertia Blast II.

Community Organization, Design, and Content Creation: Creative and organizational skills are needed across several groups. The Design team is calling for sketches and concepts for the F46 Wallpaper Project (details). Volunteers with video editing, design, marketing, and logistics skills can help run the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity by joining the discussions or the Matrix room. Community advocates are actively sought to staff event booths at All Things Open 2026 and Software Freedom Day Bukidnon 2026. Writers and translators can contribute by pitching the "What's New in Fedora KDE" article, cleaning up obsolete Docs Project Wiki pages, or translating MATE Desktop.

Packaging, Development, and Debugging: Technical contributors can assist by adopting over 100 orphaned packages, conducting a package review swap for the GRUB EFI (devel request) or dupeguru packages, or packaging Inertia Blast II. The newly formed Crystal SIG needs packagers and testers to review guidelines and manage applications via their Matrix room. Rust developers are needed to port dependents away from obsolete crates like bincode, rustls-pemfile, and proc-macro-error, update GTK4 applications, and resolve Hickory-DNS vulnerabilities. Python developers can write a fedora-messaging automation consumer for RISC-V builds, while debuggers can analyze Kinoite AV1 tint issues, Discover crashes, IoT Clevis bugs, and RISC-V GCC core dumps.

Policy, Architecture Planning, and Analytics: Contributors can provide critical feedback on policies, including the storage interfaces criteria change (devel thread), the Fedora Forge usage policy, the Matrix moderation setup, and SPDX firmware guidelines. Data scientists are asked to review the Authorized Analytics Volunteer Agreement. Community members interested in technical direction can help define the scope of the Privacy SIG or join the Atomic and CoreOS unification planning discussions via Forgejo, GitLab, GitHub, or the new systemd-sysexts SIG. Finally, AWS administrators must ensure their resources include the FedoraGroup tag.

From Livestream To Library: Publishing Flock To Fedora’s Session Recordings

Posted by Fedora Magazine on 2026-09-09 08:00:00 UTC

Intro

After months of good old fashioned struggle with Google Drive and YouTube Studio, we were finally able to prepare the video sessions from the 2025 and 2026 Flock To Fedora event livestreams. These are now released to our YouTube and PeerTube communities. This article describes the details of the entire process that got us from the raw footage to the final uploads. It documents all our learnings along the way from the vendor selection to the FFMPEG configurations!

The Famous Last Words

While I was on my way back from Prague, after participating in Flock To Fedora 2026, I thought to myself – “Uploading the session recordings to YouTube should not be that difficult, right?”. I was, of course, very humbled when I instinctively reached out to (erstwhile Fedora Community Architect) Justin Wheeler to obtain the livestream files. I was very surprised to find that there indeed was an existing process, so I did not necessarily have to reinvent the wheel.

Recording Spreadsheets – Flock 2025

A couple years back, Adrian Edwards had worked on the tooling to more or less streamline slicing, thumbnailing, metadataing (are those actual words?) and uploading to our YouTube channel. There were, of course, changes to be made on the documented processes, but since the uploads for the 2025 events were partially done, that was a good starting point. We were yet to receive those from the 2026 events so I had some time to acclimate to the existing methods.

Recording Spreadsheets – Flock 2026

Defective Detective

Of course, the first roadblock was as foundationally trivial as having wrong paths for the footage grouping. Flock To Fedora 2025 occurred during four days (i.e. 04th June 2025 to 07th June 2025) and across four distinct tracks (i.e. Plenary, Topaz, Opal and Quartz). This meant I had to untangle the messily organized footage files. As we were already a year late to upload the Flock To Fedora 2025 recordings, we knew that we could take some time to do it right.

YouTube Playlist – Flock 2025

I onboarded Shounak Dey, a fellow Fedora Infrastructure contributor who had previously helped me with the Fedora Badges Revamp Project, to help me out with this. He was able to maintain spreadsheets for the footage files and their corresponding mappings. That allowed us to quickly move to the next step. While I initially started using SponsorBlock to annotate the video timestamps, I quickly reverted back to manually eyeballing them using VLC Media Player.

Google Drive – Flock 2025

More Hands, Quick Hands

Delegation was key here. While Shounak worked on manually annotating the video timestamps, I focussed on slicing sessions from the footage files using the LosslessCut application. With Adrian’s Python scripts coming in the clutch and Justin giving the necessary access to Shounak, the only thing holding us back was the network bandwidth at that time. We earmarked some changes for the documentation updates, but we had to keep those for later when the processing was complete.

Configuring Tracks – LosslessCut Application

Justin and I were planning on a phased video release model, with sessions coming out on PeerTube first, before coming to YouTube. The videos being released gradually on both the platforms would ensure that we were able to retain the audience footfall and general relevance. In between – we had to bide our time if we wanted to succeed. I was gradually getting back to my day job as I worked through my event report for the Flock To Fedora 2026 conference.

Configuring Outputs – LosslessCut Application

Where Are Those Templates?

The processing scripts and relevant documentation were available, however, I had to go looking for the thumbnail templates. It did not help that those files were on a separate repository, thus making it difficult for some contributors not as involved as us to be able to discover them organically. Shounak kept jotting down the improvements to the documentation that he would make once we were done with processing livestreams for both 2025 and 2026.

Thumbnail Template – Flock 2026

What did not help was the buggy nature of the InkScape plugin for generating thumbnails using the discovered template called NextGenerator Addon. Honestly, I was at my wits end — as I was no designer and had no idea how to tailor fit the generated templates from the flaky extension. With some help from Emma Kidney and Madeline Peck, we were able to drive it home as they began working on the templates for the 2026’s edition of the Flock To Fedora 2026 event.

Thumbnail Proposal – Flock 2026

Lay of the Land

By the last week of June 2026, we had received the footage files from Flock To Fedora 2026. I had access to the Fedora Project’s YouTube channel, from back in the Fedora Websites And Apps days, and had begun uploading the sessions while marking them as unlisted. The learning ordeal from the footage processing of Flock 2025 gave us enough idea about how to proceed. This sped things up significantly once we were done with the growing pains of the required tooling.

YouTube Playlist – Flock 2026

I focused on uploading the 2025 slices on Google Drive for Justin to be able to upload them later onto PeerTube. At the same time Shounak stepped up to participate in the Marketing Team as an official member. There were some missing recordings that we pursued with Dorota Volavkova for multiple weeks. This was in vain and we ultimately settled for the lower quality YouTube VODs. We were more or less gradually closing on the finish line with this entire initiative. Or at least, so we thought…

Google Drive – Flock 2026

No Audio? No Problemo!

This week we faced a new problem! About ten of our uploaded videos from Flock To Fedora 2025 did not have an audio playback in them. The audio tracks from the source files were unable to be muxed into the MP4 format. We had to losslessly convert the PCM format audio to the AAC format first. This came to our attention from a YouTube viewer’s comment message. We had to resort to unlisting the affected videos and uploading them as a separate entry.

LosslessCut highlighting muxing exceptions

With Shounak pushing his documentation changes, I worked through this problem since this had to resolve as soon as possible. Late uploads for 2025 was already bad enough. We did not want the affected videos to create a new problem. After spending almost half a day learning FFMPEG’s configs and documenting those, I was able to put it back into Justin’s hands to reschedule the release of the (now fixed) session recordings.

Shounak’s suggested documentation changes

Outro

One of the (rather unarguably) best ways to fix a problem is to first face the problem itself before rolling up your sleeves to resolve it. What I initially thought would be a very atomic and less influential contribution method ended up touching on a wide part of Fedora Project’s community processes. Not only were we able to get these videos out for 2025 and 2026, but we were also able to mark a path forward for those who come after us wanting to do this for future events.

Session recordings

A Review of postmarketOS on the Fairphone Gen 6+

Posted by Phoebe Harris on 2026-09-08 18:53:00 UTC

Over the past 2 weeks, I've been daily-driving postmarketOS with phosh on a Fairphone Gen 6+ (From now on called FP6). I had previously been using a Fairphone 4 (FP4) with lineageOS, but I've had a good bit of experience with degoogled Android before that, including CalyxOS on the FP4 and /e/OS on a Samsung Galaxy S8. I'd like to document the parts I like about it, and expectedly, the parts that really aren't ready for use yet.

I hadn't been planning on getting a newer Fairphone for a while (at least wait til Gen 7), but I left my FP4 in a Tesco and it got nicked. Oh well ;P

What Went Well

Networking and Personal Information Management

GNOME's always had very strong online account features, and has the combination of not assuming that the user uses a particular ecosystem (see: /e/OS basically assumes that you have a Nextcloud). GNOME doesn't care if you use Nextcloud, Microsoft, or just something that exposes a webDAV and IMAP - it'll all appear in system apps all the same.

Part of this seems to me to come from some of the specific benefits of a coordinated vision that Linux can benefit from in a way that's been mostly inaccessible to degoogled Android ROMs. While obviously Linux distributions are made of a lot of components by a lot of different projects, the UI layer is usually centralised under one project and one vision (GNOME, KDE, elementaryOS, etc). On the other hand, a degoogled Android ROM's UI features are going to be a mixture of AOSP, F-Droid, microG, Aurora store, bespoke apps, and so on.

Compare, for instance, PIM in a degoogled ROM to that in Phosh. In Phosh, you sign in in GNOME Online Accounts, and you have access to mail (if using a GNOME mail client), contacts, calendars, the works. In LineageOS, I have to think about DAVx5, ICSx5, the Nextcloud app, and whatever calendar and contacts app my ROM is using. The difference in experience is night and day. /e/OS tries to paper over this but doesn't - I still find the same OS flows taking me to DAVx5/ICSx5 under the hood. In general, I find a lot of the time when Android ROMs try to integrate OS-level features they really just look like having an entry in settings redirect to an app - I see you, Seedvault hiding in LineageOS settings. In Linux, the whole stack belongs to us, and is centralised in single projects with a coherent vision and broad user-interface guidelines that allow third-party apps to feel like they fit in.

Obviously this is a little limited by GNOME not really having a good mail app at the moment, but it looks like Stamp is getting really good. Plus, some of the ongoing work into further networking/PIM features in GNOME are really exciting - the upcoming local-first contacts portal and password autofill portal come to mind.

Mapping

Android has long had a bit of a maps problem. In general, the choice facing users has been to use some of the big nonfree mapping apps, like Google Maps or Magic Earth, or to forego important features like public transport routing. The open-source Android world is starting to catch up, with efforts such as an /e/OS maps app with transitous routing in alpha and work on integrating public transit into CoMaps ongoing, but GNOME Maps has public transport routing, not in alpha, right now, and has done for a while.

The Hard Parts

Hardware support

Fairphones tend to be among the better-supported of pmOS devices, but the Fairphone 6 is a new phone (roughly a year old), and the hardware support really isn't there yet. Speakers don't work, microphone doesn't work, neither does fingerprint, NFC, or the camera. I had been betting on mobile data, SMS and bluetooth working (they're documented as working on the pmOS wiki), but I've had no luck. The system UI recognises that I have a SIM card, but I never connect properly, and BlueTooth has similar issues. With BlueTooth headphones out, that leaves me with basically no routes to play audio, and without being able to authenticate text messages, I can't use Signal, even with Linux-first clients like Flare. Basically, I have a computer that can connect to WiFi and has no audio.

Dual-booting doesn't work particularly well either. You can install pmOS on an SD card and dual-boot it with /e/OS, but there's no ability to choose a boot partition at boot - you have to flash a new boot partition remotely each time.

Waydroid

Waydroid is a compatability layer that allows running Android apps on Linux systems. Theoretically, it should allow me to run the Android apps I need to run on my phone which don't have Linux clients - in particular, my Railcard, WhatsApp, my bank, etc.

I've had no luck in getting it working - upon opening the app or invoking it from a CLI, it just causes the UI to flicker. I know other users have managed to get it working on FP6 hardware, but even then they've had Internet access issues.

The screen flickering after opening Waydroid

UI polish

GNOME is a great desktop system, but Phosh and GNOME apps in many places don't feel polished. GNOME Apps benefit a lot from buttons having a lot of reactivity. A button takes a different appearance when the mouse is hovered over it, and a different appearance again when pressed

Pressing the back button in a GNOME desktop

On pmOS (Phosh + GNOME apps), this reactivity doesn't feel appreciable, meaning you don't get feedback on buttonpresses in a way that feels a bit choppy. I'm not sure pressing an app in the app list has any kind of tap feedback besides opening the app, for instance. Looking more closely, standard GTK UI buttons have feedback, but the visible press is less long on, for instance, back buttons, compared to Android.

  • Pressing the back button in phosh
  • Opening an app in phosh

Many other gestures and interactions feel unpolished in a way that I don't have the UI skills to reliably identify.

Copy-paste is also a bit of a mess. Different apps and system dialogues seem to have different avenues for copy-pasting. Some don't seem to be copy-pastable at all, and those differences are just across GNOME apps! In particular, I've found no way to paste a password into GNOME Online Accounts. Even just a paste button in the on-screen keyboard would provide a big improvement, but of course I'd really like to see a standard system text popup menu. I don't have the technical knowledge on Wayland and the XDG Desktop Portals to know what that looks like architecturally, but the current system isn't very good IMO.

Misc

Chatty isn't a very complete piece of software as it stands. Notably, it includes Matrix messaging features, but doesn't seem to be able to handle encrypted messaging at all. To an extent, non-Element Matrix clients lagging behind is pretty expected, but this feels like a pretty basic feature to not have working, especially for something installed out of the box.

The UI allows setting a pin, and actively encourages it with a numpad password box. However, setting the password to something with letters still has the login screen bring up a numpad by default, creating a number PIN with a fairly normal amount of digits for a phone PIN will be rejected by the OS, and upon switching from the numpad to the keyboard in the login screen, you can't go back without reentering the login screen.

Phosh gives you a popup asking about USB developer mode on the plugging in of any USB cable, even a dumb power cable.

Conclusion

With the mobile data, driver, and Waydroid issues unfortunately I don't think I can stick with postmarketOS for now. But I'm hopeful for the future! There's been a lot of movement on mainline drivers for FP6 recently (although from what I gather a lot of the work is vibecoded), and I think the big strides taken in the past ten years by the Linux desktop have proven that free software communities can create high-quality consumer software.

Generally, as time's gone on the feasibility of free Android ROMs has been more and more difficult. Google's regularly slashed the update cadence of their publicly available security patches, and whereas once upon a time AOSP would have several high-quality apps in them, now new app development is mostly kept as nonfree Google additions. It remains to be seen whether the new sideloading lockdowns will strike a big blow to the degoogled Android ecosystem (remember - even if our degoogled ROMs don't lock down on sideloading, the loss of accessibility could damage the health of projects like F-Droid and NewPipe). In any case, I hope you don't think me too hasty in seeing this as a bit of a sinking ship. Mobile Linux matters.

The success of free software initiatives have often depended on our ability to rise to crises. When Windows users railed against AI slop changes and the deprecation of Windows 10, we were able to step in with a high-quality operating system to offer. Now that European governments are realising the insanity of having most of their critical infrastructure rely on American companies, once again, Linux is ready to step in.

Sometimes we fail - when Discord users railed against overbearing age attestation requirements, Matrix was not well placed to step in - it currently lacks basic features like screen sharing with audio in calls, or server roles. Hence, nothing changed.

What about when the next crisis in the mobile ecosystem happens? When Android pushes a user-hostile update that the degoogled ROMs are unable to counter, will mobile Linux be able to step up?

I hope the answer is yes, and I'm gonna throw some money towards postmarketOS. In a year, I'll write a second blog post assessing whether the following areas have improved:

  • Driver support (speakers, microphone, mobile data, BlueTooth, fingerprint, NFC, camera)
  • Ease of dual booting pmOS and Android.
  • Waydroid support
  • UI look and feel
  • Chatty polish

Neuroscience AI assistant updates: scope, funding, ideas, and a name: Klea

Posted by Ankur Sinha on 2026-09-08 16:16:56 UTC

In a past post, I had written about my current project, where I am building an AI assistant for Neuroscience.

To quickly recap the motivation, for projects that we neuroscientists would like to undertake, including both experimental and modelling projects, we are often (even regularly) hampered by the question of "how are we going to carry out this investigation?" This is because the methods/techniques/code that need to be implemented are non-trivial to create. A lot of what we do is at the "edge of science", which means that it hasn't really been done before. Even if it has, for example an analysis methodology/technique may be well established, it still needs to be implemented in the specific novel context of the research project.

Research projects nowadays are necessarily multi-disciplinary. Experimental projects require experimentalists, that may be specialists in neurobiology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, to know enough about analysis and the tools for analyses---generally writing code. Modelling folks like me, on the other hand specialise in modelling and software development but need to know enough neurobiology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology to be able to build models. We speak slightly different languages, because each specialism has its own jargon, and so the same word can mean different things in different domains.

Generative AI based tools can help with this. To begin with, because they work on the basis of semantic similarity (meanings of words), they can cover different domains. Next, we're seeing more and more tools that are built around LLMs now being able to carry out tasks. I won't go into the AGI debate, or into a discussion whether LLMs and these systems are intelligent here. I have my views, like everyone else. What I will say is that I have found these tools useful, with caveats.

The most common caveat is the lack of correctness. LLMs work towards completion by generation---there may be multiple ways of completing a task, not all of them correct.

For science, correctness is paramount. We'd rather have a slow system that takes longer to develop than one that was generated in a day but that does not guarantee correctness. It isn't enough to be evidence based either. We must be able to clearly trace the evidence.

Klea

The goal of this project is to develop an AI assistant grounded in evidence. Since I last wrote, we submitted this as a project proposal to the BioFAIR Pathfinders call and were accepted. This means I now have a one year grant to work on this particular project.

To make it easy to find, we came up with "Klea" as a name. It's really "KLEA" for "Knowledge Validated Expert Asistant". klea- is also a nice prefix for commands. Though it's being developed primarily with Neuroscience as the test domain, it's a general framework and tool that can be used for any domains.

As noted in the previous post, Klea includes two components:

  • a RAG_
  • a task/coding agent (WIP)

Klea RAG

Klea-RAG is fairly complete. You can install it from pypi: pip install klea-rag (or uv pip install klea-rag if you prefer uv like me). It also includes utilities to create your vector stores and attach them to the RAG. You can also attach MCP servers. Note that the RAG is limited to information retrieval, and while you can attach MCP servers to it that can carry out write operations, that is discouraged. A complete walkthrough on setting it up is here in the cookbook.

Now, as noted earlier, it isn't just enough to try to be correct. It's important to be able to confirm how the system arrived at its result. For this, the framework has grown inspection capabilities, along with a brand new NiceGUI frontend since Streamlit was a bit too basic to add the additional UI elements.

The inspection features use LangGraph's streaming features to allow each node to emit progress events. The RAG emits information from each node:

  • classification
  • semantic search keywords
  • retrieval results
  • answer generation and evaluation.

The figures below make it easier to see.

Screenshot showing Klea RAG's new interface with a query and result

The new Klea RAG interface is divided into several components:

  • the left side bar: for managing chats, deleting user data
  • the main central panel: the chat and inspection views live here
  • the right hand side bar for information and state updates: the top lists the model in use and so on, the bottom bit shows state updates sent by the graph nodes.

In this screenshot, one can see the chat view. I asked a question, and the system generated an answer, and listed references. These references are created from the curated documentation that was provided to the system in the vector stores. So, it is not hallucinated. The right hand pane lists all the documents that were referenced along with their scores.

Users can verify the information using the references and the referenced documents.

The top part of the right hand panel also allows users to change models as required. One can set default models, as I've done here, but users can then use their own models and API keys to use different models that they have access to.

Screenshot showing Klea RAG's new interface's inspection pane showing different node outputs

The next image shows the inspection pane. Here, one can review all the steps that system took to arrive at this answer, with the input/outputs, retrieved information, tool calls and so on. This is of great value---because it allows us to verify the results have greater confidence in the system's outputs.

I now have multiple deployments of the RAG on HuggingFace. One for NeuroML, one for Open Source Brain (this includes an MCP server to query a database of Open Source Brain repositories), and a third one for OpenWorm.

These are all containerised, and you will notice that they follow the same deployment pattern. You can clone one of these HuggingFace spaces and tweak the configuration to set up your personal deployment.

Note that you can also just use the RAG locally on your machine. It's designed to work for both use cases---local use and deployments. I tend to mostly use it locally.

Klea Agent

The agent is now a work in progress, with the RAG relatively stable. I still don't promise API compatibility though, since the general framework may change/evolve as we get feedback from our users. It'll follow the same framework, but we make some architectural decisions to make it "science worthy", because otherwise, why not just use an existing coding agent?

I'll write about this more in coming posts, but you can follow progress on the GitHub repository in the meantime. Klea has detailed documentation at https://neuroklea.org, and in the GitHub repository---ADRs, C4 diagrams, nodes, commented code. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Feedback is always welcome.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Posted by Akashdeep Dhar on 2026-09-07 18:30:15 UTC
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Hello travelers!

Loadouts for Genshin Impact v0.1.19 is OUT NOW with the addition of support for recently released artifacts like Heart of the Furnace and Scarlet Proof, recently released characters like Alyosha and Odette and for recently released weapons like Blade of Atonement, Clash of Kings, Covenant of Frost and Snow, Echoes of the Heart, Emberwell, Exaiphanes Blade, Forged by the Golden Melody, Frostbreath, Heretic's Molten Blade, Jade Vista, Song of the Vigil and Whitelake Frostfeather from Genshin Impact v7.0 Phase 2. Take this FREE and OPEN SOURCE application for a spin using the links below to manage the custom equipment of artifacts and weapons for the playable characters.

Resources

Installation

Besides its availability as a repository package on PyPI and as an archived binary on PyInstaller, Loadouts for Genshin Impact is now available as an installable package on Fedora Linux. Travelers using Fedora Linux 42 and above can install the package on their operating system by executing the following command.

$ sudo dnf install gi-loadouts --assumeyes --setopt=install_weak_deps=False

Installation command for Fedora Linux

Changelog

  • chore: remove obsolete Fedora packaging files by @w3lld1 in #588
  • Sign the release artifacts with Sigstore by @gridhead in #592
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #590
  • Parallelize Nuitka builds and resolve Sigstore action version by @gridhead in #593
  • Replace extra-arguments with jobs for parallelization by @gridhead in #594
  • Publish to PyPI before Sigstore signing by @gridhead in #596
  • Remove stability days check from the Renovate config by @gridhead in #595
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #597
  • Update actions/setup-python action to v7 by @renovate[bot] in #598
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #599
  • Update sigstore/gh-action-sigstore-python action to v3.5.0 by @renovate[bot] in #600
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #601
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #634
  • Create issue ticket template for weapon additions by @gridhead in #621
  • Create issue ticket template for weapon modifications by @gridhead in #624
  • Create issue ticket template for character additions by @gridhead in #622
  • Create issue ticket template for artifact additions by @gridhead in #623
  • Create issue ticket template for artifact modifications by @gridhead in #626
  • Introduce the recently added character Alyosha to the roster by @gridhead in #627
  • Use Inter font instead of IBM Plex Sans by @gridhead in #630
  • Optimize test cases to consume less memory by @gridhead in #633
  • Center the children dialog on the parent window by @gridhead in #632
  • Adapt modal dialog tests from .show() to .exec() by @gridhead in #636
  • Avoid header style overriding by parent widget stylesheets by @gridhead in #638
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #640
  • Introduce the recently added character Odette to the roster by @gridhead in #628
  • Fallback to IBM Plex Sans font from Inter by @gridhead in #645
  • Resolve ScanDialog parent passing usage inconsistency by @gridhead in #648
  • Resolve the MTKY assets alignment issue by @gridhead in #639
  • Introduce the recently added artifacts Heart of the Furnace by @gridhead in #649
  • Add additional description in artifact Viridescent Venerer by @gridhead in #651
  • Introduce the recently added artifacts Scarlet Proof by @gridhead in #650
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Whitelake Frostfeather by @gridhead in #652
  • Add additional description in weapon Cashflow Supervision by @gridhead in #658
  • Add additional description in weapon Kagura's Verity by @gridhead in #659
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Echoes of the Heart by @gridhead in #653
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Song of the Vigil by @gridhead in #656
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Covenant of Frost and Snow by @gridhead in #657
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Emberwell by @gridhead in #654
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Clash of Kings by @gridhead in #661
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Blade of Atonement by @gridhead in #655
  • Automated dependency updates for GI Loadouts by @renovate[bot] in #663
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Forged by the Golden Melody by @lxr14589-ai in #664
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Frostbreath by @gridhead in #667
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Jade Vista by @gridhead in #666
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Heretic's Molten Blade by @gridhead in #668
  • Introduce the recently added weapon Exaiphanes Blade by @gridhead in #669
  • Enable double quotes in formatting runs by @gridhead in #662
  • Stage the release v0.1.19 for Genshin Impact v7.0 Phase 2 by @gridhead in #670

Artifacts

Two artifacts have debuted in this version release.

Heart of the Furnace

  • Bonus for Two Piece Equipment
    ATK increased by 18%.
  • Bonus for Four Piece Equipment
    Increases the equipping character's ATK by 12% for 12s when they trigger a Stellar Glimmer reaction or deal Stellar Glimmer reaction DMG. Also increases Stellar Glimmer reaction DMG dealt by all nearby party members by 50%. The above effects can trigger even when the equipping character is not on the field, and the DMG bonus from multiple Artifact Sets with the same name do not stack.
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Heart of the Furnace - Workspace and Results

Scarlet Proof

  • Bonus for Two Piece Equipment
    ATK increased by 18%.
  • Bonus for Four Piece Equipment
    Increases the equipping character's CRIT Rate by 16%, and their Stellar Swirl reaction dealt by 40%, for 10s after they trigger a Stellar Swirl reaction.
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Scarlet Proof - Workspace and Results

Characters

Two characters have debuted in this version release.

Alyosha

Alyosha is a polearm-wielding Electro character of four-star quality.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Alyosha - Workspace and Results

Odette

Odette is a sword-wielding Cryo character of five-star quality.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released

Odette - Workspace and Results

Weapons

Twelve weapons have debuted in this version release.

Blade of Atonement

Repentance and Redemption - Scales on ATK%.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Blade of Atonement - Workspace

Clash of Kings

Without Heed for Day nor Night - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Clash of Kings - Workspace

Covenant of Frost and Snow

The Law's Equilibrium - Scales on DEF%.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Covenant of Frost and Snow - Workspace

Echoes of the Heart

Echo of a Vow - Scales on ATK%.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Echoes of the Heart - Workspace

Emberwell

Starfire Upon the Snowplains - Scales on Elemental Mastery.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Emberwell - Workspace

Exaiphanes Blade

Traveler's Path - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Exaiphanes Blade - Workspace

Forged by the Golden Melody

Day and Night in Counterpoint - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Forged by the Golden Melody - Workspace

Frostbreath

A Cast Real Far - Scales on Energy Recharge.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Frostbreath - Workspace

Heretic's Molten Blade

Lone Light's Blessing - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Heretic's Molten Blade - Workspace

Jade Vista

A Candle Woven From the Night - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Jade Vista - Workspace

Song of the Vigil

Cadence of Days Gone By - Scales on Elemental Mastery.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Song of the Vigil - Workspace

Whitelake Frostfeather

Snow Swan's Finale - Scales on Crit Rate.

Loadouts For Genshin Impact v0.1.19 Released
Whitelake Frostfeather - Workspace

Appeal

While allowing you to experiment with various builds and share them for later, Loadouts for Genshin Impact lets you take calculated risks by showing you the potential of your characters with certain artifacts and weapons equipped that you might not even own. Loadouts for Genshin Impact has been and always will be a free and open source software project, and we are committed to delivering a quality experience with every release we make.

Disclaimer

With an extensive suite of over 1616 diverse functionality tests and impeccable 100% source code coverage, we proudly invite auditors and analysts from MiHoYo and other organizations to review our free and open source codebase. This thorough transparency underscores our unwavering commitment to maintaining the fairness and integrity of the game.

The users of this ecosystem application can have complete confidence that their accounts are safe from warnings, suspensions or terminations when using this project. The ecosystem application ensures complete compliance with the terms of services and the regulations regarding third-party software established by MiHoYo for Genshin Impact.

All rights to Genshin Impact assets used in this project are reserved by MiHoYo Ltd. and Cognosphere Pte., Ltd. Other properties belong to their respective owners.

Rolling Wireless RW350R-GL / Fibocom FM350R-GL (5G module) on Linux

Posted by Andreas Haerter on 2026-09-07 12:28:00 UTC

We use ThinkPad X13 Gen 6 21RMCTO1WW laptops among others. They shipped with a 5G WWAN module that Lenovo sells as the “Rolling Wireless RW350R-GL 5G CAT19”. ModemManager detects it but cannot bring the radio up, because the module ships FCC-locked.

For the unlock procedure on Linux, Lenovo publishes lenovo-wwan-unlock. It works, but it is a closed binary running as root (sic!), supports only Ubuntu and Fedora, refuses to start on machines outside a hardcoded allowlist, and declines to unlock the modem when it finds a US SIM (for regulatory reasons, since it then assumes FCC jurisdiction). None of that is necessary. ModemManager has shipped a working unlock procedure for this module since version 1.24. It is just not enabled by default.

We have submitted a merge request that reads the OEM string at runtime instead of hardcoding one vendor’s value. Until it is merged and new ModemManager versions arrive downstream, the commands below may help you to get the module working today.

Which module is this?

The same piece of hardware appears under a lot of names, which makes searching for it frustrating. If any of these match your machine, this post applies to you:

Name Where you see it
Rolling Wireless RW350R-GL Lenovo sales and order pages
Fibocom FM350R-GL the actual design, and the FCC filing
MediaTek T700, 5G Solution 5000 lspci output
14c3:4d75 PCI ID, shared with the Fibocom FM350-GL
2099:3552 PCI subsystem ID, Rolling Wireless
mtk_t7xx kernel driver
Dell DW5931e Dell’s name for the same family

Rolling Wireless was spun out of Sierra Wireless in 2020 and is now a Fibocom subsidiary, so the RW350R-GL is a rebadged FM350R-GL. Lenovo lists it for the X13 Gen 6 and Gen 7, the T14s 2-in-1 Gen 1, and the P16 and P16v Gen 3. Because ModemManager matches only on 14c3:4d75, the instructions below also cover the plain Fibocom FM350-GL in machines like the X1 Carbon Gen 10 and 11.

Enabling the unlock

If you installed lenovo-wwan-unlock before, remove it first. Its own script shadows the one from ModemManager, in /usr/lib64/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d/ on Fedora and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d/ on Debian and Ubuntu. The uninstall script handles both:

git clone https://github.com/lenovo/lenovo-wwan-unlock.git
cd lenovo-wwan-unlock && chmod ugo+x fcc_unlock_uninstall.sh && ./fcc_unlock_uninstall.sh

Then enable ModemManager’s own script. Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu all ship it in the same place:

sudo install -d -m 0755 "/etc/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d"
sudo ln -s -f "/usr/share/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.available.d/14c3" \
              "/etc/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d/14c3:4d75"

The script needs xxd, which none of them install as a hard dependency:

# Fedora / Red Hat
rpm -q xxd || sudo dnf install xxd

# Debian and Ubuntu
dpkg -s xxd > /dev/null 2>&1 || sudo apt install xxd

Now shut the machine down completely. A warm reboot is not enough: the module keeps power across reboot and suspend, and only re-arms its lock when it loses power. After a cold boot the modem should come up on its own:

mmcli -L
nmcli device | grep gsm

Two harmless warnings

ModemManager logs this once during boot:

Cannot power-up: hardware radio switch is OFF

That is the FCC lock, not a physical switch or a soft block. Check rfkill list and you will see nothing blocked. The line is immediately followed by power state updated: on once the unlock script has run.

Uninstalling Lenovo’s package also strips --test-low-power-suspend-resume from the ModemManager unit, which its installer had added to stop the modem waking the machine from suspend. If you notice spurious wakeups afterwards, restore it as a drop-in rather than by editing the packaged unit:

sudo install -d "/etc/systemd/system/ModemManager.service.d"
printf '[Service]\nExecStart=\nExecStart=/usr/bin/ModemManager --test-low-power-suspend-resume\n' \
  | sudo tee "/etc/systemd/system/ModemManager.service.d/10-low-power-suspend.conf"
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

What about SAR?

SAR, the specific absorption rate, is the regulatory limit on how much radio energy a body absorbs. The tables tell the modem to back off transmit power on the bands and in the situations where the antennas sit close to you.

Removing the Lenovo package does not remove them. configservice_lenovo is a provisioner rather than a runtime component: it compares a version string and writes the tables into the modem’s non-volatile memory only when they differ. On my machine, 127 runs produced exactly two writes, 1.02 in October 2025 and 1.1.3 in August 2026. Every other run logged bodysarver is same do not update.

The tables live in the module and the modem enforces them itself, so they survive reboots, suspend and uninstalling the package. What you give up is the updater: a newer table version will not be installed, and nothing re-provisions the modem after an NV wipe or a firmware reflash. Both are recoverable by reinstalling the package temporarily, letting it write, and removing it again (and I doubt one needs these updates at all).

To check the current state:

sudo mbimcli -p -d /dev/wwan0mbim0 --fibocom-set-at-command='AT+BODYSAREN?'
sudo mbimcli -p -d /dev/wwan0mbim0 --fibocom-set-at-command='AT+BODYSARVER?'

Note that Lenovo does not ship a table for every machine. On some models the service logs Lenovo Sar config is not supported in this machine, in which case nothing was ever written.

How the unlock works

No secret is involved. The modem answers AT+GTFCCLOCKGEN with a challenge, and the host replies with the first four bytes of SHA-256(challenge || SHA-256(model_id)[0:4]) via AT+GTFCCLOCKVER. The model_id is the first OEM string in SMBIOS type 133, which you can read yourself:

sudo dmidecode -t 133

On ThinkPads that string is KHOIHGIUCCHHII, and sha256sum of it starts with 3df8c719, exactly the constant in ModemManager’s script. Fibocom’s public FM350 AT command manual uses the same string as its worked example, in chapter 17.4.

Since that value is per vendor rather than per machine, hardcoding it means the script only works on the vendor it was taken from. A Dell Latitude 5540 with the same PCI ID fails for that reason, and Dell ships no SMBIOS type 133 string at all there, so reading it at runtime does not help either. Its value turned out to be DW5931EFCCLOCK, matching Dell’s own DW5931e branding.

Framework Laptop 12 Arrives with Fedora Pre-installed

Posted by Fedora Magazine on 2026-09-07 08:00:00 UTC

Recently, Framework announced their new Laptop 12, which optionally comes with the KDE Edition of Fedora Linux pre-installed. Framework’s modular hardware has long captured the hearts of tinkerers, and many Framework users were already running Fedora Linux. Giving community members the option to unbox a hardware-validated, pre-installed Fedora KDE system is the culmination of months of effort from both Framework and dedicated Fedora community members. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the hard work of the Fedora community that’s made this possible

The Perfect Match: Fedora KDE Plasma & Convertible Hardware

The Framework Laptop 12 is a 12.2” 2-in-1 convertible laptop complete with a touchscreen and stylus support. Delivering a seamless experience on a form factor like this requires an interface that excels across traditional, touch, and pen modes.

Enter Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop.

Over recent release cycles, the Fedora KDE Special Interest Group (SIG) and upstream KDE contributors have poured immense effort into refining the user interface. This includes touch navigation, gesture support, virtual keyboards, and digital pen input under Wayland. Combined with the brand-new Intel Core Series 3 architecture, Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 7, and options for a backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader, the hardware and software form a cohesive unit.

“The Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop contributors work hard to make the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop edition the premier KDE experience for users. It’s great to see Framework customers have the choice to have it pre-installed.”

— Jef Spaleta, Fedora Project Lead

Community Collaboration at its Finest

Bringing a brand-new hardware platform with bleeding-edge components (like Intel’s Core Series 3 chips and BE213 Wi-Fi 7 modules) to pre-built availability doesn’t happen by accident. It takes rigorous testing, community bug hunting, and close collaboration.

Long before today’s announcement, Framework provided pre-release hardware to Fedora QA and SIG contributors to ensure day-one hardware enablement:

  • Kernel 7.1 Integration: Core Series 3 and Wi-Fi 7 R2 radios rely on recent upstream kernel drivers. Fedora contributors verified boot stability, power states, and Wi-Fi throughput on early builds to ensure seamless out-of-the-box performance.
  • Fingerprint Sensor Support via libfprint: The new power-button fingerprint reader required driver verification and early integration into libfprint. This work allows users to instantly set up biometrics during the initial Plasma setup wizard.
  • Display, Touch, and Stylus Calibration: Fedora QA and KDE community testers ran extensive Test Day scenarios to validate palm rejection, active stylus pressure sensitivity, and automatic screen rotation when flipping the device into tablet mode.
  • Open-Source Firmware (ZMK): The updated backlit keyboard uses a reprogrammable controller running open-source ZMK firmware. This firmware aligns perfectly with Fedora’s “Four Foundations” (Features, Friends, Freedom, First).

What This Means for the Linux Desktop

Starting at $699 USD for the Fedora pre-built configuration, the Framework Laptop 12 demonstrates that a fully modular, repairable, open-source-friendly laptop can be accessible, performant, and ready to go from day one.

Thank you to every member of the Fedora Quality Assurance team, the Fedora KDE SIG, and the broader upstream community who submitted test reports, verified kernel patches, and helped make this launch a massive success!

Disclosure: We used generative AI to outline and draft this post, but real humans shaped, verified, and reviewed it.

From Pop!_OS to Bluefin: A 20% CPU Performance Upgrade on Raptor Lake

Posted by Rob McBryde on 2026-09-05 18:48:01 UTC

From Pop!_OS to Bluefin: A 20% CPU Performance Upgrade on Raptor Lake

Distro-hopping isn’t something I do on a whim. Changing your main operating system is always a bit of a hassle, but when a switch actually pays off, it’s a great feeling. For a couple of years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS and even encouraged others to adopt it. However, being on the Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS version felt like I was stuck in the past. With System76 pouring all their energy into building the new Rust-based COSMIC desktop, the 22.04 LTS release naturally started to feel stale.

Working at Red Hat, I have a natural bias toward the Red Hat and Fedora ecosystem, as Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Since Bluefin is an atomic, image-based spin of Fedora, it felt like the perfect opportunity to bring that familiar ecosystem to my daily driver.

Recently, I decided to make the leap from Pop!_OS to Bluefin on my personal desktop, a GMKtec NukBox K10 powered by an Intel i9-13900HK. The results genuinely surprised me, and for the first time in a while, I’m actually excited to sit down at my desk.

Preparing for Change: A Seamless Transition

Before diving into the installation, I took the time to back up all my data and jot down crucial settings, like my backup_sync.sh script that keeps my Home directory files backed up to an external drive. That little bit of prep made the actual switch painless. Installing Bluefin, along with my essential apps, was a breeze, though it did require a dedicated USB drive since Ventoy wasn’t supported.

Geekbench Performance Analysis: Pop!_OS vs. Bluefin

Curiosity and a desire for a modern, up-to-date desktop experience drove my decision to switch operating systems. I wasn’t explicitly hunting for raw speed when I made the leap, but after using Bluefin for a bit, the system felt noticeably snappier. I ran Geekbench to check if the smoother feel was backed up by actual scores.

Geekbench measures raw processor performance across everyday workloads. Single-core scores reflect how quickly your system handles individual tasks like web browsing or launching apps, while multi-core scores show how well it handles heavy parallel processing like code compilation, video rendering, and multitasking under heavy loads.

The post-install benchmarks confirmed what I was feeling:

BenchmarkPop!_OS 22.04 LTSProject BluefinPerformance Gain
Single-Core Score2,0652,264+9.64%
Multi-Core Score11,38813,665+20.00%

View full Geekbench benchmark runs: Pop!_OS Baseline Result | Project Bluefin Result

Why Bluefin Runs So Fast

A few key technical factors explain why Bluefin runs so much faster on Intel’s hybrid chips:

  • Modern Kernels for Modern Hardware: Bluefin uses modern 6.x and 7.x kernels built for Intel’s Raptor Lake architecture. The scheduler works directly with the Intel Thread Director to push heavy tasks to Performance cores and background tasks to Efficient cores.
  • Minimal System Overhead: Because Bluefin uses an atomic, image-based design, the base OS stays small. Applications run through Flatpaks or rootless Podman containers, keeping background daemons low and preventing OS slowdown over time.
  • Performance Power Profiles: Default power settings allow the i9-13900HK to hold higher power limits under load without throttling prematurely.

Everyday Benefits Beyond Benchmarks

Synthetic scores are great, but the daily workflow improvements are what made me stay:

  • Background Updates & Rollbacks: System updates install automatically in the background. If an update ever breaks anything, you can reboot and instantly roll back to the previous working state.
  • Isolated Applications: Running apps in Flatpaks and containers keeps your core system clean and prevents library conflicts over time.
  • Developer-Ready Setup: Built-in support for Docker, Podman, and developer toolchains means you spend less time configuring tools and more time building.

Discovering Universal Blue: Project Bluefin

For those curious about the performance gains and architectural improvements of Bluefin, the Universal Blue project website provides a deep dive into how Fedora-based immutable distributions redefine Linux desktop experiences compared to traditional systems like Pop!_OS.

Shout Out to Jorge Castro

A special shout out to Jorge Castro for his insightful videos on YouTube. His passion for Project Bluefin is contagious, and I’m so impressed with his ability to freestyle his video content at length without going off the rails.

Conclusion: Embracing the Performance Leap

Transitioning to Bluefin was more than just a performance upgrade. It was a step towards embracing simplicity and efficiency. If you’re considering a similar switch, I hope my experience provides some useful insights. It’s been an exciting journey, and I’m eager to see how Bluefin continues to enhance my computing experience.

If you have any questions or want to share your own experiences, feel free to leave a comment below. Let’s keep the conversation going!

<p>The post From Pop!_OS to Bluefin: A 20% CPU Performance Upgrade on Raptor Lake first appeared on Rob McBryde.</p>

misc fedora bits: first week of sep 2026

Posted by Kevin Fenzi on 2026-09-05 18:10:05 UTC
Scrye into the crystal ball

This week seemed to have a lot of small irq's all around. That said, I did make some progress on a few things:

RHEL10 migrations: databases

Next up on the migration train: databases. It turns out we already had one database server in staging moved to rhel10, but it was using the default postgresql 16 and since I am going to the trouble to migrate things to a new os, might as well move them to newer postgresql too.

postgresql 18 makes data page checksums default. You can disable them at startup if you really want to, but they seem like a really good idea to enable. So, I took db-koji01.stg down and added checksums and it took around 45minutes. Not super great, but not nearly as bad as it could be.

Then, the upgrade to 18 was super fast and painless.

I did some work in our ansible repo to set up rhel10 hosts with postgresql18 to start with and created a db-fas02.stg to migrate that to.

The rest of these servers will follow basically this pattern:

  • Setup a rhel10/postgresql18 02 vm for each server

  • Sync data from rhel9 one.

  • Stop rhel9 one (OUTAGE)

  • Sync data again from rhel9 one.

  • Enable data page checksums

  • Migrate from 16 to 18

  • Profit

I hope to get the staging ones all done next week and find any issues, then we can look at scheduling an outage after Beta freeze to do all the production ones.

Laptop Battery replacement

My lenovo slim7x battery was getting pretty pathetic. It was 2 years old and it's max full capacity was something like 35% of design full and sometimes it was now refusing to charge without a reboot.

So, I ordered a new battery and installed it this last week.

This laptop is anoying to work on because, while there are screws on the bottom panel, it's also held on by clips. So you have to pry it off and it sounds like you are breaking it while doing so. Anoying.

Also on this laptop they routed all the cables around the battery. The battery has cable guides all around it. So, to replace the battery you have to move all those cables carefully and slide the old battery out and new one in, along with unplugging the bluetooth and wifi antennas, and disconnecting/connecting the battery connector.

I did manage to do it, but it took more time that I thought it would.

While I had the machine open I swapped the windows drive I had back in and updated the firmware (which there's no way to do from linux). It was quite a pain. windows took quite a while to notice that it was not 2024 and that it should check what _current_ updates were available. Did manage it in the end. I don't know what effect the newer firmware has, everything still works the same as far as I can tell.

Fedora 45 beta rc's

We have started making rc's for beta. That sure reads weird, but if you are able, please do test and file bugs.

Authentication issues

There's one weird auth issue I am aware of. Thats where services with keytabs are sometimes getting permission denied. It seems to be somehow some differing config on two of our ipa servers. Thats being tracked in https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/13539

I am not aware of any other issues remaining. So, if you hit something, please do file a ticket and include enough information for us to try and fix it. ie, time/date, exactly what you were trying to login to, exactly what error message you got, etc.

As always, comment on the fediverse: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/117219935269136120

BTRFS boot failure and easy GUI methods for system recovery

Posted by Fedora Magazine on 2026-09-04 20:54:40 UTC

A few short how-to’s with screenshots, showing easy ways to boot up off a USB live ISO and return back to previous points in time with BTRFS.

Many Linux distributions now default to BTRFS as the standard installation filesystem. Fedora Linux is no exception to that.

2022/23 saw a lot of articles extolling its virtues of easy rollback, stability and so forth. All complete with paragraphs of command line instructions.

Times have changed, the BTRFS infrastructure has matured, and there are now easy to use GUI tools at our fingertips.

No special tools or skills

You may use any standard Fedora Linux ISO image and USB stick.

This article is for people new to Fedora Linux and for those who are familiar with ext4 and Timeshift.

Easy to follow instructions

My experience with Linux goes back quite a long way.

There used to be a time when the Fedora Linux help links often routed to Red Hat Enterprise. This generally targeted the needs of network managers and other system professionals.

Thankfully, for ordinary users the situation has now improved. The Fedora Magazine is one of those reasons.

In the last few years I have been using Fedora Linux as test-bed virtual machines and I have been using Fedora Kinoite on a secondary laptop.

As a daily driver, the thing that most recently stopped me switching to Fedora Linux was not being able to find easy to follow instructions on snapshot recovery during system boot failure.

This article lists the solutions that I finally pieced together.

How to start

how to use a partition manager to discover what file system that you are using

First, make sure that you do actually have your OS running with BTRFS.

This is now normally the case but if you have had your installation for a few years, or someone else installed it for you, it is wise to check.

On Fedora Workstation, with Gnome, try disks or gparted. These two will also install readily on KDE and many users actually prefer them to the KDE partion manager.

Many people welcomed the 2025 decision by the Fedora steering committee to promote KDE to parity status with (Gnome) Workstation. This guide covers both official versions.

If you don’t have Fedora Linux yet, there are also a few notes on general setup as well.

Getting help from the assistant

You may have seen btrfs-assistant mentioned in forum discussions. If you don’t already have this program installed, then now is the time to look at doing it.

ways to install btrfs-assistant using Fedora

The package only takes a tiny amount of space and also installs snapper. About 4MB in total. Either Gnome Software or KDE Discover are fine. Or you can use dnf on the the command line.

Up and running:

The btrfs-assistant user interface showing the range of system maintenance options

Sub-Volumes

Registration of existing sub-volumes is automatic:

graphical viewing of btrfs sub-volumes using btrfs-assistant


By default, Fedora creates two sub-volume sections on standard installation. We can only see them in the file manager when we boot via a USB live ISO, otherwise we see the volume contents only.

Partition managers such as gparted may show the partition as complete but the file system won’t work unless we have set up the logical sub-volume overlay inside of it.

If you are using Gnome Workstation you may probably see an additional sub-volume ‘/root/var/lib/machines‘ which, unless you are working with container built machines, will be empty. It’s just there to exclude temporary files from any snapshot processes and can be ignored too.

Alternative layouts

Anaconda is the in-house installer and I have been quite impressed with its recent incarnations.

The default installation route is decidedly the easier option at present.

However, for users wanting to add extra sub-volumes, the best method may be right at the start when you are offered the Storage Editor option. If using pre Fedora Linux 45, you can also find it at the top right corner of the interface.

Fedora Linux will happily install alongside your current setup if you want to try things out.

I have found that the best method is to use gparted to prepare a section of non-allocated disk space to offer the installer to work with, rather than offering it a ready made partition.

Post-install adjustments

Creating new sub-volumes requires the command line. This is for advanced users only.

In theory, Blivet-gui claims to be able to do this task but I am yet to be convinced. Btrfs-assistant leaves this bit well alone, which is what we are going to do.

Backups

There isn’t much that we can do with the actual sub-volumes, as they stand. The Copy On Write (CoW) mechanism is there and working. That’s about it.

But backups are always good to have, so make sure that you have got one before you start setting things up for real. We’ll have a look at this in detail later on.

There are btrfs command line methods for sub-volumes using send and receive but the concepts can get quite complex.

Making standard partition backups are much easier using dd or Gnome Disks, just as if we were using ext4, and they are equally effective for basic needs.

Snapshots

These are what really sets BTRFS rollback into a totally different league compared to using Timeshift.

To get this working we are going to use Snapper:

using live boot to view btrfs sub-volumes and snapper configs to setup automated snapshots

You may find mention on forums about using Timeshift on Fedora Linux BTRFS with Ubuntu style @ sub-volumes. This now no longer works unless you are using something like Linux Mint. It was never probably a good idea to start with but it does illustrate the extents to which people have gone to, and just to get some kind of easy GUI recovery setup going.

We need to set up Snapper before things go wrong.

If you have arrived at this article through a web search and are in difficulties, unless you have previously setup snapshots, you are going to be restricted to using the command line.

Command line btrfs is actually the foundation program used to create and manage the overlay sections. Snapper helps us work with the btrfs snapshots.

Several command line articles are available: https://fedoramagazine.org/?s=btrfs

Snapper configs

The place to start is at the Snapper Settings tab. Click ‘new’ and fill in the details, one for ‘root’ and one for ‘home’:

Setting up BTRFS Snapper configs

The backup and target paths must both be on the same partition. Otherwise, the docs say that you can place sub-volumes anywhere. BTRFS uses hidden sub-volumes, so placing ‘root’ at ‘/’ and ‘home’ at ‘/home’ is as good a place as any, probably.

In our setup, root means everything except the home folder. And the home folder will neatly hold the home snapshots.

Snapper will place its config files at ‘/etc/snapper’ if you need to find them.

Enable timeline, cleanup and boot. Click the save button.

Numbers

The first config save will set up the config file. We now have to set the numbers.

snapper retention numbers need adjusting

I don’t know if is intentional for Snapper to default to saving 10 whole years of snaps and nothing weekly. Perhaps it’s something to do with openSUSE and and their long term server support program?

For everyday use, these figures need changing. And the root volume needs to be treated differently from the home one.

I am currently evaluating the above set for root, with 15, 10, 5, 3, 1, 50 for home. Although, I am wondering if these these figures could be a bit too high …

The number defines how many snapshots the timeline cleanup algorithm should keep, counting from the youngest.

When done, save again, then apply systemd changes.

Hoarding Junk

Make sure that you don’t get carried away. Snapshots are very easy to take. We’ve all probably seen stories of people filling their houses with 20 years of old newspapers.

One or two snapshots of old kernels and firmware updates might get us out of problems but we don’t really need to keep Gigabytes of these for months on end. Conversely, it could be invaluable to find some small but important documents that got accidentally deleted a few months back without us realizing.

The dangers of system bloat could well be one of the reasons that Fedora Linux doesn’t have snapper already installed.

Creating the snapshots

This is normally fully automated and happens in micro-seconds. A very different scale to ext4 and Timeshift where we are frequently talking of minutes.

Manual snaps are great as well. Maybe just before doing something that could go wrong is a good idea.

If you set up the Snapper boot config option, an instant snapshot will be taken at every boot time, so any errant updates can be very easy to reverse too.

Different copy on write file systems can have both subtle or major differences but the basic b-tree principles tend to remain. If you want a deep dive into the theory, there’s lots out there.

The BTRFS system is continually working on records of what is happening, so data processing requirements are very small. In simple terms we can look at this as making tag at a point in time on a type of continuous and interconnected meta-data event log. When we roll back, we return to the tag and restart the recording on a new branch.

Browsing

Select the Snapper tab and then the sub-tab for Browse/Restore:

browse and restore with btrfs-assistant

Find the snapshot that you think you need and click on Browse to see what’s in there. The Browse function also lets you restore individual files rather than whole snaps. Keep an eye on the target drop down which will change when you switch tabs.

Deleting

BTRFS is night and day faster than the qcow2 systems used on virtual machines. The same for Timeshift. Only a couple of seconds are needed, even for very old snapshots.

Maintenance

On this tab, scrub is probably the only important one. The docs say this should run at least monthly. If you have done a lot of snapshot rewinding then a manual scrub is a good idea.

Balance is for balancing RAID devices and you only really need defrag if you are running on a mechanical hard drive. An SSD will have its own optimising system built in but you could run defrag manually every year or two if you want.

selecting btrfs maintenance schedules

Live booting

There are some operations that we simply can’t do on an operating system when it’s in use. Instead, we need to use Fedora Media Writer or Gnome Disks to put a downloaded Live ISO onto a USB stick and run things from there. For Disks, right click on the ISO and select open-with Disk Image Writer.

Many of you will be very familiar with this process. But not everybody is aware that many live ISO’s will also allow you to install small amounts of software onto them. This little trick will in fact go on to form a keystone to how we do our system failure recovery.

Downloaded ISO images from https://fedoraproject.org

If preferred, try the Manjaro KDE ISO from https://manjaro.org/products/download/x86 which will also have most of the needed software already there.

Restarts

The next stage is to get your computer to boot with the USB; you will need to have either already set your UEFI/BIOS to allow a trigger key during initial starting, usually delete, or you will need to go to the OS settings and request a UEFI restart there:

how to reboot into the uefi/bios from your operating system

Staying safe

It’s basic standard good practice to have a recent full backup when doing anything to your system.

Once you have booted the live ISO, if you don’t have a backup, then make sure that you do.

Using Disk‘s GUI interface allows the making of partition images to be fairly straight forward. Gnome Workstation ISO’s will already have Disks ready for you to use. If you are using KDE, set it up using KDE Discover. Otherwise use dnf. The installation is just a few MB.

Gnome Disks interface and how to make a partition backup image

Select the partition, standard click the options button and choose ‘create partition image’.

Backup the boot partitions too. BTRFS makes no copies of these.

The usual cautions if you are thinking of using dd and have never used it before. You need to always pay attention to your input ‘if=’ and your output ‘of=’ or it changes from being a useful disk duplicator into it’s other guise of disk destroyer ….

Also, place your backups on to something reliable. A good quality USB hard-drive is generally viewed as a good choice. They are more resistant to time fading than SSD’s even if they are slower. If you have not heard of ‘bit rot’ there are lots of articles on the web. SSD’s will lose data if they are not regularly powered up.

Partition sizes

You may want to consider partition size adjustment at this point. But do the initial backup first, if you can.

Keeping the size of the OS partition reduced down will make backing up much easier. And you are still going to need further full backups, even with Copy On Write running things.

For more experienced users, there are methods to compress partition backups using dd. Also creating a ‘/dev/zero‘ temp file will help compress even more. You can save lots of space but the .img files have to be fully decompressed in order to mount them, which is a slight down side.

Virtual machines

Problems with computer speed and with excess data can occur when having a two concurrent CoW systems running together. A kind of snowball effect from the host system continually backing up copies of the other backups.

According to the Qemu docs, when keeping virtual machines on a BTRFS partition it is recommend to use the ‘nocow‘ option to avoid performance issues.

For those of you using Gnome Boxes, which comes pre-installed on Workstation, any adjustment of the config files and VM locations is not needed.

Boxes likes to keep its virtual machines out of view in a hidden home folder called ‘.local/share/gnome-boxes/images’ and it tends to work best when left that way. All the image files will already have had CoW disabled.

I can’t say that I have noticed any significant problems when I have carried out short tests. However, the issue is there nevertheless and a general look on the web will yield some quite lively discussion on the matter.

Advanced users may wish to consider running their VMs on a separate ext4 partition as another option.

The nocow +C flag can be easily checked by using lsattr against the image file, if required.

Swap files

Fedora Linux now uses the faster and more modern zram system which compresses the RAM data instead of swapping it to storage.

BTRFS snapshotting will not work if traditional swap files are present in the sub-volume.

If you are running short of RAM, your first option should be adjusting the zram allocation ratios. If you still find that you need a swap file, you will need to create a separate sub-volume to contain it.

Recovery

Having arrived at this point, you should now find this section to be fairly intuitive.

However, do remember to pay attention to root/home continuity. Remember that home will still contain hidden system and config files that are used by programs installed in the root section.

btrfs-assistant restore proceedure

For small problems, where the system still boots, load btrfs-assistant on standard load and roll back to a previous good point.

Importantly, for USB running, start the file manager and mount the partition that you need to fix before installing or running btrfs-assistant or it will fail to work.

In both cases you will be advised to reboot for the request to take effect. The whole process is fairly quick and compared to Timeshift, pretty much instant.

Choosing the right tools

System failure happens to the best of us, given enough time to press enough buttons or to adjust one configuration file too many. But sometimes the failures are caused from upstream, from an unnoticed upstream bug perhaps.

If you are still able to boot into your system, Fedora Linux already features a very quick package reversal system as built-in standard. Sometimes we don’t need to use snapshots at all.

There is a GUI program to run this called dnfdragora:

installation of dndragora

For the sake of completeness, this does need mentioning. However, I would probably argue that in this case the command line is quicker and more intuitive:

Downgrades work on a simple temporary basis only, so there is no need to re-instate anything at a later stage. When the next batch of updates are available, hopefully with a fix, the package and its associated files become automatically re-upgraded.

Conclusion

This article hopefully updates us to the start of H2 2026.

Should Red Hat support Fedora Linux putting their support behind btrfs-assistant and should we have snapper and snapshots already setup on new installations?

I think the answer to that is yes, and that this is probably going to be happening. But for exactly how and when, we will have to wait to see.

Further improvements will always be in the pipeline.

How I use LLM for my work

Posted by Marcin Juszkiewicz on 2026-09-04 14:40:00 UTC

One of the hot topics in the last months has been the use of “AI” — which usually means using LLMs (Large Language Models).

After a big push at work to adopt “AI”, it took me some time to find a good use of it in my daily workflow.

Rewriting software

One of most popular ways of using “AI” is rewriting software. I know people having old games ported from one retro platform to another this way.

However, the low barrier to entry gave many people a way to jump in which did not end well…

As a result, countless projects have stopped accepting merge requests because so many of them were nothing more than “AI slop” (aka “worthless junk not even worth looking at”).

My example

I have used Claude to rewrite my EDK2 ArmCpuInfo project to make it easier for me to update it. The statistics of the commit that did most of the work:

lines changed: 5630 additions & 3552 deletions

I would not send anything like that to anyone for review. Far too messy. Going through it was painful but I got what I asked for. And this was a result of several prompts and manual changes.

Fixing packages

As you know, my work is mostly around building packages. I have worked on Arm, AArch64, ppc64le, s390x and now RISC-V. I fixed countless packages by hand, going through their source and finding out why they failed and how to get them building on target platforms.

After my last vacation I decided to check how an LLM would help with it.

I fetched the package, unpacked the sources (fedpkg prep), fetched the build.log file from the latest failed build, and ran Claude with one, simple prompt:

Look at build.log and source and find out why it does not build on risc-v.

The amount of time I had to wait and output to read varied from package to package. Sometimes build logs from other Fedora architectures were needed, sometimes a few build attempts. At the end I had a patch which made the package buildable on the RISC-V architecture.

Types of fixes

Some fixes were simple, like fastnetmon where a change in the link order was the only thing needed.

Some were funny, like GNU Data Language where fixing RISC-V fixed it for AArch64 as well. This made the build fail, as some tests, which were expected to fail, passed.

Others were related to differences between RISC-V (RV64GC) floating-point unit compared to other architectures. Such “simple” things like “are we dividing by zero” can be a problem.

Things I do not send

There were also packages for which I got some patches and never sent them neither upstream nor to the package maintainer.

Those were ones I did not understand. For instance, a patch changed how the “R” language handles “NA and NaN” numbers. It was yet another issue related to how RISC-V FPU works. Also it was so cryptic that I looked at code and had no idea what I was looking at.

The final question

I understand FOSS developers who refuse to accept any “AI generated” changes. There is too much “AI slop” being submitted. At the same time I wonder where their limit is.

Would they merge patch below or not? And would presence of the “Assisted-by: LLM” line make them refuse this patch or not? Will they accept it without such line?

Subject: [PATCH] Fix abseil link order for ld.bfd

Move absl:: libraries after gRPC in fastnetmon_api_client link list.
ld.bfd (used on riscv64) is a single-pass linker and needs dependees
before dependencies.

Assisted-by: LLM
---
 src/CMakeLists.txt | 8 ++++----
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/CMakeLists.txt b/src/CMakeLists.txt
index 10caf4c6..5bde9fcc 100644
--- a/src/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/src/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -800,10 +800,6 @@ if (ENABLE_GOBGP_SUPPORT)

     add_executable(fastnetmon_api_client fastnetmon_api_client.cpp)

-    if (LINK_WITH_ABSL)
-        target_link_libraries(fastnetmon_api_client  absl::base absl::synchronization)
-    endif()
-
     # We use another way to specify dependencies for Windows as our standard approach clearly does not work
     # https://www.f-ax.de/dev/2020/11/08/grpc-plugin-cmake-support.html
     if (${CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME} STREQUAL "Windows")
@@ -819,6 +815,10 @@ if (ENABLE_GOBGP_SUPPORT)

     target_link_libraries(fastnetmon_api_client protobuf::libprotobuf)

+    if (LINK_WITH_ABSL)
+        target_link_libraries(fastnetmon_api_client  absl::base absl::synchronization)
+    endif()
+
     if (KAFKA_SUPPORT)
         target_link_libraries(fastnetmon ${LIBKAFKA_CPP_LIBRARY_PATH})
     endif()

I would accept it. Because for me, despite the origin of that patch, it is a very simple change to review.

Friday Links 26-28

Posted by Christof Damian on 2026-09-03 22:00:00 UTC
A black Sony Walkman music player on a dark leather surface, screen showing a podcast episode of The Europeans ready to play, with grey Sony in-ear headphones coiled around it

A short one this week. The management reading list gave me some new ideas and the interview with Mr. T is great.

Quote of the Week
I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.
The Advantage
Patrick M. Lencioni

Leadership

Good Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI - It relates to the quote above.

Maintainer’s Guide to Hackfests

Posted by Ben Cotton on 2026-09-02 12:00:00 UTC

I just published the first version of the Maintainer’s Guide to Hackfests. It’s intended to be a short, practical guide for getting the most out of participating in a hackfest. As my luck would have it, this year’s Hacktoberfest — the event that inspired me to write the guide in the first place — will be completely different from years past. But there are other hackfest events out there that you might want to participate in.

From being clear about why you’re participating, to getting policies and configuration in place, the Maintainer’s Guide to Hackfests condenses all of my experience in 16 short pages. If you find it useful, or if you find something confusing, missing, or flat out wrong, you can contribute. Or just start reading from the links below.

This post’s featured image from Control by Tristan Ferne, used under CC BY 2.0. Edited by Ben Cotton.

The post Maintainer’s Guide to Hackfests appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

Using syslog-ng with Elasticsearch 9.5

Posted by Peter Czanik on 2026-09-02 11:49:17 UTC

Recently, I heard complaints within the syslog-ng community that using Elasticsearch is not that easy anymore. I installed Elasticsearch 9.5 with Kibana to verify these claims.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/using-syslog-ng-with-elasticsearch-9-5

syslog-ng logo

Faster builds and better answers: GPU acceleration and model comparison for Fedora’s RAG assistants

Posted by Francois Gonothi Toure on 2026-09-01 16:11:34 UTC

An Outreachy internship note on the Fedora AI/ML editorial and packaging assistants

CPU/GPU banner image created with Google Gemini’s Nano Banana

As part of my Outreachy internship with the Fedora Project, I built two retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistants: one for the Fedora editorial guidelines (Community Blog and Magazine) and one for the Fedora packaging guidelines. Both share the same key step: building a vector store. The assistant reads the source documents, splits them into chunks, and turns each chunk into an embedding it can search later.

For most of the internship, I ran these builds without a GPU. Once I had access to a GPU instance, I re-ran the same builds on the GPU and measured the difference. On both projects, the result was about the same: roughly a 13x speedup.

What was measured

For each project, I built the vector store twice, holding the work identical and changing only whether the GPU was used:

  • Same corpus per project, the same chunk size, and the same embedding model on both runs.
  • Identical output: the chunk count matched between the CPU and GPU runs, confirming both did the same work (8888 chunks for the editorial guide, 6137 for the packaging guide).

A note on method: the two projects were measured slightly differently. For the editorial guide, both runs were on the GPU instance, with the GPU enabled for one and disabled for the other. For the packaging guide, the CPU run was on a local laptop, and the GPU run on the instance. So the packaging comparison is across two machines rather than one machine toggled. Either way, the question is the same: how much does proper GPU hardware speed up the build? The answer was consistent across both.

The result

Editorial guide assistant

Observations made for the editorial-guide-ramalama on CPU/GPU

Packaging guide assistant

Observations made for the packaging-guide-ramalama on CPU/GPU
Both builds ran about 13 times faster on the GPU

Why the GPU helps here

The slow part of these builds is embedding: turning each text chunk into a vector. That is a large number of small, similar matrix operations, exactly the kind of work a GPU does in parallel. On the CPU, the chunks are processed with far less parallelism, so the same work takes much longer. During the packaging build, I could watch the card working: utilization rose to around 64%, and power draw climbed from about 10 W at idle to roughly 120 W.

One thing worth knowing

Installing the GPU drivers was not enough on its own. The pipeline runs inside a container, and at first the container could not see the GPU, so it quietly fell back to the CPU. The fix was to configure GPU passthrough for the container runtime (generating a CDI configuration). Once that was in place, the same command used the GPU with no other changes. It is an easy step to miss, because nothing fails; the build just runs slowly.

See it in action

Want to watch the packaging assistant actually run? Here’s a full walkthrough of the pipeline, from staging the corpus to reviewing a spec file:

https://gtfrans2re.fedorapeople.org/videos/packaging-guide-ramalama.mp4

Takeaway

For builds that happen often during development, cutting the editorial build from over an hour to under six minutes, and the packaging build from nineteen minutes to ninety seconds, changes how you work. You can rebuild the vector store as part of a normal iteration loop instead of planning around a long wait, and it makes larger corpora and larger models practical to experiment with, which is where the projects go next.

What the GPU let us explore: larger models

Fast builds were not the end of the story. Because the GPU made a full rebuild cheap, we could do something that would have been impractical on CPU: try a range of model sizes and see how each one actually behaves against the guidelines. We tested five models on both projects, keeping to the same model families for a fair comparison, plus one from a third family: Granite 3B and 8B, Gemma E4B and 12B, and a 14B Qwen model.

A note on model versions: Model family alone does not tell the whole story; the generation matters too. The models here were granite-4.0-micro (3B) and granite-3.3 (8B), gemma-4 (E4B and 12B), and Qwen2.5 (14B). Worth keeping in mind: Qwen2.5 was released about two years before the others, and model quality has moved quickly in that time. So the 14B’s weaker showing is not simply a case of “bigger is worse”, it may also reflect its older generation. Newer small models often outperform older larger ones, which is part of why a mid-sized, current-generation model came out ahead here.

The question was grounding: does a bigger model do a better job of answering from the retrieved guidelines, rather than falling back on what it happened to learn during training? The answer turned out to be more interesting than a simple yes.

A mid-sized model grounded best; the largest did not.

Retrieval carries the small models further than expected. For facts that live directly in the guidelines, like the exact SPDX license identifiers a package must use (MIT, GPL-2.0-only, Apache-2.0), every model got them right, including the smallest 3B. The retrieval step did the work, so size did not matter there.

Where size and quality showed up. The differences appeared on harder questions. Asked whether a spec file still needs a %clean section (it does not, under current guidelines), the two Granite models gave the outdated answer they had seen often in training, while the Gemma and Qwen models correctly said it is no longer required. On the editorial side, the small Gemma E4B actually refused to answer from the guidelines, replying that it did not have access to them, even though they were right there in its retrieval corpus.

Bigger is not automatically better. The clearest example: asked how to format the Release field in a spec file, the 14B Qwen model confidently invented a macro that does not exist, %{?asparagus:.ASPARAGUS}. It sounded authoritative and was entirely made up. The 12B Gemma model, by contrast, gave clean, decisive, grounded answers on both projects and comfortably fit the GPU with room to spare. It was the sweet spot: better grounded than the smaller models, and more reliable than the larger one.

The takeaway on models: RAG grounding works, but the model still matters. It decides whether the retrieved guidelines actually get used, or get overridden by training habits or confabulation. For these two projects, a mid-sized model was the best balance of grounding quality and hardware fit, and none of this comparison would have been practical to run without the GPU.

Written as part of my Outreachy internship with the Fedora Project. GPU hardware: an NVIDIA A10G (24 GB) instance running Fedora Linux 44. Packaging CPU baseline: local laptop [CPU: AMD EPYC 7R32, RAM: 32 GB].

Call for Mentors for Outreachy (Dec 2026)

Posted by Felipe Borges on 2026-09-01 12:59:08 UTC

Once again, GNOME is considering participating in the Outreachy internship program. Outreachy provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by under-representation in the tech industry where they live.

Outreachy internships are funded by the participating communities. While the GNOME Foundation has not yet finalized the budget for this cohort, having a strong list of proposed projects and available mentors helps the Board decide how many slots to fund.

Project ideas will be selected based on available funding and their relevance to the overall goals of the GNOME project. Project selection will be handled by Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, and Sri Ramkrishna.

If you are a GNOME developer/maintainer available for mentoring between December 2026 and March 2027, please submit a project proposal at gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/internship/project-ideas as soon as possible (by September 11).

If you have any questions, you can contact the Internship Committee on Matrix or ask on Discourse.

Don’t Forget: Unset Confidentiality on Private Issue Reports

Posted by Michael Catanzaro on 2026-08-31 19:21:23 UTC

It’s hard to evaluate the security of open source projects when security bug reports remain private forever. Users deserve to see security bug reports, so please remember to unset issue report confidentiality when you’re done handling an issue. There are very few good reasons to keep an issue report confidential forever. If you’re not planning to disclose the issue report within the next few months, it should probably already already be public.

For GNOME, I disclose issues whenever a merge request has been created or a fix lands in the git repo, or 30 days after the issue was reported, whichever comes first. Your project might prefer to wait until the fix is released before disclosing, especially if you fear that a vulnerability might actually be exploited during the window between the fix and release. Whatever you choose, please don’t forget about it and leave the issue report confidential forever. That’s not fair to your project’s users. Even if not many people will take the time to look, users should at least have a chance to see reported issues.

What do I want in a Linux distribution?

Posted by Jonathan McDowell on 2026-08-31 17:20:15 UTC

I’ve been a Debian user since 1999, and a Debian developer since 2000. Given recent events it’s worth thinking about why that that is, and why I haven’t switched to something else in the past quarter century.

My first Linux distro was Slackware, off a CD in a book, some time in the mid 90s. After starting university I ran SUSE for a while, then moved to RedHat (both back before they had commercial variants significantly different to what was available freely). The main motivation for switching was package management; I was running a machine at home, and a machine at university. Keeping track of what was installed on each, and what versions, was getting annoying with Slackware. Most of the folk I knew were running RedHat, and I mostly played with SUSE because I’m contrary before realising it was different enough that I couldn’t easily make use of 3rd party RPMs.

I came to Debian via friends in Cambridge, who spoke highly of it. The first Debian machine I installed was fourier, the initial host for Black Cat Networks, and I never looked back.

(For additional context I should also point out I have contributed, in the distant past, to, and run, OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded, and FreeBSD.)

I’d like to try and work out what is it I get from Debian that I’d need in anything else. Originally I tried to order the requirements in some sort of priority, but it’s sometimes hard to work out what I’d drop if I had to compromise somewhere, so it’s a somewhat loose ordering.

Stable releases, with security support
I run Linux in lots of places, from remote servers/VMs, to my house router, to my desktop/laptop. Some of those I don’t want to be updating regularly with new software releases, I need something I can be sure is going to keep working, but will get necessary security + critical updates. A rolling distro that provides security via the latest upstream release doesn’t provide that guarantee. Equally there need to be regular stable releases, or things become too stale. (The one time I considered moving away from Debian was during the 3 year Sarge / 3.1 release cycle. I think if things hadn’t improved I’d have jumped ship to Ubuntu at the time.)
A good selection of packages
One of the reasons I moved from RedHat to Debian was the wide range of packages available as part of the standard OS. Pulling it all into the distro helps with quality control, compared to random 3rd party packages. A centralised bug system and repository is a win too. Perhaps packages at all is something I should list, but I take it as a given if you’re running a distro. I need to know what I have installed on my machine, what version that software is, what files it owns, and what it depends on.
Free Software
This is important to me. I’ll make pragmatic compromises about software I run on my systems if it makes sense, but I want to start from a place that does not require anything non-free. I’ve run a company on Debian, and I’ve worked on numerous products that ran it under the hood. The DFSG give me confidence I can do that.
Smooth upgrades
Debian’s ability to upgrade a system smoothly is one of the reasons I first moved to it. The first upgrade I did was remotely on a machine sitting on a 2Mb/s leased line. I was nervous doing the reboot at the end, but it came back fine. At the time the equivalent procedure with RedHat involved rebooting into the OS installer to do the upgrade.
I know things have moved on since then, and really it should all be scripted, and machines should be cattle not pets, but for personal use I run a small enough number of machines that having the upgrade path between releases is a must have.
Community
The original pull of the Debian community was the knowledge I could get involved, and upload packages that were missing that I was using. That’s how I first got involved, uploading things Black Cat used, which made life easier for us in the long run. I don’t have time to maintain all the software I use myself, and I don’t want to be beholden to a commercial entity to do so for me, so a distribution that allows me to help out where I can as part of the community seems to me to be the right way to do things.
Architecture support
Perhaps less important, especially when I started using Debian, but these days I have amd64, arm64, armhf, and riscv machines. Everything except for the risvc box is doing something useful, and would need replaced if I couldn’t keep running it, and I expect RISC-V to transition into that state in the next few years as the hardware improves.
Binary packages
I ran a FreeBSD desktop for some time. It might have been the way I was holding it, but binary package installs were generally not something reliable, especially after the initial install, and I ended up building things from ports from source quite often. That worked incredibly well (I used to think people who raved about Gentoo really should just go do it properly and use FreeBSD), but I don’t want to spend time compiling things, especially on some of my machines (my router should not need a compiler, for example).

Ultimately I don’t want to have to actively think about the Linux distribution I use. Debian has mostly given me that; I know it will generally be suitable for most environments I want to use it in (embedded situations where OpenWRT or OpenEmbedded are better choices being the exception, but that’s less frequent these days), and I can rely on getting timely security updates (thanks to all those who work on that within Debian!). I’m not sure there’s currently an alternative that would suit my needs? I’d love to hear if there’s something I should look at, even if I’m not necessary making a move just yet!

Modernizing Fingerprint Management in GNOME Settings

Posted by Felipe Borges on 2026-08-31 09:57:31 UTC

For a while now, the fingerprint management UI in GNOME Settings (gnome-control-center) has felt outdated. While it worked, the layout and enrollment flow hadn’t kept up with the rest of GNOME’s modern interface updates.

I am happy that during the GNOME 51 development cycle we managed to address that. Allan Day, Marco Trevisan, and myself worked on modernizing the interface. There’s still more work to do in the UI and in fprintd, but what we will ship in 51 is already a great step forward.

Historically, the fingerprint dialog in User Settings was stuck on a GTK3-style design. Even after being ported to GTK4, conceptually it remained unchanged. Beyond looking out of place alongside Libadwaita-based settings panels, it suffered from responsiveness and accessibility issues that made it difficult for some users to enroll their prints.

Screenshot of the new fingerprint management dialog in GNOME Settings
Screenshot of the Fingerprint Authentication dialog

The new fingerprint management dialog uses a standard boxed list displaying your enrolled fingers. From here, each enrolled finger can be removed individually.

Clicking the “Add Fingerprint” button starts the finger enrollment process. First, you choose one of the unused finger options to enroll. From there, an assistant guides you through the scanning process. As you place your finger on the reader, the UI detects the touch and provides feedback on whether it was read correctly. You continue touching the reader until enough samples have been collected (the exact number depends on your reader’s driver). Once the progress bar fills, your finger is ready for authentication.

Screenshot of a fingerprint being enrolled
Screenshot of a fingerprint enrollment

This is only one of the improvements that GNOME 51 is bringing. As with everything in GNOME, we will continue gathering user feedback and making iterations over time. There are already more fingerprint features in the pipeline, such as renaming enrolled fingers and verifying individual prints. Stay tuned!

From August 24 to August 30

Posted by Aurélien Bompard on 2026-08-31 08:33:00 UTC

Across the various Fedora groups, the primary focus is the progression of the Fedora 45 release, with teams actively navigating the Beta freeze, conducting Blocker Review meetings, and completing QA and feature testing. Concurrently, significant infrastructure and tooling transitions are a shared priority; multiple groups are gathering workflow requirements for an upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, finalizing the migration from the newly retired Pagure.io to the Forgejo-based Fedora Forge, and integrating modern build systems like Konflux. Package maintenance and policy refinement also dominate daily operations, characterized by widespread updates to packaging guidelines across ecosystems (including Python, NodeJS, and cryptography), coordinated responses to security advisories (notably RUSTSEC vulnerabilities), and the mass-orphaning of inactive packages. Finally, strategic structural alignments represent a common operational thread, highlighted by the EPEL 10 mass branching and repository restructuring, as well as ongoing proposals to unify CoreOS with Bootc technologies.

Announcements

Critical deadlines have arrived for Fedora 45 contributors: the "Complete" deadline for F45 Changes requires all tracker bugs to be updated to ON_QA, coinciding with the Fedora 45 Beta freeze, Bodhi updates-testing enablement, and Software String freeze. Additionally, contributors must meet a September 1 deadline to submit bug tracker workflows to help identify a replacement for Red Hat Bugzilla as its maintenance winds down. On the community engagement front, the Fedora Badges application has been completely revamped with a modern, fast single-page interface, and content creators can now utilize editorial-guide-ramalama, a new RAG-based local AI assistant designed to verify article drafts against Fedora's editorial guidelines before submission.

For the broader Linux community, several new technical guides have been published. Users can learn how to monitor drive health using Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) to catch subtle warnings of SSD or NVMe failure before data loss occurs. Those interested in local AI development can explore a guide on running Ollama locally with Podman to keep host systems clean and isolated, as well as a tutorial on how to safely sandbox AI coding agents using microVMs to prevent unauthorized automated access to production clusters or local work environments.

Council

The Fedora Council met to discuss the Fedora Forge Usage Policy and the proposed Innovation Lifecycle (Sandbox). The Council achieved consensus on the Forge Usage Policy, clarifying CI resource access for spins and remixes, and establishing a notification-only process for new remixes.

Additionally, extensive debate took place regarding the level of early technical oversight required for the Innovation Sandbox, prompting the scheduling of a dedicated follow-up workshop.

Decisions

  • The Fedora Forge Usage Policy will be updated for version 5 to explicitly state that spins and remixes are permitted CI resources. Requests for infrastructure resources for new remixes must CC a Council member for visibility, but formal Council approval is not required.
  • The Fedora Forge Usage Policy will remain open for one final week of feedback; if there are no further edits, it will proceed to an official Council vote.
  • The Council will hold a dedicated, public video call on Thursday, September 3, 2026, at 14:00 UTC+1 to workshop the Innovation Lifecycle Proposal to resolve ongoing debates about FESCo's involvement.

See the detailed report for the Council team.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

During this week, FESCo held a meeting to discuss ongoing system transitions and policy updates, including the rollout of 2FA for provenpackagers, the handling of binary executable content in node_modules, and the timeline for gathering requirements for Fedora's upcoming Bugzilla replacement. The committee also finalized a major policy change regarding where Fedora Changes discussions will take place moving forward.

In ticketing and forum activity, FESCo formally approved the use of AWS-LC for cryptography in Rust packages, bringing clarity to package maintainers struggling with the ring crate. Additionally, several non-responsive maintainer tickets were processed, resulting in package handovers and the mass-orphaning of inactive maintainers' packages, while a draft for Crystal packaging guidelines was submitted for community review.

Decisions

  • Approved the F46 Change: Changes Discussion Only On Devel List, making it effective immediately. Discussions regarding Changes will now happen solely on the devel mailing list and will no longer be simultaneously discussed on Discourse.
  • Approved the inclusion and use of the aws-lc-sys and aws-lc-rs crates for cryptography in Fedora to replace the ring crate wherever possible, via Ticket #3679. This exception will be documented in the Packaging Guidelines.
  • Agreed to close the re-review of the F45 Change: RelocateRpmRepoConfigsToUsr, as major known issues affecting rpm-ostree, anaconda, and container composes have been resolved or mitigated.
  • Approved extending the deadline for gathering Bugzilla replacement requirements to September 4th to accommodate additional feedback from teams, as discussed in Ticket #3664.
  • Approved mass-orphaning of packages for non-responsive maintainers cleber (Ticket #3659) and gui1ty (slated for Sep 4 per Ticket #3678), while approving the handover of packages for benzea (Ticket #3672) and prarit (Ticket #3665).

See the detailed report for the FESCo team.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Packaging Committee

This week, the Packaging Committee's activity focused on updating and clarifying packaging guidelines across various ecosystems to prevent contributor confusion and accommodate structural changes. A new ticket was opened to document an exception for limited aws-lc use within the system-wide CryptoPolicies.

In the NodeJS ecosystem, new guidelines for using different nodejs versions have been finalized to detail how packaged streams should be utilized after the upcoming metapackage change. Additionally, the Python packaging guidelines are being revised to explicitly state that using %pyproject_buildrequires automatically satisfies the mandatory python3-devel build requirement, making redundant declarations unnecessary.

Decisions

See the detailed report for the Packaging Committee team.

Learn more about the Packaging Committee team.

Mindshare

This week, Mindshare focused heavily on in-person event representation, travel funding, and committee governance. The core theme connecting the active tickets is establishing a strong physical Fedora presence at regional open source conferences and ensuring proper internal representation on the Fedora Council.

The committee received two new travel support requests: one to record on-site Fedora Podcast episodes and present a talk at Texas Linux Fest 2026, and another to host a Fedora sub-booth alongside Red Hat India at IndiaFOSS 2026. Meanwhile, action was requested on the open Fedora Council Representative Nomination ticket to clarify earlier voting miscommunications and finally select the Mindshare liaison for the Fedora Linux 44 cycle.

See the detailed report for the Mindshare team.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Workstation / GNOME

The Workstation / GNOME group reviewed progress on several upstream and integration initiatives this week. Key topics included resolving recent bug-reporting friction with the Showtime project, acknowledging the failure of the current Flatpak strategy regarding Flathub integration, and discussions around Bazaar as a potential GNOME Software replacement.

Additionally, community members provided updates on restoring Google Drive integration for GNOME, noting that testing is temporarily delayed while developers adapt to recent upstream changes. Preparations are also underway for the Fedora 45 Blocker Review meetings, with a call for asynchronous QA voting.

Decisions

  • The working group confirmed that the effort to filter the Fedora Flatpak repository remains formally blocked by the pending GNOME Software redesign, per the meeting summary.
  • It was decided that the integration of the Bazaar app store requires a new contributor to take over the review process, as the original contributor is no longer responding.
  • Neal Gompa will review the ticket regarding the replacement of xvfb-run with wl-headless-run for GNOME packages and close it if no further action is required.
  • Allan Day will chair the next working group meeting, with Matthias Clasen serving as secretary.

See the detailed report for the Workstation / GNOME team.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

KDE Gear 26.08.0 is now available for testing on Fedora 44 and newer. While a minor bug regarding missing icons in Dolphin's "Details" mode was identified, an upstream patch has already been secured for the forthcoming 26.08.1 release. Additionally, the Fedora QA team has scheduled an upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting to address proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the upcoming Beta and Final releases.

See the detailed report for the KDE team.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server group met on August 26 to discuss Fedora 45 release testing and Project Ansible support. For F45 testing, the team is actively verifying features and installations, though hardware limitations for ARM and RAID setups have caused minor bottlenecks, prompting targeted volunteer efforts. A minor, non-blocking bug regarding Kickstart was identified during the testing phase.

On the Ansible support front, the working group verified that the Wildfly role functions properly when Java 25 is configured. The team agreed that the Wildfly and post-install modules are near completion and will serve as pilot projects, with beta user testing slated to begin in two to three weeks. In addition, the Fedora QA team announced Blocker Review meetings for Fedora 45.

Decisions

  • The Server working group will use the post-install and Wildfly Ansible modules as pilot projects, with beta user testing slated to begin in two to three weeks. (Meeting Log)

See the detailed report for the Server team.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Fedora Infrastructure team has officially entered the Fedora 45 Beta infrastructure freeze, which will remain in place until mid-September to ensure stability for the upcoming release. In major ecosystem news, Pagure.io has been officially retired as an active platform and transitioned into a read-only static archive for historical purposes. Concurrently, the team is heavily preparing the new Forgejo instance (Fedora Forge) to take over production Dist Git duties, including provisioning storage, refining access controls, and finalizing project board support.

Ongoing maintenance focused heavily on RHEL 10 migrations, with Zabbix servers successfully upgraded and Mailman servers queued next. The team also addressed a severe spam attack on the fedora-devel mailing list by banning the offending user, cleaning the archives, and implementing new moderation headers. Finally, various monitoring improvements were discussed, including stabilizing database OOM kills and tuning OpenShift app load balancer metrics.

Decisions

  • The Fedora 45 Beta infrastructure freeze is in effect from August 25 until approximately September 15. Frozen production hosts cannot be modified without sign-off from sysadmin-main or rel-eng.
  • Pagure.io has been officially turned off as an active service and converted into a read-only historical archive.
  • A freeze break was approved for the new-updates-sync script to ensure RHEL users receive the correct EPEL 10 epel-release-latest symlink and avoid dependency errors.
  • A generic internal guest account was enabled for Zabbix to allow the Copr team to easily forward status metrics to Grafana without complex SAML authentication.
  • A new FAS group, sysadmin-public-inbox, was created to manage the public-inbox OpenShift deployment.

See the detailed report for the Infrastructure team.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team enacted the Fedora 45 Beta Freeze on August 25 and began tracking Beta release tasks. A significant amount of the week was spent navigating infrastructure hiccups, including a Koji hub DDoS that stalled builds and dropped mounts, F44 Flatpak compose timeouts, and Rawhide ostree compose failures. In a F45 mass branching retrospective, the team noted successes in automation but highlighted the need to strictly prevent massive, disruptive updates right before branching.

Meanwhile, several infrastructure requests were addressed, including the setup of a temporary empty repository for F46 OpenH264 to bypass 404 errors until binaries are published. The new fedpkg request-unretirement tool saw active testing by maintainers, revealing some quirks regarding Rawhide branch unblocking.

Decisions

See the detailed report for the Release Engineering team.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group was highly active this week as Fedora 45 reached its Beta freeze and Bodhi enablement point. The GNOME 51 test day concluded successfully with 30 participants submitting 135 test results. Early manual validation testing for Fedora 45 was also completed, uncovering multiple bugs across different architectures.

Additionally, the team evaluated proposed blockers in their Beta blocker review meeting, deciding on key anaconda-webui and kmscon bugs. The group is also urgently compiling requirements for the upcoming Red Hat Bugzilla replacement system, which are due by September 1st.

Decisions

  • Accepted Fedora 45 Beta Blockers for an anaconda-webui review screen crash (Bug 2519654) and a kmscon bug that breaks console initial-setup on ARM minimal (Bug 2484542).
  • Accepted Fedora 45 Beta Freeze Exceptions to pull LLVM 23 into Fedora 45 (Bug 2506941), to address missing obsolete packages for Python 3.14 (Bug 2492124), and to fix an anaconda-webui dependency issue preventing soas livespin creation (Bug 2517903).
  • Declared User switching restart failure as an Accepted Final Blocker, but rejected it as a Beta Blocker (Bug 2501857).

See the detailed report for the Quality team.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

This week, the Design team saw continued progress on graphic design requests and repository maintenance, though some coordination activities were paused due to Madeline being on PTO. New artwork was submitted for the EPEL Steering Committee badge, and the migration of historical repositories to the new Forge organization was reviewed.

See the detailed report for the Design team.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Fedora Docs team held a meeting to discuss ongoing projects, including the frontpage redesign and proposed updates to the Release Notes process. A major milestone was reached with the merging of a long-standing pull request that restructures the team documentation, successfully splitting the Docs Contributors Guide into its own module for better visibility.

Additionally, the team evaluated ticket activity, opening a new discussion on archiving or removing End-of-Life (EOL) distribution pages and processing a membership request. The team is actively seeking community input on the frontpage redesign and continues to request help with manual wiki migrations.

Decisions

  • The Release Notes process will be updated to include clear documentation questions in the Fedora Change template, which will directly affect all Fedora Change owners. (Meeting Log)
  • The Docs Contributors Guide has been moved into a separate module to allow placement on the Docs landing page, finalizing the team documentation restructuring. (Issue #55)
  • Docs group membership requests will be denied unless the applicant has already made demonstrable contributions to repositories within the Docs organization on Forge. (Issue #60)

See the detailed report for the Docs team.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization group focused on optimizing translation resources and streamlining issue tracking. Key discussions included centralizing the issue tracker for localization-docs repositories by redirecting them via API to the main localization tracker, and removing archived documentation (sysadmin and install guides) from Weblate to save resources.

Additionally, the team fielded requests regarding unsupported Fedora releases and an upstream KDE translation error. Both were closed and redirected to the appropriate channels (Fedora Docs and the upstream KDE translation team, respectively), clarifying the scope of the Fedora localization team's responsibilities.

Decisions

  • Archived and unpublished documentation (Sysadmin Guide and Install Guide) will be removed from Weblate to free up resources, while keeping their underlying Git repositories.
  • Unsupported (EOL) Fedora releases will remain in Weblate as long as they are still published on Fedora Docs; requests to hide them must be directed to the Fedora Docs team.
  • Translation issues for upstream projects (such as KDE Plasma Vault) are out of scope for Fedora Localization and must be reported directly to upstream translation teams.

See the detailed report for the Internationalization team.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group successfully completed the EPEL 10.3 mass branching, officially shifting standard development on the epel10 branch to target the upcoming EPEL 10.4 release. Packagers wanting to build specifically for EPEL 10.3 must now request and use a dedicated epel10.3 branch. The transition went smoothly, overcoming some infrastructure adjustments required for the new "10s" repository naming scheme.

Simultaneously, the team deployed the first phase of the EPEL 10 "de-z-ification" initiative. CentOS 10 systems with the latest release package will now use the new epel-10s metalink pointing to 10.4, while RHEL changes will follow in the fall with the release of RHEL 10.3. The team also addressed a minor but impactful bug regarding symlink churn for the EPEL 10 release RPM, temporarily fixing it to prevent repository dependency errors for users.

Decisions

  • Builds submitted to the default epel10 branch now target EPEL 10.4 following the completion of the EPEL 10.3 mass branching. Packagers who need to build against EPEL 10.3 specifically must request and use the epel10.3 branch.
  • The first phase of the EPEL 10 "de-z-ification" proposal was put into production. CentOS 10 systems now utilize the epel-10s metalinks and paths, which redirect to the epel-10.4 repository, to prevent package dependency issues on private mirrors. Details were announced on the discussion forum.
  • The MirrorManager mapping logic for EPEL 10 was adjusted to use explicit minor versions (e.g., epel-10.4) with redirects for prior minor versions, rather than keeping the existing mapping and setting up redirects for future ones. (Discussion Post)

See the detailed report for the EPEL team.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

CentOS Hyperscale

During the August 26, 2026 meeting (log), the CentOS Hyperscale SIG announced that the wprof tool has graduated from incubation and is now available in Fedora and EPEL 10. The SIG has rebased to 7.1 kernels and plans to transition to 7.2 shortly after Fedora does. In broader ecosystem news, AlmaLinux is actively considering building the Hyperscale kernel for its users, which sparked discussions on kernel signing limitations and potential expansion of Hyperscale packages into AlmaLinux's extra repositories.

The group also discussed the progression of transactional Hyperscale updates, noting that core elements have been ported to dnf5. Work is actively proceeding on packaging these components, tracked via Bugzilla issues 2521657, 2521661, and 2521666. Additionally, a KDE proposal to improve enterprise technologies was highlighted for its strong alignment with Hyperscale's system snapshot capabilities.

Decisions

  • The SIG decided to retain the EPEL 9 builds of wprof in the experimental hsx repository, despite its graduation to standard repositories for Fedora and EPEL 10.
  • Davide Cavalca and Neal Gompa will finalize and submit the delayed Hyperscale quarterly report this week.

Learn more about the CentOS Hyperscale team.

ELN

During the August 25, 2026 meeting, the ELN SIG focused on infrastructure, sync processes, and tooling improvements. The group discussed options for building ELN and CentOS toolbox and container images, specifically weighing whether to migrate from Kiwi to image-builder for CentOS parity or to wait for future Konflux adoption; the decision was deferred for further investigation. The team also debated how to optimize the ELN Build Sync (EBS) timeout duration to prevent buildroot breakage during high-load events like mass rebuilds, with discussions moving to the tracker.

Most significantly for the broader Fedora and Linux packaging ecosystem, the SIG reached a consensus to stop using the Rawhide GPG key for ELN. Instead, they will provision a dedicated ELN key starting with the F46/EL11 branching. This key will be rotated approximately every three years to align with RHEL branching, which should resolve the recurring signing-related disruptions that typically happen during the Fedora branching process.

Decisions

  • The SIG agreed to provision a new, dedicated GPG key for ELN starting with the F46/EL11 branching, rather than continuing to use the shared Rawhide key. This key will be rotated roughly every 3 years (aligned with RHEL branchings) to avoid widespread signing-related breakages during Fedora branching. (Meeting log)

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Fedora Atomic group successfully added base and compose images for Fedora 45 in Konflux, while actively working to resolve build failures for IoT images alongside the IoT team. Ticket discussions highlighted a strong theme around improving the bootc image derivation process, focusing on trademark compliance and filesystem structure.

Administratively, steps were taken to grant write access to new maintainers for the base-images repository on both GitLab and the Fedora Forge. Users also reported a critical bug causing emergency mode on non-BTRFS filesystems (ext4/XFS) following recent system updates, which is currently under investigation.

Decisions

  • Sean Thrailkill and Hristo Marinov were formally approved for maintainer access to the base-images repository and the Fedora Forge.
  • A new Fedora Account System (FAS) group will be created for maintainers to safely isolate bot permissions on the Forge.
  • The IoT team will fix their Konflux image builds now that they are aware of the failures, and coordinate future strategy for CoreOS, bootc, and IoT images.
  • Ticket #125 will strictly track logos, release, and release notes packages for derived builds, with a separate ticket (#126) opened to track the /usr/local and /opt symlink issues.

See the detailed report for the Atomic team.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

During the week of August 24-30, 2026, the CoreOS group held one meeting to review pending action items, coordinate around the Fedora 45 (F45) release schedule, and discuss a major proposal to unify CoreOS and Image Mode/Bootc. Key discussions revolved around navigating the F45 beta freeze to implement zram/oomd enablement, and scheduling the F45 Test Day for September 21st.

The team had a highly positive initial reaction to the Bootc unification proposal, viewing it as a natural progression that could reduce duplication of effort across Fedora variants. This initiative will be proposed to the Bootc community next week to evaluate feasibility and alignment.

Decisions

  • Tentatively scheduled the Fedora CoreOS 45 Test Day for 2026-09-21 (tracked in CoreOS #934).
  • Agreed to prioritize completing the zram/oomd implementation for F45 and address any beta freeze exceptions afterward if necessary.

See the detailed report for the CoreOS team.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

ARM

This week, the ARM group primarily discussed hardware compatibility and upcoming release blockers. A user reported a kernel error when attempting to boot an older Fedora 43 installation on a Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.1. The issue was bypassed by upgrading to a Fedora 44 image, prompting maintainers to close the inquiry since Fedora 43 is no longer a focus.

Additionally, QA announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting scheduled for August 31, 2026. Community members were invited to participate in the triage of proposed blockers and freeze exceptions for the Beta and Final releases.

Decisions

See the detailed report for the ARM team.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

This week, an update was shared in the Hummingbird Community Meeting - 20 August 2026 thread regarding a new project. Jorge Castro announced that a version of Bluefin built on Hummingbird technology is essentially finished and will serve as a full peer to Dakotaraptor. He emphasized his complete commitment and support for this variant, noting that initial code pushes to its new repository are expected shortly.

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML group met to discuss ongoing packaging efforts and long-term goals (meeting log). Work on PyTorch 2.13 has temporarily stalled in Rawhide and Fedora 45 due to a libstdc++ update that conflicts with ROCm, causing build breaks. Meanwhile, ROCm 10.0 (previously referred to as ROCm 8) was released on August 26. This major upgrade marks a shift in AMD's release pace and support model. The group is currently evaluating potential ABI breakage, though efforts are slightly hampered by libabigail crashing on debuginfo packages.

The group also explored the feasibility of shipping "open weights" AI models (like Nvidia's Nemotron 3 or AMD's open models) directly in Fedora. The consensus is that training or rebuilding these models from scratch within Fedora's build system (Koji) is currently unrealistic due to extreme hardware requirements (e.g., 64x MI300 GPUs) and timeouts. Doing so would require dedicated infrastructure proposals and deep-pocketed sponsors to provide heavy cloud compute resources.

Decisions

  • ROCm 10.0 packages will be staged and maintained in the ROCm packagers preview COPR until basic testing is completed and the scope of ABI changes is fully quantified.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

Security

This week, the Security SIG's primary focus was discussing a draft proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG, which originated from earlier conversations about maintaining the ff-disable-ai-ml package. The group debated the appropriate scope for such a SIG, noting that while security and privacy are closely related, a dedicated Privacy SIG might inadvertently attract ideological or political debates rather than technical contributions.

To address these concerns and ensure good optics—particularly to avoid appearing antagonistic toward the AI/ML SIG—the group agreed to postpone any formal launch. Instead, members will take extra time to review the RFC and intend to focus initially on concrete, ad-hoc technical work, such as packaging clear privacy config toggles for users.

Decisions

  • Deferred the formal creation and announcement of the proposed Privacy SIG to allow members more time to review the draft and refine its scope.
  • Agreed to focus on tangible, ad-hoc technical implementations (such as packaging user privacy toggles) to establish a technical foundation before officially spinning off a new SIG.

See the detailed report for the Security team.

Learn more about the Security team.

Go

During the Go SIG meeting, it was announced that Go 1.27.0 is now available in Rawhide. Maintainers will soon move this update into Fedora 45 and trigger a mass prebuild on COPR. The SIG is also preparing to retire Go 1.25 in Fedora 43 in favor of Go 1.26, aligning with upstream Kubernetes requirements which have dropped support for 1.25 across all supported releases.

Additionally, the team discussed a new method for handling security vulnerability reports. A community member modified an upstream CRI-O script to generate govulncheck output in openvex format. This script makes it much faster to verify if a package is actually affected by specific CVEs without having to run manual checks for each one. The script will be shared publicly on platforms like GitHub or Forgejo to help maintainers triage Bugzilla tickets more efficiently.

Decisions

  • Move Go 1.27.0 into Fedora 45 and perform a mass prebuild on COPR.
  • Open a ticket to retire Go 1.25 in Fedora 43 and transition to Go 1.26 to support recent Kubernetes releases.

Learn more about the Go team.

Perl

This week's activity on the Perl mailing list consisted entirely of package maintenance pull request notifications from Michal Josef Špaček. Key updates centered around the perl-DBD-ODBC package, which was re-submitted for Fedora review, updated with a new EPEL10 package, and received miscellaneous updates. Additionally, the perl-Archive-Extract package received version 0.90 version bumps across multiple branches.

Decisions

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

This week, the Python group discussed the behavior of %pyproject_patch_dependency when packaging multiple Python distribution packages in a single specfile. They agreed that its current behavior—filtering dependencies from all distributions—is sensible for most use cases but needs to be properly documented. An option to filter by a specific distribution name might be considered in the future.

In addition, flit-core has been updated to version 4. A deprecated compatibility package, python3-flit-core3, was introduced for packages that still require older versions. However, maintainers are expected to eventually migrate their packages to flit-core 4+.

Decisions

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group focused heavily on addressing various RUSTSEC security advisories and dealing with unmaintained crates across the ecosystem. Significant efforts were directed toward updating critical dependencies, notably the lru and git2 crates, to mitigate vulnerabilities, alongside planning migrations away from archived crates with unfixed soundness issues like smartstring, bitmaps, sized-chunks, and im-rc.

A major theme of the week was coordinating package updates and rebuilds gracefully. Because of the large number of dependent packages in the Fedora ecosystem, temporary compatibility packages are being introduced (such as for git2), and the group finalized a strategy for handling security rebuilds for affected packages they do not directly co-maintain, prioritizing cross-team communication over unilateral action.

Decisions

  • Rather than invoking provenpackager privileges to force rebuilds of applications affected by the cxx RUSTSEC advisory, the group will file targeted bugs against the applications, linking the advisory and advising maintainers to simply rebuild their packages (Issue #36).
  • A temporary rust-git2_0.20 compatibility package will be added to the repositories to prevent breaking a large number of dependent packages while they are being ported to git2 v0.21.0 (Issue #30).
  • The group will wait until lru v0.18 is available in the repositories before attempting to patch the bounds for dependent packages like pydantic (Issue #39).

See the detailed report for the Rust team.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

  • Michael Scherer initiated a discussion on Dynamic users with sysusers and bootc/image mode, noting that sysusers.d in image mode can cause UID mismatches on upgrades, and proposed amending packaging guidelines to pair it with a tmpfiles.d fragment to properly chown files in /var.
  • Mattia Verga posted the latest report on Inactive packagers for the F45 release cycle, prompting a request from Miroslav Suchý to include plain text lists of usernames directly in the email rather than relying solely on the ticket tracker links.
  • Norbert Manthey proposed to Extend default compiler settings to harden applications by adding flags like -fno-strict-overflow and -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero. Daniel P. Berrangé noted that while the latter eliminates vulnerabilities, it can cause non-trivial performance degradation (e.g., 9% in virtio-blk) that maintainers must address.
  • SY Wang raised an issue regarding No response from the main admin on a libxsmm pull request open for two months. Other users noted similar issues and advised following the formal nonresponsive maintainer policy via Bugzilla.
  • Tobias Girstmair asked for advice on Questions on packaging vim-classic so it can coexist with standard vim. Maxwell G and Simon de Vlieger suggested starting with renamed or suffixed binaries rather than using the alternatives system.
  • Aoife Moloney announced a DEADLINE: Please Submit your Bug Tracker Workflows by Sept 1, 2026 to collect workflow requirements for an eventual Red Hat Bugzilla replacement, though the tight deadline was questioned by Quality team members.
  • Chihurumnaya Ibiam reported a FTBFS/FTI Page Not Found issue in an auto-generated comment link, which Miro Hrončok promptly fixed while reminding contributors to report tooling issues directly to the releng ticket tracker.
  • Henryk Paluch noted that the Package Sponsorship page points to decommissioned pagure.io, and was directed to the new Fedora Forge tracker and an open pull request designed to fix the documentation.
  • Kevin Fenzi confirmed the spam wave is over, stating that the spammers were banned, the archives cleaned, and new header rules were added to block similar messages.
  • Orion Poplawski posted Help wanted with ansible mysql/mariadb collections, seeking a new maintainer for ansible.mysql as they are migrating to ansible.mariadb; Andreas Haupt volunteered to take it over.
  • Other discussions included an announcement of the upcoming F45 Blocker Review Meeting, and two PRs from Bojan Smojver to address a Failed F44 Flatpak compose holding back updates.

Package updates

Orphaning packages

New contributor introductions

  • Charles Haithcock introduced himself as a former RHEL kernel troubleshooter who is now working on Fedora kernel bugs and hopes to become more entrenched in the community.
  • Bri Mo introduced himself as an applied AI/ML engineer and OSINT enthusiast running Silverblue 44 and container-first workflows with Podman.

Contribution opportunities

Testing and Quality Assurance: Community members looking for highly accessible ways to contribute can help streamline the release process by voting on proposed blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the blockerbugs app (requested by Workstation/GNOME, KDE, Server, Release Engineering, and ARM). Testers are also needed to evaluate Google Drive integration in GNOME, the KDE Gear 26.08.0 release, ROCm 10.0 packages, and transactional updates. More involved QA tasks include investigating Atomic Desktop boot failures on non-BTRFS systems, benchmarking tuned-ppd performance, and writing test cases for upcoming Anaconda test days or CoreOS testing events.

Design, Documentation, and Community Governance: Non-developers can make significant impacts by shaping project identity, documentation, and policies. Designers are invited to create an avatar for the Matrix Moderation Bot or submit artwork for the upcoming Fedora 46 Wallpaper call. Documentation volunteers can guide the Docs frontpage redesign (Issue #6, Issue #52), assist with Wiki cleanup (Issue #43), and modernize the Request for Resources process. Contributors are also encouraged to review and provide feedback on the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, the Innovation Lifecycle Proposal, Draft Crystal Packaging Guidelines, the Privacy SIG RFC, and the CoreOS Unification proposal. Additionally, bilingual users can report translation errors directly to upstream translation teams.

Programming and Scripting: Software developers have opportunities to write automation tools and patch ecosystems. Scripting tasks include using the Forgejo API to redirect localization issue trackers, building tools to adjust NodeJS shebangs, and creating a programmatic fix for EPEL 10 symlink churn. UI/UX developers can tackle low-hanging fruit by adding a power-off option to the GNOME initial setup screen, building system snapshot integrations aligned with KDE's enterprise goals, or developing user-facing privacy toggles. Rust developers are urgently needed for security auditing and migrating Fedora packages away from unmaintained crates like smartstring (Issue #38) and updating git2 dependents.

Packaging, Infrastructure, and Sysadmin: Contributors with packaging and system administration skills are highly sought after to adopt orphaned packages resulting from unresponsive maintainers, including PackageKit-Qt5, ansible.mysql, and Python utilities (sponsorship is available for adopters of packages like python-aexpect). Python packagers can also assist by migrating spec files to flit-core v4+. Infrastructure volunteers can help prepare for RHEL 10 by building missing EPEL packages needed to migrate Mailman servers, fix Ansible inventory macros, and update the Koji theme footer URI. Furthermore, packaging contributors can help create generic Fedora remix assets to ease trademark compliance for derived bootc builds.

misc fedora bits: last week of aug 2026

Posted by Kevin Fenzi on 2026-08-29 17:53:19 UTC
Scrye into the crystal ball

Time for another saturday weekly recap in longer form.

RHEL10 migrations

Bunch more progress of various machines over the last week or two, and we are down to:

Nice to finish this off soon.

Authentication woes... over?

I am hopefull that we have solved the last of our auth issues late this week. There's a lot of moving parts in our authentication stack: ipa servers on the backend, noggin on the frontend (accounts.fedoraproject.org), ipsilon for identity provider (id.fedoraproject.org). All of these have had various issues recently, but we have worked through them and I did some tuning of ipsilon on thursday that seems to have really helped.

If you are still seeing any issue, please add exactly what you were trying to login to/do and time/date to our tracking ticket. ( https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/13482 )

Fedora 45 Beta infrastructure freeze

We are in beta freeze now, so hopefully that will keep things a bit quieter and we can catch up on work in staging and docs and other like things.

As always, comment on the fediverse: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/117180272072423365

⚙️ PHP version 8.4.25 and 8.5.10

Posted by Remi Collet on 2026-08-28 04:51:00 UTC

RPMs of PHP version 8.5.10 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 43 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.25 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 43 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

ℹ️ These versions are also available as Software Collections in the remi-safe repository.

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

ℹ️ There is no security fix this month, so no update for versions 8.2.33 and 8.3.33.

⚠️ PHP version 8.1 has reached its end of life and is no longer maintained by the PHP project.

Version announcements:

ℹ️ Installation: Use the Configuration Wizard and choose your version and installation mode.

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.5 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.5/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.5
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.5 as Software Collection

yum install php85

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.4 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.4
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection

yum install php84

And soon in the official updates:

⚠️ To be noticed :

  • EL-10 RPMs are built using RHEL-10.2
  • EL-9 RPMs are built using RHEL-9.8
  • EL-8 RPMs are built using RHEL-8.10
  • intl extension now uses libicu74 (version 74.2)
  • mbstring extension (EL builds) now uses oniguruma5php (version 6.9.10, instead of the outdated system library)
  • oci8 extension now uses the RPM of Oracle Instant Client version 23.26 on x86_64 and aarch64
  • A lot of extensions are also available; see the PHP extensions RPM status (from PECL and other sources) page

ℹ️ Information:

Base packages (php)

Software Collections (php83 / php84 / php85)

🛡️ PHP version 8.2.33, 8.3.33, 8.4.24, and 8.5.9

Posted by Remi Collet on 2026-07-31 05:05:00 UTC

RPMs of PHP version 8.5.9 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.24 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.3.33 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

RPMs of PHP version 8.2.33 are available in the remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 42 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky...).

ℹ️ These versions are also available as Software Collections in the remi-safe repository.

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

⚠️ PHP version 8.1 has reached its end of life and is no longer maintained by the PHP project.

🛡️ These Versions fix 3 security bugs (CVE-2026-7260, CVE-2026-17543, CVE-2026-17544), so the update is strongly recommended.

Version announcements:

ℹ️ Installation: Use the Configuration Wizard and choose your version and installation mode.

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.5 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.5/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.5
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.5 as Software Collection

yum install php85

Replacement of default PHP by version 8.4 installation (simplest):

On Enterprise Linux (dnf 4)

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4/common

On Fedora (dnf 5)

dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.4
dnf update

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection

yum install php84

And soon in the official updates:

⚠️ To be noticed :

  • EL-10 RPMs are built using RHEL-10.2
  • EL-9 RPMs are built using RHEL-9.8
  • EL-8 RPMs are built using RHEL-8.10
  • intl extension now uses libicu74 (version 74.2)
  • mbstring extension (EL builds) now uses oniguruma5php (version 6.9.10, instead of the outdated system library)
  • oci8 extension now uses the RPM of Oracle Instant Client version 23.26 on x86_64 and aarch64
  • A lot of extensions are also available; see the PHP extensions RPM status (from PECL and other sources) page

ℹ️ Information:

Base packages (php)

Software Collections (php83 / php84 / php85)

Friday Links 26-27

Posted by Christof Damian on 2026-08-27 22:00:00 UTC
A black Sony Walkman music player lying on a wooden bench, screen showing a track playing, with a grey headphone cable plugged in

I skipped a week again. Some good podcasts this week, have a listen to the ones about The Pragmatic Programmer and the one about performance. For some fun, play Snek and watch the relaxing visualisation of train movements.

Quote of the Week
You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig

Leadership

Headed for the Exit: the Great Engineering Leader Career Break - I can definitely relate. I would say that this doesn’t affect only leaders.

Change in Timeline to “Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking”

Posted by Michael Catanzaro on 2026-08-27 14:56:33 UTC

In Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking, I reported:

I will discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on November 1, 2026. During November, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to November 1. By December 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been reached, and I will be done.

This is because I was planning to leave my job at Red Hat on December 31 due to some internal Red Hat policy changes. But this timeline has now unexpectedly moved forward two months, to October 30. Accordingly, I will now discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on October 1, 2026. During October, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to October 1. By November 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been reached, and I will be done.

Syslog-ng end of August news, and about scaling back Java support

Posted by Peter Czanik on 2026-08-27 11:02:53 UTC

Most of August, I was on vacation, but now I’m back and I try catching up on the events of the past weeks, just like my colleagues do. Currently, we are fixing issues and reviewing contributions, but we also discussed scaling back our efforts on Java support.

While most of the team was away on vacation, the number of syslog-ng contributions suddenly grew. We support both autotools and cmake, and while differences are narrowing, there are still some minor problems to fix. There are pull requests related to cmake, the syslog-ng disk buffer and more. Check https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ for a full list of pull requests we are working on.

We also received some new issues. One of them was related to a memory leak when syslog-ng is reloaded. While we fixed several problems, Java was not among them. In fact, we rather disabled packaging Java destination support.

To explain this decision: Java support was introduced back when several destinations had no native C drivers and were only implemented in Java. However, Elasticsearch works fine using a wrapper around the http() destination. Kafka now also has a native C driver. And as for HDFS: well, it is dead, and its code will be removed from syslog-ng soon. A few months ago, I also wrote about disabling Java support in my packages. Now the same is happening with Debian / Ubuntu / RHEL packages available from https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-java-destination-disabled At the same time, we also decided not to work on a Java-related memory leak problem, unless we are notified that someone is actually using the Java destination with a self-developed driver. We were aware of such projects 3-4 years ago, but not anymore.

But are there any benefits of not packaging Java, you might ask? Well, in the Debian / Ubuntu world, many users install the syslog-ng package, which is an umbrella package installing all syslog-ng sub-modules and their dependencies. But even without an umbrella package, I have seen similar solutions from RPM users. Removing the unused Java package from the mix reduces both RAM and HDD usage, which benefits everyone.

syslog-ng logo

Originally published at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-end-of-august-news-and-about-scaling-back-java-support

Removing inactive maintainers

Posted by Ben Cotton on 2026-08-26 12:00:00 UTC

In open source projects, we tend to grant privileges far more often than we remove them. This is understandable, but risky. First, keeping inactive people on the maintainer list means someone may go to them with a question and be frustrated when they don’t get an answer. More importantly, it presents a security risk. Compromised accounts remain a common attack vector, and it’s much easier to escape notice if the account owner isn’t using the account. It behooves the project to keep the maintainer (or other privileged role) list tidy.

There are a few reasons that trimming the maintainer list doesn’t happen. First, it’s boring, tedious work. Who wants to do that? Second, it’s complicated work. What does it mean to be “inactive”? Third, it can lead to hurt feelings. People who earn privileges absorb that role into their identity and they don’t want to let it go. This is a case where the perfect quickly becomes the enemy of the good (or okay-ish). Let’s look at each of the reasons in turn.

Overcoming the objections

Project and community management tasks often end up on the “avoid: no fun” pile. They only seem like no fun because they are. But “fun” and “important for the project” aren’t the same. Changing the air filter in my furnace isn’t fun, but it’s important for the health and safety of my family. Ideally, the inactive maintainer process is automated and runs regularly, but building that automation takes work. So if you go through the list and identify inactive maintainers once or twice a year, that’s better than nothing.

“Inactive” can mean a lot of things. Does one activity in a six month period count? Does the activity have to be “sustained”? You can define it in the way that’s most convenient to you. The goal isn’t to be rigorous and precise, it’s just some spring cleaning. You can start by just asking yourself “have I seen So-and-so around lately?” If the answer is “yes”, then they’re active. Again, it would be nice if you could automate it. You don’t need to wait for that.

The feelings objection is the hardest one. We’re all friends here and we don’t want to hurt our friends’ feelings. Unlike the other two, you can’t really half-ass this one, so you need a policy that treats people with kindness. Let’s move on to that.

Creating an inactive maintainers policy

Here are some features of a good inactive maintainers policy:

  • Define “inactive” unambiguously. “We will remove maintainers who have not been active in N months, where ‘active’ means having done X, Y, Z.” Six or twelve months is probably a good place to start. Be sure to include as many activities as you can reasonably determine. Think about what’s important to keep that status: commits, issues opened/closed/commented/reviewed, pull requests, mailing list posts, and so on.
  • Define “inactive” generously. For the most part, the bigger concern is “is this person still in control of their account?” not “is this person earning enough points to keep their privileges?” So if someone’s activity isn’t what you’d want for them to initially earn maintainer status, that’s probably okay.
  • Check for inactive maintainers at a set time. If you have calendar-based releases, check at a given point in the release cycle. Right after the release is a good starting point.
  • Automate what you can. The time spent really does pay off pretty quickly. Fedora is a large and complicated project, so evaluating activity requires checking half a dozen services. Mattia Verga wrote a script that handles the checks and creates issues in a repo to track the inactive packagers.
  • Don’t remove anyone without notice. This is a big part of the “don’t hurt your friends’ feelings” requirement. Give people a chance to respond. Some will respond by being more active. Some will respond by saying “yeah, I no longer have the time and/or interest, so go ahead and drop me.” Some won’t respond at all. If someone wants to remain, let them.
  • Conspicuously acknowledge the people you’re removing. Add people as a “maintainer emeritus”. Mention them in a blog post, release notes, or other vehicle for public praise.
  • Allow easy reinstatement. If someone lapses and later wants to return, let them. Don’t make them go through the whole process again. It’s much easier to let a role go if you know you can easily get it back later.
  • Leave some privileges for people on emeritus status. Keeping their name on a list of historical maintainers, letting them keep a project email address, giving them voting privileges on certain issues, and other privileges will help people who are inactive still feel valued in the project.

It will take a few tries to get the policy just right. Don’t be afraid to try it.

This post’s featured photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash.

The post Removing inactive maintainers appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

🎲 PHP version 8.4.25RC1 and 8.5.10RC1

Posted by Remi Collet on 2026-08-14 03:53:00 UTC

Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and as base packages.

RPMs of PHP version 8.5.10RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 43-44 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

RPMs of PHP version 8.4.25RC1 are available

  • as base packages in the remi-modular-test for Fedora 43-44 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8
  • as SCL in remi-test repository

ℹ️ The packages are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

ℹ️ PHP version 8.3 is now in security mode only, so no more RC will be released.

ℹ️ Installation: follow the wizard instructions.

ℹ️ Announcements:

Parallel installation of version 8.5 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php85

Parallel installation of version 8.4 as Software Collection:

yum --enablerepo=remi-test install php84

Update of system version 8.5:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.5
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

Update of system version 8.4:

dnf module switch-to php:remi-8.4
dnf --enablerepo=remi-modular-test update php\*

ℹ️ Notice:

  • version 8.5.10RC1 is in Fedora rawhide for QA
  • version 8.6.0beta1 is also available in the repository
  • EL-10 packages are built using RHEL-10.2 and EPEL-10.2
  • EL-9 packages are built using RHEL-9.8 and EPEL-9
  • EL-8 packages are built using RHEL-8.10 and EPEL-8
  • oci8 extension uses the RPM of the Oracle Instant Client version 23.26 on x86_64 and aarch64
  • intl extension uses libicu 74.2
  • RC version is usually the same as the final version (no change accepted after RC, exception for security fix).
  • versions 8.4.19 and 8.5.4 are planed for March 12th, in 2 weeks.

Software Collections (php84, php85)

Base packages (php)

Streaming Online Radio with Shortwave on GNOME

Posted by Christiano Anderson on 2026-08-26 05:30:59 UTC

As an expat living in Germany, online radio has become a good daily companion. I enjoy listening to news from my home country (and connect to my mother tongue), practice German language or just discovering music and stories from a random place around the globe.

I found a GNOME app that is a genuine gem: Shortwave, which can be installed via Flathub.

Shortwave is an online radio app for GNOME that has a great and clean design, cool features and a built-in search that makes finding radio stations around the world effortless. Just search, tune and listen, super easy.

Hooking an old magicJack adapter to modern Asterisk

Posted by Matthew Garrett on 2026-08-26 04:04:17 UTC

I’m on a VPN setup with several friends that, obviously, includes a VoIP network. I also have an old magicJack adapter and a deep and abiding need to use hardware in ways I should not. There was obvious synergy here.

Plugging in the magicJack gives a USB vendor id of 0x06e6, which belonged to a company called TigerJet who made a range of chips for hooking up phones to computers, either via USB or PCI. Some more digging suggested that it was a 580 part, and someone had conveniently uploaded some reference code and datasheets, so figuring out how to talk to the chip wasn’t terribly difficult. Once configured it simply sends HID events whenever a user hits a phone key or changes the hook state, and otherwise exposes a USB audio device that can be spoken to using the stock kernel driver. It also has the ability to generate dial tone and assert ring signal, giving a full traditional phone experience.

So you’d think this would be a super easy project, but I’d made things harder for myself by deciding I wanted to tie directly into Asterisk rather than just smashing an existing SIP stack onto the device. Asterisk uses channels to talk to devices, and channels end up as compiled C code that Asterisk can load dynamically. I didn’t want to have to deal with the pain of compiling stuff and matching ABIs and everything so writing a new channel from scratch was unappealing. Fortunately, the websocket channel is available in recent versions of Asterisk and provides a convenient way to get audio in and out, but that still leaves the job of handling incoming and outgoing calls. That’s handled with the Asterisk Rest Interface, which can initiate a call or respond to an incoming one and bridge various channels together to produce a bidirectional audio stream. There’s a convenient async Python library that handles the low level protocol.

Code for all this is here1, and works for my use case, but I should really abstract out the asterisk side and the magicJack side to make it easier to adapt to other devices. That’s a job for later, though. For now, you get this:

  1. This has also been an excuse for me to figure out how to make Tangled work, which I’ll write about at some later point. But self-hosted git repo with a convenient collaboration plane! ↩︎

Brother DCP-T420W (workaround for Linux aarch64 and macOS 27 Golden Gate)

Posted by Filipe Rosset on 2026-08-26 03:43:32 UTC 
#
# https://github.com/rosset/myconfig/tree/master/brother-t420w-2026
#

                         ┌───────────────────────┐
                         │   Brother DCP-T420W                          │
                         │  (final architecture)                              │
                         │   IPP / PWG-Raster                                │
                         └──────────▲────────────┘
                                                         │
                         ┌──────────┴───────────┐
                         │      Network / IPP    │
                         └──────────▲───────────┘
                                                         │
              ┌─────────────────────┴─────────────────────┐
              │                                           │
    Linux / Raspberry Pi 5                         macOS 27 Golden Gate
        aarch64                                                            IPP Everywhere
              │                                                                                     │
        CUPS + PPD                                                                    CUPS
              │                                                                                     │
      br-box64-filter                                                           driver=everywhere
              │
            box64
              │
    Brother x86_64 filter
              │
       HBP / PWG-Raster
              │
              └───────────────────────► Printer

# Linux
# Printer Brother_T420W running with Linux (aarch64) + box64 + cups filter + modified ppd
# Status: working

=> uncompress opt-brother.tar.gz to /opt - final path = /opt/brother

=> copy /opt/brother/br-box64-filter to /usr/lib/cups/filter/br-box64-filter
    * make sure it is executable: chmod +x /usr/lib/cups/filter/br-box64-filter
    * this filter is a wrapper for the Brother LPD filter, which is a x86_64 binary
    * it uses box64 to run the x86_64 binary on aarch64 (rpi5 in my case)
    * if you try to use ./lpd/x86_64/brdcpt420wfilter directly, it will fail with "wrong architecture" error
    * DietPi v10.6.2 (Debian 13.6) + [BOX64] Box64 with Dynarec v0.3.4 nogit built on Apr 24 2025 09:54:47
    * the "key" thing is to keep the A4 Geometry: 2480x3508 (some wrappers are changing it to 2480x3507, which is wrong)
    
=> key files under /opt/brother:
    - /opt/brother/Printers/dcpt420w/inf/brdcpt420wrc
        -changed PageSize=Letter to PageSize=A4

    - /opt/brother/Printers/dcpt420w/cupswrapper/brother_dcpt420w_printer_en.ppd
        - changed from *cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 brother_lpdwrapper_dcpt420w"
            - to.      *cupsFilter: "application/pdf 0 br-box64-filter"

    - copy /opt/brother/Printers/dcpt420w/cupswrapper/brother_dcpt420w_printer_en.ppd
        to /etc/cups/ppd/Brother_T420W.ppd
    
    - finally add the printer:
        lpadmin -p Brother_T420W -E -v ipp://printer-IP:631/ipp/print -P /etc/cups/ppd/Brother_T420W.ppd


# V2 => Easiest path for Linux aarch64, avoid use of box64 and Brother
# x86_64 filter, use IPP (no everywhere) driverless printing instead
#
# Brother_T420W - V1
#    → Brother proprietary LPD + box64
#    → maximum Brother specific compatibility

# Brother_T420W_IPP - V2
#    → native CUPS driverless
#    → PWG Raster over IPP
#    → no x86_64 emulation

driverless \
    ipp://printer-IP:631/ipp/print \
    > /tmp/brother-ipp/dcp-t420w.ppd

sed -i 's/\*DefaultPageSize: Letter/*DefaultPageSize: A4/' \
    /tmp/brother-ipp/dcp-t420w.ppd

lpadmin \
    -p Brother_T420W_IPP \
    -E \
    -v ipp://printer-IP:631/ipp/print \
    -P /tmp/brother-ipp/dcp-t420w.ppd

cupsenable Brother_T420W_IPP
cupsaccept Brother_T420W_IPP

lpstat -v
lpstat -p Brother_T420W_IPP -l

# macOS 27 Golden Gate
# Printer Brother_T420W with CUPS + IPP Everywhere
# Kind: DCP-T420W - IPP Everywhere
# Driver version: 2.3
# Status: working

lpadmin -p Brother_T420W -E -v "ipp://printer-IP/ipp/print" -m everywhere

Meet editorial-guide-ramalama: An AI Assistant That Checks Your Fedora CommBlog and Magazine Articles Against Editorial Guidelines

Posted by Fedora Community Blog on 2026-08-25 12:47:18 UTC

By Ananya Nalavathu and Francois Gonothi Toure

Introduction

Open source communities run on contribution, and contribution runs on documentation, storytelling, and knowledge sharing. At the Fedora Project, that means the Fedora Community Blog and Fedora Magazine, two publications that give contributors a voice and give the community a way to stay informed, inspired, and connected.

This year, as part of my internship with the Fedora CommOps team at Red Hat Ireland, I got to experience that firsthand. Publishing 11 articles, running editorial campaigns, and coordinating content across sprints gave me a deep appreciation for how much thought goes into keeping Fedora’s editorial standards consistent and how much easier that journey could be for new contributors with the right tool in hand.

That’s exactly what my fellow intern Gonothi built during his Outreachy internship with the Fedora Project. In our final sprint together, we decided to share it with the community because tools that make contributions more accessible deserve to be heard. With that context in mind, I’ll hand over to Gonothi to walk you through what he built and why. 

What I built and why

My name is Gonothi, and I’m an Outreachy intern within the Fedora Project. The tool I built is called editorial-guide-ramalama, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) assistant that reads Fedora’s actual editorial guidelines and published articles, then checks your draft against them. It tells you whether your article meets the standards and exactly what to fix if it doesn’t.

A regular chatbot would guess. RAG grounds every answer in the actual guidelines. When the tool flags a problem, it cites the specific guideline and gives you an actionable fix. Not “this looks off”- but “your article is missing the Read More tag, which is required per the Magazine guidelines.” 

RamaLama is the engine behind the whole tool, and it’s a big part of why this project works the way it does. It runs open models locally as OCI containers, the same container tooling Fedora already uses, so there’s no API key, no external service, and no data leaving the machine, which keeps everything private and fully reproducible. It also has RAG built in: RamaLama handles the ingestion, chunking, and retrieval itself (running Docling internally to parse and chunk the guidelines), so I don’t have to wire together a separate vector pipeline. That combination of local inference, OCI-container packaging, and built-in RAG is what lets the tool ship as a single image that anyone can pull from Quay and run.

How it works

The tool supports both Fedora publications, Fedora Magazine and the Fedora Community Blog, each with its own editorial guidelines loaded as the primary source the model checks against. Switch publications in the sidebar, and the guidelines change accordingly.

The stack is built on RamaLama, Docling, Quay, and Streamlit, with small GPT-Generated Unified Format (GGUF) models benchmarked for quality versus size. The pipeline works like this:

Articles are pulled from both publications via the WordPress REST API; no static files are committed, and the corpus is always rebuilt from source and stays reproducible. RamaLama RAG runs Docling internally to parse and chunk the documents into a vector store, packaged as OCI images published to Quay at quay.io/fedora/editorial-guide-ramalama. To run a check, pull the relevant image and use either the Streamlit interface or the terminal; no build step required.

Paste a draft that meets the Magazine’s standards, and the model confirms compliance, citing the relevant guideline. Paste one with known issues, a missing featured image, a missing Read More tag, and it flags each problem with an actionable fix.

One honest note: small local models have limits. editorial-guide-ramalama is great for catching common issues before submission. It is not a replacement for a human editor, and it doesn’t try to be.


Why the open source community should care 

What strikes me most about this project is not just what it does technically, but what it represents for contributor onboarding in open source communities. One of the biggest barriers for new Fedora contributors isn’t motivation; it’s knowing the unwritten rules. Editorial guidelines, packaging standards, community norms these exist, but they’re scattered, and learning them through rejection is discouraging.

Tools like editorial-guide-ramalama lower that barrier. They don’t replace human editors or community knowledge; instead, they give new contributors a first pass, a way to self-check before they submit, and a way to learn the guidelines through doing rather than through trial and error. That’s exactly the kind of tooling that makes open source communities more accessible.

What comes next

This mini-project was the proof of concept that validated the RAG approach for Fedora editorial documentation. The same architecture is now feeding into a larger project applying RAG to RPM packaging guidelines, a higher-stakes domain where grounded, local, open-model AI can help contributors get packaging right.

The code is on the Fedora Forge at ai-ml/editorial-guide-ramalama. Pull the image from Quay and try it on your next draft before you submit.

Try it yourself

The tool is live and available now. Pull the image from Quay, paste your draft, and see what it says. If you’re a new contributor, nervous about your first article, this was built for you.

Thank you to the Fedora community, our mentors Justin Wheeler, Dominik Kawka, and Carol Chen, and Outreachy for making this internship possible.

The post Meet editorial-guide-ramalama: An AI Assistant That Checks Your Fedora CommBlog and Magazine Articles Against Editorial Guidelines appeared first on Fedora Community Blog.

From August 17 to August 23

Posted by Aurélien Bompard on 2026-08-24 07:52:00 UTC

Across the Fedora project, a major unified focus is the urgent preparation for the Fedora 45 Beta Freeze on August 25, 2026. Multiple groups—including Release Engineering, Quality, and various architecture and desktop SIGs—are finalizing mass branching, managing fails-to-install (FTI) packages, and conducting Blocker Review meetings to triage critical issues, such as widespread rpm-ostree breakages caused by the recent RPM repository configuration relocation to /usr. Concurrently, significant infrastructure shifts are a central theme, highlighted by the decommissioning of pagure.io into a read-only static archive and the formulation of usage policies for the new Forgejo-based Fedora Forge. Finally, routine package and system maintenance remains a shared priority, with teams actively auditing inactive maintainers, coordinating mass rebuilds for EPEL 10.3 and RISC-V, and modernizing packaging strategies across language-specific ecosystems like Python, Perl, and Rust.

Announcements

Significant infrastructure shifts are underway as pagure.io transitions to a permanent, read-only static archive, cementing the new Forgejo-based Fedora Forge as the primary development platform. Accordingly, the Fedora Council is finalizing the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, which restricts the new forge strictly to Fedora-related projects, marking a departure from the previous general-use scope of Pagure. In brighter community news, the Fedora Badges service has been completely rebuilt from the ground up into a fast, modern single-page application and is currently heading to production.

As Fedora 45 approaches its Beta Freeze, developers are urgently reminded that all F45 system changes must be marked "Complete" by August 25. Concurrently, routine maintenance has identified over 200 inactive packagers for the F45 release cycle; affected contributors must comment on their tracking tickets to avoid being removed from the packager group. Finally, contributors and general Linux enthusiasts are invited to participate in the Fedora 45 Test Days starting August 17 to help evaluate major upcoming software changes—including GNOME 51, RPM 6.1, and OpenSSL 4.0—on both real hardware and virtual machines.

Council

This week, the Fedora Council focused on policy development and event planning. A revised draft (Version 3) of the Fedora Forge Usage Policy was published for an extended community feedback period before an impending Council vote. Additionally, the Council began brainstorming Call for Papers (CfP) themes for Flock to Fedora 2027, and initiated a discussion on clarifying the AI-Assisted Contributions Policy regarding commit message attribution.

See the detailed report for the Council team.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

FESCo had a busy week managing package maintainer responsiveness, assessing feature changes for Fedora 45, and planning the requirements for Fedora's upcoming Bugzilla replacement. The committee addressed major regressions in rpm-ostree caused by the RelocateRpmRepoConfigsToUsr change, opting to grant maintainers a few more days to implement fixes before forcing a revert. In addition, FESCo handled multiple non-responsive maintainer tickets and approved several system-wide changes, including dropping the NIS profile from authselect and updating python-cloudflare for certbot.

Decisions

See the detailed report for the FESCo team.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Mindshare

The Mindshare group met on August 20, 2026 (meeting log) to share recent announcements and review open tickets. Key news included the production launch of Fedora Badges v3.x (Announcement, Try out) and Framework's announcement of their new Laptop 12 featuring an optional Fedora KDE pre-installation.

Due to low attendance, comprehensive ticket resolutions were largely deferred to asynchronous communication. Members reviewed event planning for Data Con LA 2026 (Issue 143) and All Things Open 2026 (Issue 128). They also discussed structural topics, including how to handle historically vacant Marketing and CommOps seats (such as CommOps Issue 145) on the committee.

Decisions

  • The committee decided to alternate future weekly meetings between Matrix chat and video formats to improve attendance (see Issue #135).
  • Committee discussions regarding the vacant Marketing and CommOps seats (e.g., CommOps Issue #145) will be moved to the main Mindshare channel to determine whether to bring those seats back to the broader electoral pool.
  • It was decided to resolve Issue #131 asynchronously by the end of the month via a final summary comment.

Learn more about the Mindshare team.

Diversity & Inclusion

The Diversity & Inclusion group has begun early planning for the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity. The event is tentatively scheduled around October 9th as a short, 2-to-3-hour virtual event featuring 10-to-20-minute talks. The current proposed theme is "Respect the Culture," though the group is actively open to brainstorming other options.

Learn more about the Diversity & Inclusion team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the Workstation Working Group focused on cleaning up default installations and third-party repositories. They discussed the removal of GNOME Boxes from the default installation, a change likely slated for version 52, while keeping GNOME Connections. Additionally, they approved the removal of PyCharm from third-party repositories due to its outdated Community Edition.

Elsewhere on the forum, users expressed concerns over the maintenance status of Ptyxis and suggested Fedora prepare a contingency plan. More details can be found in the Workstation Working Group Meeting Summary and the Ptyxis discussion.

Decisions

  • Approved the removal of PyCharm from the Fedora Workstation third-party repositories, as the Community Edition no longer exists as a separate codebase. (Meeting Summary)
  • Decided to remove GNOME Boxes from the default installation, effectively delaying the action until version 52, while keeping GNOME Connections in the default set. (Meeting Summary)

See the detailed report for the Workstation / GNOME team.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

KDE

This week, the KDE group announced that KDE Gear 26.08.0 is built for Fedora 44+ and ready for community testing. Community discussions focused on user requests for changes to the Fedora repositories and spins, specifically regarding the inclusion of Kgamma2 for Wayland and a debate over offering a "Minimal Installation" option for the KDE desktop to reduce default application bloat.

In addition, the Fedora QA team notified the KDE mailing list about the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting for the Beta release, encouraging early votes on proposed blocker bugs.

Decisions

  • The KDE Plasma Edition SiG released the KDE Gear 26.08.0 update to Bodhi for community testing on Fedora 44 and newer.

See the detailed report for the KDE team.

Learn more about the KDE team.

Server

The Server working group held a meeting this week focusing on Fedora 45 release testing, Ansible support restructuring, and documentation improvements. A new member joined the group to help document homelab, Podman, and systematic backup strategies. Additionally, Adam Williamson announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review Meeting, encouraging members to review and vote on proposed blockers in advance.

Decisions

  • The group agreed to split the current 'post-installation' documentation article into several shorter, more specific articles (e.g., First steps, Networking, Storage, Security hardening, Automatic updates, Backups) housed in a separate subdirectory.
  • The group decided that the Ansible postinstall role will be structured as a single role using boolean variables to toggle specific tasks, which will eventually be packaged as an Ansible Collection and distributed via both Ansible Galaxy and RPM.

See the detailed report for the Server team.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

The Infrastructure team completed a major planned outage to apply updates, reboot servers, and advance the RHEL 10 migration, which now has only 33 hosts remaining. Notable infrastructure changes included moving download servers to BBR congestion control for improved syncing, preparing the pagure-ro01 VM as a read-only archive ahead of the pagure.io shutdown, and successfully migrating the Matrix moderation bot to official Fedora infrastructure. Additionally, the the-new-hotness bot was fixed to resume filing Bugzilla bugs after a token expiration.

In the community and services space, a discussion is ongoing regarding the deprecation of the retrace.fedoraproject.org server, as the maintaining ABRT team no longer exists. While QA finds the service valuable, it currently lacks active maintainers. Forgejo development continued with monitoring implementation and SSH enabled on staging, while several authentication bugs affecting FreeIPA and accounts.fedoraproject.org are under active investigation.

Decisions

  • The pagure-ro01 VM is now live and will serve as the read-only static archive for the upcoming pagure.io turnoff.
  • The official Matrix Moderation bot has been migrated to Fedora infrastructure (@moderation:fedoraproject.org), with a draft policy introduced for managing official Fedora Matrix rooms.
  • The retrace.fedoraproject.org server is slated for retirement due to a lack of active maintainers, pending a final call for volunteer engineers.
  • Download servers have been moved to BBR congestion control, resulting in significant package syncing gains.

See the detailed report for the Infrastructure team.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

The Release Engineering team focused heavily on the Fedora 45 release cycle, finalizing post-fixes for the mass branching process and preparing for the Beta Freeze scheduled for August 25. As part of this cycle, FTI (Fails To Install) packages in the NEW state were processed for retirement, and a Blocker Review meeting was announced for the upcoming Beta release. Furthermore, progress was made on infrastructure improvements, such as preparing the new Fedora 46 (Rawhide) openh264 builds for Cisco and enhancing documentation.

A significant operational shift highlighted this week is the full transition to self-service package unretirements. Maintainers opening unretirement tickets were directed to use the fedpkg request-unretirement command instead. To support this, the background tooling (toddlers) was updated with retry logic and fixes for Koji tag resolution on Rawhide. The team also handled routine requests to untag buggy updates (such as freeipa and bash-color-prompt) to prevent widespread test failures, and processed multiple EPEL stalled package handovers.

Decisions

See the detailed report for the Release Engineering team.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

Fedora 45 branching is mostly complete, though it was heavily complicated by the late-stage landing of the RPM repo config relocation to /usr. This required urgent patching across Anaconda, openQA, and Kiwi, and currently leaves ostree broken. Early manual validation testing for Fedora 45 is ongoing and has already surfaced notable bugs, including missing initial setup screens on non-graphical disk images (affecting Server and Minimal) and system freezes during shutdown.

In broader community news, a significant discussion highlighted performance and efficiency regressions caused by the default switch from power-profiles-daemon to tuned-ppd. Users and developers are actively debating whether to adjust the default TuneD profiles or revert the change entirely. Additionally, QA efforts are moving forward to formally propose replacing the unmaintained mcelog package with rasdaemon.

Decisions

  • The group agreed to support an upcoming formal Change proposal to replace mcelog with rasdaemon by default, as mcelog is minimally maintained and fails on modern, unsupported CPUs. (Discussed in the Quality meeting and forum thread)

See the detailed report for the Quality team.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

This week, community members praised the newly revealed Fedora 45 wallpaper on the Fedora 45 Wallpaper Inspiration Poll. The team is already preparing for the next release, having recently held the Fedora 46 wallpaper mindmap call. In documentation news, the Design Docs have been revamped with newly published How We Work and Meetings pages.

On the tracking side, a contributor is asking for scoping clarification on the Community Personas project to determine whether deliverables should include a comic or just character illustrations. Additionally, older legacy repositories like designassets have been successfully migrated to the new design organization on Forge to preserve their history before Pagure is deprecated.

Decisions

  • The legacy designassets repository (along with several others) was formally migrated to the new design organization on Forge to preserve historical content before Pagure is retired (Ticket #82).

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

This week, the Docs team and community members engaged in a discussion regarding the Fedora Installer's recommendation for a separate /boot partition, exploring the technical constraints and historical reasons behind it. Additionally, a broken link reported on a Fedora test results wiki page was addressed and resolved after being properly routed to the Quality team.

Decisions

  • Outdated links to the relval package documentation in the Release validation instructions wiki template were fixed by the Quality team. (Issue #61)

See the detailed report for the Docs team.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

The Internationalization group held a meeting on August 17 to review the progress of Fedora 45 changes, bug triaging for Fedora 43, and upcoming test events. Three changes for Fedora 45 (Fontconfig 2.18, LibreOffice Dictionaries, and IBus 1.5.35) have been accepted and will be transitioned to the MODIFIED state before next week's ON_QA deadline. Contributors were also reminded of key Fedora 45 milestones approaching on August 25, including the Beta Freeze, Bodhi updates-testing activation, and the 100% Code Complete deadline.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

Vitaly inquired on the legal mailing list about the licensing of a JavaScript port of CPython's argparse (thread). The question centered on whether the port could be licensed under PSF-2.0 alone, rather than carrying the full CPython license stack, since the original code was added in 2010. Richard Fontana followed up by addressing the question directly on the upstream pull request.

Learn more about the Legal team.

COPR

Branched Fedora 45 chroots, which are builds copied from Rawhide, are now enabled and available for use in Fedora Copr. This update was announced on the copr-devel mailing list.

Decisions

  • Branched Fedora 45 chroots have been enabled in Fedora Copr (source).

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL team's primary focus was preparing for the upcoming EPEL 10.3 mass branching scheduled for August 24, 2026. This process will create the EPEL 10.4 tags and involves temporarily disabling builds to the epel10-candidate target, as announced on the epel-announce and epel-devel mailing lists and discussed during the weekly meeting.

Additionally, the team discussed two package updates moving into testing: the new epel-release update for CentOS Stream 10 and a long-awaited ffmpeg compatibility package for EPEL 9. Both updates require community testing and feedback.

Decisions

  • Proceed with the EPEL 10.3 mass branching on 2026-08-24, temporarily disabling builds to the epel10-candidate target during the process.

See the detailed report for the EPEL team.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

Atomic

This week, the Atomic group saw brief activity across two forum discussions. A moderator action took place on an older discussion regarding Lenovo shipping ThinkPad laptops with Fedora, splitting off newer posts into a dedicated topic for new AI-ready ThinkPad models.

Additionally, a discussion regarding the behavior of /opt and /usr/local as symlinks in Silverblue and bootc images received a response. It was clarified that existing systems heavily rely on this legacy behavior, and any proposed changes to make them regular directories would require a comprehensive migration path.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

The CoreOS group met on August 19, 2026 (meeting log) to review the Fedora 45 Release Schedule ahead of the beta freeze. The team evaluated several proposed Fedora 45 system-wide changes to determine their impact on Fedora CoreOS, updating their F45 tracker. Most reviewed changes, such as LLVM 23, CMake variable drops, and disabling vendor changes by default, are expected to be transparent to FCOS.

The group also discussed ongoing work and blockers. Incomplete branching for fedora-bootc images is currently holding up Rawhide and Fedora 45 progress. Ongoing investigations continue for the relocation of RPM repo configs (Issue #2172) and the impacts of an OpenSSL upgrade (Issue #2165) and RPM cryptographic policy changes (Issue #2085).

Decisions

  • Determined that the DisableVendorChangeByDefault change does not require specific accommodation work for FCOS, though users performing derived container builds should be aware of potential impacts.
  • Confirmed that the LLVM-23 and CMake_drop_install_vars transitions should be transparent to FCOS.
  • Decided to adopt the Grub2LightForConfidentialComputing bootloader exclusively in future confidential computing efforts (e.g., sealed/UKI images), rather than utilizing it for general usage in F45.
  • Assigned enablement and dependency testing for FESCO Ticket #3661 (conditional on Fedora 45+) to volunteer Angel Cervera Roldan.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

IoT

The Fedora IoT Working Group met to discuss the status of stable and upcoming releases ahead of the Fedora 45 Beta Freeze on August 25, 2026. Fedora 44 remains stable, with testing progressing well on a new Greenboot update. However, both Fedora 45 and Fedora 46 have encountered critical installation failures that caused their OpenQA tests to be canceled. The group is actively triaging these bugs, particularly focusing on issues related to Anaconda and rpm-ostree.

Decisions

  • File a bug against Anaconda regarding the recent installation failures and officially flag it as a blocker for the Fedora 45 Beta release.
  • Open an official issue/bug tracker for the rpm-ostree failure impacting Fedora 45, as the primary maintainer is currently on PTO.

See the detailed report for the IoT team.

Learn more about the IoT team.

ARM

Adam Williamson announced the upcoming Fedora 45 Blocker Review meeting, scheduled for August 24, 2026, at 16:00 UTC on Matrix. The agenda includes evaluating 3 proposed blockers and 3 proposed freeze exceptions for the Beta release against the Fedora Release Criteria.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird group held its community meeting on August 20, 2026 (summarized here). Key updates included the introduction of the Gorget project for managing source tarballs and dependencies, progress on the bootable host (which is dropping the "bootc" name for trademark reasons), and broader Fedora Atomic Initiative efforts to expand Konflux access outside of Red Hat. The group celebrated reaching 3,100 packages in the repository and over 500 users of their images on public GitHub.

A major topic of discussion centered around establishing contributor pathways and building trust within a highly automated, SLSA-compliant environment. The team acknowledged that current restrictions (such as build logs hidden behind private logins) clash with Fedora's open philosophy and act as a barrier to external contribution. To address this, they agreed to break the contributor ladder down into three distinct areas: infrastructure code, build system operations, and image content creation.

Decisions

  • The bootable host project is dropping the name "bootc" due to trademark reasons (Meeting notes).
  • Managed Konflux infrastructure on the Fedora instance is being made available outside of Red Hat; tenant access can now be granted to anyone with a standard Fedora account (Meeting notes).
  • The Hummingbird contributor ladder will be broken down into three distinct pathways to accommodate different access levels and interests: core infrastructure code, internal factory/build system configuration, and image content creation (e.g., spec and container files) (Meeting notes).

Learn more about the Hummingbird team.

Kernel

The kernel-ark os-build branch has been rebased. This continues a standard cadence established since version 5.15, aligning with upstream releases. By rebasing near the end of a release cycle when outstanding merge requests are minimal, the team ensures that patches carried by Fedora remain no more than one release out of date. This practice maintains the project's spirit of openness and makes patches easier to apply to other trees.

Decisions

  • The kernel-ark os-build branch was rebased, continuing the established cadence of rebasing for every upstream release (which will continue for 7.3, 7.4, etc.).

Learn more about the Kernel team.

RISC-V

The Fedora RISC-V group successfully concluded the mass rebuild for Fedora 45, leaving a delta of fewer than 1,000 packages. The team is preparing to analyze the remaining "fails to build from source" (FTBFS) packages and unresolved dependencies once another full delta rebuild is complete. In the weekly meeting, members also highlighted solid progress on building installer images utilizing Anaconda and image-builder.

On the hardware front, the team is actively debugging glibc mutex failures on Titan (DP1000) boards and has temporarily disabled some builder boards due to proxy issues. Additionally, members suggested starting Fedora 46 preparations earlier than usual to maintain momentum while the package delta remains manageable.

Decisions

  • Temporarily disabled specific hardware boards in the build cluster due to a proxy failure (source).
  • Enabled coredumps to investigate and resolve glibc mutex failures occurring on Titan (DP1000) boards (source).

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security group focused on privacy-enhancing initiatives and SELinux integration for systemd-run0 this week. During their August 20th meeting, the SIG debated adopting a package (ff-disable-ai-ml) that disables Firefox AI/ML features, ultimately concluding that a dedicated Privacy SIG would be a more appropriate home. Consequently, a draft proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG was created and is currently open for feedback.

In SELinux developments, discussions on the systemd-run0 policy issue thread yielded a path forward for making run0/systemd natively SELinux-aware. This upstream fix will dynamically calculate target user contexts, bypassing the current architectural limitations of PAM transitions via PID 1.

Decisions

  • The proposal to move the ff-disable-ai-ml repository to the Security SIG was placed on hold in favor of creating a dedicated Privacy SIG. (Meeting Log)
  • The group agreed to draft a proposal for a new Fedora Privacy SIG. (Meeting Log)
  • It was agreed to pursue an upstream fix making systemd-run0 natively SELinux-aware, rather than relying on static policy rules to handle transitions. (Mailing List)

See the detailed report for the Security team.

Learn more about the Security team.

DotNET

This week, Amine Kheddache introduced a free AI chat platform called Ptero on the DotNet SIG mailing list. The tool requires no signup and provides access to multiple large language models. It is designed to assist C# and .NET developers with debugging, generating boilerplate code, brainstorming architecture patterns, and explaining complex concepts like LINQ and async.

Learn more about the DotNET team.

Perl

This week, the Perl group focused on routine package updates and continuous integration testing. Michal Josef Špaček opened and merged four pull requests (PRs 13 through 16) to bump the perl-Mozilla-CA package to version 20260813. In addition, Steve Traylen continued work on PR #5 for perl-SQL-Abstract to disable the Perl bootstrap, successfully triggering a Packit CI scratch build to test the configuration.

Decisions

Learn more about the Perl team.

Python

This week, the Python group clarified that redundant manual license file declarations can be safely removed from specfiles in favor of using %pyproject_save_files --assert-license unconditionally, provided the package requires flit-core 3.11 or newer (Drop second copy of LICENSE file?).

The group also agreed on a migration strategy for the backwards-incompatible flit-core v4 release. To avoid widespread build failures for packages pinning flit-core < 4, the primary package will be updated to v4 while simultaneously introducing a deprecated v3 compatibility package. This will allow time to gradually patch dependent users (Plan for flit-core v4).

Decisions

  • Specfiles requiring flit-core >= 3.11 can safely drop manual %license directives and rely exclusively on %pyproject_save_files --assert-license (Source).
  • The migration to flit-core v4 will be handled by updating the main package to v4 and providing a deprecated v3 compatibility package, allowing dependent packages to be patched incrementally over time (Source).

Learn more about the Python team.

Rust

This week, the Rust group discussed a proposal for a new RPM packaging strategy aimed at eliminating the large volume of empty feature subpackages by using conditional metadata dependencies instead. Contributors weighed the impact of the currently generated Rust feature packages, noting that while they constitute a significant percentage of Fedora's package count, their actual payload and size remain negligible. Additionally, a new package review request for rust-ssh2 was submitted.

See the detailed report for the Rust team.

Learn more about the Rust team.

Other Discussions

Orphaning packages

Package updates

  • Julian Anderson requested a Koji retrigger for golang 1.25.13 and 1.26.6 updates, which were then fixed by Alejandro Saez Morollon after identifying an upstream regression.
  • Dan Horák issued a heads up for an update to sg3_utils-1.49 containing a soname bump, requiring a sidetag rebuild for dependent packages.
  • Jerry James notified the list of a soname bump for z3 that will require reverse dependencies to be rebuilt.

New contributor introductions

  • Jose Lopez introduced themselves as an embedded systems engineer interested in packaging, low-level Linux development, and eventually Linux kernel drivers.

Contribution opportunities

For contributors interested in Testing, Quality Assurance, and General Feedback, there are numerous entry-level opportunities across the project that do not require specialized team membership. Community members are highly encouraged to help with Fedora 45 early manual validation testing, test branched F45 builds, and participate in the Internationalization Test Week starting September 7. Users can quickly assist by testing the KDE Gear 26.08.0 Bodhi update, the new epel-release update, and the freshly launched Fedora Badges v3.x platform. Furthermore, anyone can help shorten release meetings by asynchronously voting on blocker bugs and freeze exceptions using the Blockerbugs app. General feedback is widely requested on several community-wide topics, including the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, Conflict of Interest Guidelines, AI-assistance attribution in commits, the Privacy SIG proposal, and the Ptero AI tool for .NET (mailing list thread).

Those with Writing, Design, and Event Organization skills are highly sought after to support project infrastructure. Documentation writers can tackle server-side "white spots" (like Podman containers, HPC, and domain controllers), review installer and partition layout guides, or update Workstation marketing materials to reflect that GNOME Boxes is no longer a pre-installed application. Artists and UX contributors are invited to help shape and illustrate the Community Personas project, review legacy assets in designassets, or propose new QA data visualizations in Ticket #923. On the events and community side, volunteers are needed to organize the 2026 Fedora Week of Diversity (FWD)—which has openings for schedule management, marketing, and video editing—or staff the Fedora table at All Things Open 2026 (Issue #128). Contributors seeking leadership roles can also look into open committee seats on CommOps (Issue #145).

Contributors proficient in Package Maintenance can step in to keep the distribution healthy by adopting orphaned packages, claiming retired packages using fedpkg request-unretirement, or co-maintaining packages currently facing the non-responsive maintainer process (Ticket #3678 / sponsors issue tracker). Language-specific packagers can provide feedback on the proposal for "features/extras" packaging without subpackages, assist with the Python flit-core v4 migration by patching dependency constraints, or review pending packages like rust-ssh2. Community members are also encouraged to participate in cross-team package review swaps to help unblock dependencies.

Finally, there are critical Systems Engineering and Debugging tasks for developers and sysadmins. The Infrastructure team welcomes newcomers to help port packages for the RHEL 10 migration and is urgently seeking 1-2 engineers to take over maintenance of the retrace (FAF) crash analytics server. System architects and engineers can jump in to investigate severe installation failures, such as IoT's Anaconda boot failure and rpm-ostree bugs, or analyze CoreOS's OpenSSL upgrade impacts and FESCO Ticket #3661 enablement. There are also specialized opportunities to investigate RISC-V mass rebuild build failures, help systemd-run0 become natively SELinux-aware upstream, or submit YAML manifests and container files to the new Hummingbird build factory using standard pull requests.

misc fedora bits: third week of aug 2026

Posted by Kevin Fenzi on 2026-08-22 19:08:38 UTC
Scrye into the crystal ball

Another week gone by, it's hard to understand that it's almost fall now.

Mass updates/reboots/reinstalls

Much of my week was handling updates/reboots/reinstalls. Got all our instances, including our openshift clusters updated to the latest and rebooted. Also I managed to move almost the last of our vmhosts over to rhel10.

We are down to just 27 rhel9 instances left.

  • 12 are db servers

  • 6 are rabbitmq-servers

  • 1 logserver

  • 2 mailman servers

  • 1 fedorapeople

  • 1 storinator

  • 1 torrent server

  • 1 straggler vmhost that needs a disk replaced before reinstall

  • 2 zabbix servers

I'm hoping to finish up the logserver, storinator and torrent servers next week, then I will start on the db servers. Hopefully doing staging first to catch any problems and then doing the prod ones in the time after beta but before final freeze.

We have a plan for the rabbitmq servers and zabbix servers. For mailman we will need to look and see what is missing in epel10 for them.

Looking forward to finishing this up and moving on to other things.

pagure.io is now read-only

The last bits got sorted out and now pagure.io is read-only. You can pull git repos and look at other content, but no login/push/api access is possible.

I don't know that we have a specific timeline for keeping this, but I think it should be a very long time. It's static with no auth so the attack surface is much smaller than the pagure instance.

Fedora 45 Beta freeze starts next tuesday

It's already getting to be time to start the Fedora 45 Beta freeze. So, if you have anything you want to land in the Beta, you best do it asap.

Laptop fun

My trusty Lenovo slim 7x that I have been using day to day all the time for the last 2 years (!) is finally showing some signs of wear. The battery at full is only 70% of it's orig full capacity. Some of the keys have really anoyingly been sticking for me (especially the 1 and down arrow keys). Sometimes they send 2 or 3 keypresses. Pretty anoying.

So, I have been pondering what to do.

I could try and replace the keyboard/battery in this slim7x, but not sure how easy that will be. This is not a very 'repairable' laptop. Even swapping the nvme drive was a super pain. The case uses clips instead of screws and sounds like it's going to shatter when you are trying to pry it open.

I could go back to my framework ryzen laptop. Should be perfectly usable. Not good enough for local ai playground, and would mean going back to x86, but otherwise it's just a reinstall and a bit of moving things around.

The newer snapdragon X2 version of the slim7x all models seem to only have 1024x768 screens, and thats a hard no from me.

There's a really nice looking x2ee hp laptop, the HP EliteBook X G2q. It has upstream support, but... man, you can configure one thats $7500. That is crazy. I could buy like 3 of the following laptops for that.

The asus zenbook a16 looks nice and has upstream support already, but I am not sure a 16" laptop will be very easy to carry around. I suppose it could be nice day to day. I'm not even sure my laptop bags would fit it. It would mean staying on aarch64, which I kinda like.

I could go all out and get a new framework 13 pro ( Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370 ). That would get a nicer screen than my old framework, much faster, and possibily to play with local llm model stuff. Fair pile of money and going back to x86.

No great hurry to decide, and this is indeed a horrible time to buy new computer hardware sadly.

As always, comment on the fediverse: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/117140830512414290

Introduction to Injection Vulnerabilities (and Script Worlds!)

Posted by Michael Catanzaro on 2026-08-20 22:37:22 UTC

Injection vulnerabilities, like cross-site scripting (XSS) or command injection, occur when we fail to properly encode untrusted output when inserting it into a trusted context. Before injecting uncontrolled or untrusted data, it’s essential to encode, escape, or quote the data to prevent it from breaking out of its intended context.

Some security folks previously used to like to talk about “input sanitization.” In practice, input sanitization is hopeless. Instead, nowadays we do the opposite and think about “output encoding.” When you inject untrusted data into a new context, assume the data is always malicious, and encode, escape, or quote it to make it safe for use in that context. Let’s look at some examples.

Pango Markup Injection

Here’s a low-stakes example of Pango markup injection:

markup = g_strdup_printf ("<b>%s</b>,
                          my_user_provided_data);
gtk_label_set_markup (GTK_LABEL (label), markup);

The untrusted data is not escaped and may decide to inject its own Pango markup, or break out of any markup that you used yourself. For example, if the data is </b><span foreground="blue" size="x-large">Hello world!</span><b> then it can decide to be blue and extra large instead of the intended bold. That’s not especially serious and probably not likely to be a security issue, but surely it’s an unintended bug. If you’re injecting an uncontrolled string into a Pango markup context, like a GtkLabel, then use g_markup_escape_text() first. (Pango markup can do other interesting things like hide characters or capitalize them. I’m not sufficiently creative to claim that’s definitely a security problem, but perhaps attackers will be more clever than me.)

A real-world example: in this GNOME Shell issue report, the title of a desktop notification is able to use Pango markup to manipulate its own formatting. (At least, probably, because the issue report is unconfirmed. Looks plausible, though!)

Unix Shell Command Injection

Another good example is the Evince command injection vulnerability from a few months ago, where a malicious filesystem path is able to trick Evince/Atril/Xreader into executing arbitrary code. Evince expects the path of a file to open to be something like /home/foo/hello.pdf, but a malicious PDF instead provides the evil input --gtk-module=/home/foo/evil.so /home/foo/hello.pdf. If not quoted properly, we have a command injection vulnerability where --gtk-module is interpreted as a command line flag rather than as a path:

Incorrect: /usr/bin/evince --named-dest= --gtk-module=/home/foo/evil.so /home/foo/hello.pdf

Correct: /usr/bin/evince --named-dest=' --gtk-module=/home/foo/evil.so /home/foo/hello.pdf'

If you’re constructing a Unix command line, as in the Evince example above, then use g_shell_quote(). Failure to do so is ruinous. (But beware: this isn’t necessarily safe if you’re using an actual Unix shell.)

XSS for Desktop App Developers

With that primer out of the way, let’s consider what happens when you inject untrusted content into HTML (or CSS, or JavaScript).

I used to think XSS matters only for websites, and is surely not something that desktop app developers need to know about, right? Wrong, as I discovered five years ago when, to my surprise, Prakash (@1lastBr3ath) reported that websites could inject scripts into Epiphany’s new tab page (about:overview) via malicious page titles. This on its own is not especially serious, but it’s surely not supposed to be possible.

If your desktop app uses WebKitGTK or another web engine, you probably do need to think carefully about XSS. For example, before injecting untrusted data into HTML, we need to HTML-encode it, which Epiphany didn’t do anywhere. In the simplest case, that looks like this:

char *
ephy_encode_for_html (const char *input)
{
  GString *str = g_string_new (input);

  g_string_replace (str, "&", "&amp;", 0);
  g_string_replace (str, "<", "&lt;", 0);
  g_string_replace (str, ">", "&gt;", 0);
  g_string_replace (str, "\"", "&quot;", 0);
  g_string_replace (str, "'", "&#x27;", 0);
  g_string_replace (str, "/", "&#x2F;", 0);

  return g_string_free_and_steal (str);
}

Simply replace the few dangerous characters with HTML entities, and you’re good to go. That doesn’t work for HTML attributes, though, where the rules are slightly different. And it definitely doesn’t work for CSS or JavaScript. Carefully review the OWASP Cross Site Scripting Preventing Cheat Sheet to understand what you can and cannot do.

Recent XSS Bugs in Epiphany

Anyway, back to the old about:overview bug report. Turns out, Epiphany had many similar vulnerabilities. I attempted to fix them all, but in fact, I had missed a spot. In this old commit, I recognized that a URL is untrusted data that must be encoded before I inject the URL into the error message. But I treated the error message of the GError returned by WebKit as if it’s trusted and does not need to be encoded. In fact, the error message itself may contain a URL! Oops. Fernando Munoz recently noticed and reported several example URLs that could inject content into Epiphany error pages. I’m unable to share my favorite example URL here on WordPress, because WordPress is sanitizing it (yes, that is indeed ironic, considering my above recommendation to not do that). But the result of the injection looks like this:

So an evil URL can mess up the Epiphany network error page. That’s not particularly serious, but Fernando found a second injection that is much worse, an XSS vulnerability in Epiphany’s autofill implementation. Here, selector is formed using an untrusted DOM element ID provided by the web page itself. Notice that no output encoding is performed before the untrusted value is injected into the JavaScript command:

  page_id = webkit_web_view_get_page_id (WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW (view));
  world_name = ephy_embed_shell_get_guid (ephy_embed_shell_get_default ());
  script = g_strdup_printf ("EphyAutofill.fill(%lu, '%s', %i);",
                            page_id,
                            selector,
                            fill_choice);

  webkit_web_view_evaluate_javascript (WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW (view),
                                       script,
                                       -1,
                                       world_name,
                                       NULL,
                                       view->cancellable,
                                       autofill_cb,
                                       NULL);

Because the untrusted data here is already used as a quoted data value, one of very few cases where it is safe to inject untrusted data into JavaScript, this would actually have been safe if only Epiphany had JavaScript-encoded the value first, following the OWASP rules for JavaScript encoding: “Encode all characters using the Unicode \uXXXX encoding format, where XXXX represents the hexadecimal Unicode code point. For example, A becomes \u0041. All alphanumeric characters (letters A to Z, a to z, and digits 0 to 9) remain unencoded.” But Epiphany did not do so. (I got confused by the OWASP rules and didn’t realize how easy it was to make this safe, so I fixed it in a more complicated way instead, by removing the need for injecting the form ID.)

So how bad is this mistake? In Fernando’s example, the ID of the evil form element is "a'); alert('XSS in private world'); var _=('", allowing the malicious website to run any script it wants. That might not seem so serious, because websites don’t need to exploit any vulnerabilities to execute JavaScript… right?

Script Worlds

Websites are only supposed to be able to execute JavaScript in the default script world. Think of a script world as basically just a big namespace for all of your JavaScript: the default world is what the website itself uses, but desktop applications can create their own private script worlds in order to run their own scripts. In a private script world, you can manipulate the page’s DOM as usual, but you have a separate environment for executing JavaScript code, so you don’t have to worry about name clashes or scripts conflicting with each other. Also, website scripts cannot access your scripts.

In practice, web browsers inject their own scripts into every web page in order to implement various browser features. Epiphany uses a script to find the best web app icon for a web page, for example. These scripts use a private script world that websites should never themselves have access to. But in this XSS attack on Epiphany’s form autofill implementation, the malicious website has managed to execute its script in the private script world. Now it can access whatever internal web browser features are available in that script world.

Unfortunately, there’s one more relevant Epiphany feature implemented using scripts: the password manager. Epiphany’s password manager is necessarily exposed to its private script world because Epiphany needs to execute JavaScript code in the web page in order to autofill passwords. Although there were no relevant bugs in Epiphany’s password autofill code (which is totally unrelated to its vulnerable generic form autofill feature), this did not matter: if an XSS bug in any Epiphany feature can be abused to execute code in Epiphany’s private script world, that code can access the password manager and exfiltrate all the user’s saved Epiphany passwords for every website. (At least, probably, because I have not set up an attack website to test this. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t work!) So that’s pretty serious.

Conclusion

I requested a CVE for the autofill vulnerability earlier today, but nowadays CVE requests usually take a couple of weeks, so I don’t have one yet. It is fixed in Epiphany 50.6 and 49.9. If you don’t have those versions yet, don’t panic. To be exploited, you have to manually trigger form autofill by right clicking on a form and then selecting either “Autofill Personal Fields” or “Fill This Field,” so that makes it much less scary. Even more fortunately, users probably won’t ever do that, because selecting either option always causes Epiphany to reject all further mouse input, becoming unusable. Nobody has reported this bug before, so it seems safe to conclude zero people are using Epiphany’s form autofill feature!

Update: I said it would take a couple of weeks, but a few hours later I received CVE-2026-77682. Red Hat has improved its response time!

Updates and reboots on Fedora infrastructure

Posted by Fedora Infrastructure Status on 2026-08-20 20:00:00 UTC

Fedora Infrastructure team will be applying updates to servers and rebooting them.

Many non-user facing services will be affected, most should only be down for a short time as their particular resources are rebooted HOWEVER some may be down for a non-trivial amount of time due to RHEL-9 to RHEL-10 …

The J curve, or: it gets worse before it gets better

Posted by Ben Cotton on 2026-08-19 12:00:00 UTC

If you’ve ever tried to make something work better by adding or changing a process, you may have noticed that the something got worse. Whether that worseness surprised your or not depends on if you’ve heard of the “J curve” concept. A J curve is any graph that looks like the letter “J”: a sharp dip followed by a sharp rise.

The J curve in open source projects

The phenomenon appears in many fields — economics, medicine, and technology. Where might you see it in your project? Maybe you add automated tests to reduce the manual QA work you do pre-release. This should allow you to ship your releases faster. Except once you introduce it, you spend twice as much time fixing bugs because you find so many more. The next release ships slower. But once you’ve caught up, the benefits you expected appear. Bugs — particularly regressions — get caught (and therefore fixed) faster.

Similarly, you might start blocking changes that include vulnerable dependencies. This should improve security for your users. But the first time, every dependency is full of vulnerabilities. This, at least, makes the apparent security worse. And maybe the actual security as you take time to prioritize and fix vulnerabilities in dependencies that would have been “accidentally” fixed in routine updates anyway. Again, after you have a handle on the situation, the process works as intended.

Progressing through the curve

Recognizing where you are in the curve is important to navigating it. Are you still on the downslope? Have you leveled off? Are you on the way up? If what you’re trying to change is measurable, then tracking those measurements will help. Of course, not everything is easily or meaningfully measurable. In those case, you can trust your intuition. Do things feel like they’re still getting worse? Better?

The main thing is to make everyone aware of the J-ness before it starts. Acknowledge that things will get worse for a little bit and then you’ll see the improvements. Avoiding surprise is the key to keeping people engaged, and keeping people engaged is the key to seeing the change through and not ending permanently in the “worse” state. Unfortunately, it’s hard to answer the “how much longer will it take?” question; there’s no magical way to know how long the curve is. Which leads us to…

Limits of the J curve

The J curve is a useful concept, but it’s not an inviolable law of physics. While there are plenty of reasonable explanations for why the J curve phenomenon occurs, there’s no guarantee that it will. Just because you think it will, does not mean it will. Sometimes, our ideas for making things better don’t work.

As I said above, you can’t predict where you’ll go next — even if you’ve been meticulously tracking the thing you care about. This, combined with the “it might not get better” aspect, means you could be on an endless march into darkness. At some point, you have to decide it’s time to bail out.

So what do you look for if you can’t predict the future? Let’s go to calculus class for a moment and think about the second derivative. In other words: the rate of change of the rate of change. If you’re really on a J curve and not a ramp into hell, the second derivative should become positive pretty quickly. (“Pretty quickly” is relative to the scope and impact of the change.) Even if things are still getting worse, you should see them getting worse more slowly. As long as the second derivative stays positive, you’re on a good track.

Finally, and what I’ve often seen ignored, is the fact that the upward part of the J doesn’t continue forever. At some point, you’ve maximized the gains you can see from that change. That’s fine. Contrary to investor beliefs, things do need to level off at some point. The Satir Change Model, developed by family therapist Virginia Satir, is a good representation of a realistic J curve, complete with a new equilibrium state at the end.

This post’s featured photo by Zyanya BMO on Unsplash.

The post The J curve, or: it gets worse before it gets better appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

Decoupling Boxes from the OS Release Cycle

Posted by Felipe Borges on 2026-08-19 10:12:54 UTC

Earlier this month, I published a post about the future of Boxes where I detailed the huge technical rewrite I have been doing, porting to GTK4, Libadwaita, and replacing our SPICE display widget with Libmks. Today, I want to share a structural decision that aligns with that vision and sets up the project for long-term health/sustainability.

I have formally submitted a proposal to remove Boxes from the core-developer-tools set in gnome-build-meta and transition it towards becoming an independent application (with the ultimate goal of applying for GNOME Circle once all criteria are met).

I want to dive into why I am making this move, what it means for users and maintainers, and why I believe this is the right path forward.

There is No Drama Here

First off, let’s get this out of the way: there is zero drama between Boxes and the GNOME project.

Boxes continues to be built by the same core set of contributors, fully committed to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and deeply integrated into our ecosystem. We aren’t stepping away from GNOME. We are simply right-sizing how Boxes is categorized, distributed, and maintained.

Why Boxes Shouldn’t Be “Core” (and Why Versioning with the OS is Outdated)

The desktop Linux landscape is shifting toward image-based operating systems with atomic updates and immutability. In this model, the underlying operating system provides a slim, reliable base, while applications live on top and update independently at their own pace.

Tying a complex application like Boxes to the biannual GNOME release schedule is not useful anymore. It forces us to hold back features and bug fixes for months just to align with the OS cadence, when users should simply get updates when they are ready and stable.

Furthermore, virtualization isn’t an essential utility that needs to be pre-installed on every single user’s machine by default. Boxes fits much better as a targeted application users explicitly choose to install when they need it.

Flathub-First: Moving Fast and Ending Distribution Bottlenecks

As a maintainer, maintaining separate code paths and stable branches for dozens of traditional distribution packages is simply not sustainable long-term. I can no longer afford to maintain multiple stable branches. Moving forward, I am simplifying maintenance down to one stable branch and one development/nightly branch. To make this sustainable, Flathub is our primary and only officially supported distribution method.

By bundling the virtualization stack in our Flatpak, we ensure that users get a much more tested, consistent, and working virtualization backend regardless of what operating system they are running.

Moving out of Core allows us to heavily discourage downstreams from individually packaging Boxes. Instead, distros should defer their users to the official Flatpak on Flathub. If you are filing bug reports or seeking support, the Flathub build will be the baseline.

Branding and Infrastructure Changes

To reflect this independent status, a few logistical changes are happening alongside this move. We are dropping “GNOME” from the user-facing app branding. Going forward, it will simply be named “Boxes”,  and we will soon be moving to a new website domain (which is currently being finalized). Importantly, our Flatpak application ID will remain org.gnome.Boxes for full continuity and compatibility. This means existing installations, user settings, and Flatpak configurations won’t break, and users won’t need to reinstall anything.

What’s Next?

This change gives us the flexibility to release updates whenever features are ready, iterate faster, and dramatically reduce maintainer burnout, all while delivering a more reliable and consistent user experience via Flathub. Once we settle into this new cadence and finalize our transition, we plan to apply for GNOME Circle.

To set clear expectations on timing: since Boxes currently uses GTK3 in its stable releases, we will soon submit an application for GNOME Circle review following our GTK4/Libadwaita rewrite.

If the Circle application is approved before the GNOME 52 Alpha deadline, the plan is to proceed with the removal from core-developer-tools and transition to Circle in time for the GNOME 52 release in March 2027.

For distribution maintainers wondering about upcoming distro releases: distros targeting GNOME 51 can continue to package the GNOME 50 release of Boxes, which will remain supported for the standard lifecycle of that release. If everything goes according to plan, GNOME 52 won’t include Boxes in the core set anymore. At this point, please don’t package Boxes anymore.

Fedora Badges Revamp Project: From The Ground Up

Posted by Fedora Magazine on 2026-08-19 08:00:00 UTC

After years of technical research and foundational work, the Fedora Badges application service has been rebuilt from the ground up, and it is heading to production. Whether you have been collecting badges for years or you are brand new to the Fedora Project community, here is what is waiting for you there.

Completely modernized user interface

The archaic server rendered pages are now gone. The Fedora Badges application service now runs on a modern single page application. This provides you with a much faster and more responsive experience, while functioning across various screen sizes and devices types, all without full refreshes or front-end reloads.

Navigations have been revamped as well.  But do not worry at all – if you have bookmarked any old service links, they should redirect you to the right place.

Colour schemes, Dark mode

You can now customize the look of the Fedora Badges application service choosing from eight colour schemes. Your choice flows through the various elements of the front-end – from navbar to borders, from charts to accents, etc. The dark mode and light mode switch respects your system preference and can also be toggled.

Your choices are persistent across visits residing in your session storage.  As long as the same session is used, the colour schemes and dark mode settings stay.

Revitalized badges collectathon experience

Not only does the profile page show your precious badges, it also shows a radar chart that maps your collection across categories.  This is a rudimentary method to gauge your progress and discover the areas you have not explored yet. Giving a means to diversify the activities, this encourages more people to join in.

The refreshed history page also adds a collection time-line chart showing yours (and your friends’) contribution activities over months and years at a glance.

Compare (or compete) with your friends

The renewed difference page lets you compare your badges collection with those of your friends’ possessions.  See which badges you both share, which ones only you have, and most importantly, which ones they have earned that you have not yet.  It’s a fun way to discover new badges and unearth new ways to contribute.

You can also reach out to your fellow community members for potential mentoring opportunities, based on their contribution activities and collected badges.

Explore badges by rarities

Every active badge now has a rarity tier based on how many users currently hold it:

  • Fedorable — Unobtanium stuff
  • Legendary — Mythical prestige
  • Epic — Serious bragging
  • Rare — Principled hustle
  • Uncommon — Striving future
  • Common — Warm greeting

You can now browse active badges by their rarity tiers, making it easy to hunt down the ones that fewer people have earned.  Not only does it allow you to find new pathways for contribution,  you also get a sense of the impactful work and relevant tracks that are waiting for you in your community activities.

Involved semantic collective lookup

Departing from different searches for badges and users, the search bar now helps unified lookup across both badges and users.  Start typing and results start appearing immediately after – with better lookup results. These will appear when the query is general enough to return more than eight results.

To save server resources, the asynchronous search request begins only when at least four characters are entered into the search bar for the query.

Leaderboards with time navigation

Departing from the restricted rankings page, it is now possible to request custom period filtering on the leaderboards page.  Filters can be based on days, weeks, months, and years. One can see who has been earning most badges in those times, and generally look back at the community’s evolving progress over a time period.

The rankings are deterministic and can be shared with others, using the sharing link that inherently applies the same filters. This creates a reproducible resource.

Clearer badge activity lifecycle

Badges can now be manually marked as legacy (retired, unobtainable) after they should no longer be awarded to the users.  For instance, the badges for joining the Fedora Linux Release Party 42 should no longer be available to new users in 2026. Hence, they should not be accounted for while computing rarity tiers.

And nope — we are not taking awarded badges away from users who have already earned them.  These retired badges are still going to be visible in the history.

Stronger foundational supports underneath

You see, the revamp was not just about the front-end. The data layer that powers the application service got a major overhaul as well. The Database Library project, which handles all database operations, saw 105 commits across 7 contributors during the same period, pushing from version 1.4.1 to 1.5.5.

Here’s what changed under the hood, and why it matters to you:

  • Faster queries — Redundant database lookups were eliminated, foreign key indexes were added, and pagination now happens at the database level instead of in the application code. Pages that list badges or users load significantly faster, especially as the count of badges or users grow.
  • Effective lookup — The search you use from the navbar section is powered by new search methods added to the API. This covers both badges and users. This not only makes the search noticeably faster, but the actual process is also more efficient on a synchronous database accessing layer.
  • Rarity calculation — The rarity tiers you see on badge pages are computed every day by an updated algorithm in the API code. Various edge cases are now handled too. The fall-back is set to the common tier on zero available users who own the said badges at that particular time.
  • Legacy support — A schema level change was made to introduce a new 
    legacy
     column to the 
    badges
     table to distinguish active badges from the retired ones. Filtering is built into the API code so the front-end shows them on separate pages when requested by the users.
  • Categories normalization — Badge tags are now stored in their own tables instead of as raw comma separated strings. This makes category browsing reliable.
  • Cascading deletions — Removing a badge when done in exigent circumstances now properly cleans up its assertions in the database purging orphaned data.
  • Removing invitations — Invitations are soft deleted and not hard removed. This preserves access history while preventing accidental assertions.
  • Quality assurance — Nearly every new feature ships with its test cases. Python < 3.9 support was dropped in favor of Python > 3.13.

Overall smoother authentication events

Authentication has been reworked. The old session-based login has been replaced completely with a modern token-based flow using OpenID Connect. The application service now has its own dedicated authentication client so logging in through Fedora Accounts is more consistent across other things.

If you are visiting for the first time, like it has been for years, your user account is automatically created without requiring any further steps.

Your privacy really matters

Email addresses are no longer visible across various API responses. They are hashed before being sent as an asynchronous response, for use by Libravatar. Users have the choice to opt out of the Fedora Badges application service entirely. In that case they will stop receiving badge awards for their community tasks.

RSS feeds are now limited to recent entries for performance and efficiency, so you can still stay informed about the latest incoming activities on the app.

For badge creators, maintainers, and administrators

If you are a part of the team, the new interface gives you a full set of tools.

  • Advanced database management front-end
  • Creating and revoking awards from your users
  • Creating and expiring invitations for the badges
  • Creating and revoking authorizations from your users
  • Creating and updating badges
  • Creating and updating users

Access control is tiered — community members see the service experience, while authorized team members get the administrative controls they need.

Progress by the numbers

This revamp (codenamed स्वातंत्र्य or Svātantrya) represents a year of active work across the two repositories. These comprised 165 commits in Tahrir and 105 commits in Tahrir API. This occurred after many years of technical research and foundational work  resulting in a leaner codebase with a net reduction of 13,320 lines of code.

Thank you to our amazing contributors

I mean it when I say, this revamp would have been dead in the water without the help of the following folks (in the alphabetical order):

  • Akashdeep Dhar
  • Aurelien Bompard
  • Awwal Adetomiwa
  • Chibuezem Marvinrose
  • Daniel Mungai Chege
  • Emma Kidney
  • Gregory Sutcliffe
  • John Iweh
  • Joy Aruku
  • Kevin Fenzi
  • Michael Scherer
  • Michal Konecny
  • Olamide Peter Ojo
  • Payal Sumbhe
  • Shounak Dey
  • Vanshikha Shri
  • Yash Sheorey
  • Xavier Lamien

And those, of course, from Flock 2026’s workshop on the Fedora Badges Revamp Project.

  • Ankur Sinha
  • Cornelius Emase
  • Emmanuel Seyman
  • Guillermo Leiro
  • Jakub Jelen
  • Jona Azizaj
  • Jonáš Hubený
  • Justin Wheeler
  • Mat Holmes
  • Matthew Miller
  • Misia Mary
  • Shawn Dunn
  • Vít Smolík
  • Vittorio Cioe

This revamp project was in a development hell for quite some time. It was able to come out of it thanks to those listed above and countless others who have helped maintain the project for the past fourteen years or so. It is now time for me to pass this torch on to others who can help maintain this.

The project codebase currently lives on the Fedora Infrastructure’s GitHub namespace. Please consider providing feedback and contributing changes to help maintain the projects. You can also hang out with us in the Fedora Badges chat room on Fedora Project’s Matrix server to learn more.

Go on – give it a try!

The production deployment should be live by the time this article is publicly available. Head over to Fedora Badges to explore the refreshed experience. As it might be a little rough around the edges in the starting days, please bear with us while we hammer down the oddities with your useful reports.

Your input influences what comes next to the Fedora Badges application service. Please consider giving it a try right now and let us know what you think!

Multiplexores de terminal en Fedora: más allá de tmux y Screen

Posted by Rénich Bon Ćirić on 2026-08-18 23:25:00 UTC

Hoy me topé con un artículo bien fregón publicado por Sreenath en It's FOSS: Looking Beyond Tmux and Screen: 8 Terminal Multiplexers Worth Trying. De entrada, quiero darle todo el crédito a ese gran artículo y a su autor. La neta, te invito a que vayas y le eches un ojo a su trabajo original, porque plantea un panorama excelente sobre cómo ha evolucionado la gestión de terminales en el ecosistema FOSS.

Ahora bien, como usuario y apasionado de Fedora Linux, me di a la tarea de aterrizar esa lista completa al terreno de Fedora. Porque una cosa es que una herramienta exista en GitHub, y otra muy diferente es saber cómo se instala, si está en los repositorios oficiales, si vive en Copr o si requiere bibliotecas adicionales para correr al cien en tu máquina fedoriana.

Aquí te traigo la guía completa y probada empíricamente en Fedora de cada una de estas opciones, desde los veteranos de batalla hasta la nueva generación impulsada por Rust, Go, aceleración por GPU y agentes de Inteligencia Artificial.

Note

Todas las instrucciones y comandos que verás aquí fueron verificados y probados directamente en Fedora Linux. Para los comandos de gestión de paquetes (DNF) o directorios del sistema, asume una sesión como superusuario (su -).

Los clásicos: disponibles directo en los repositorios de Fedora

Si lo que buscas es estabilidad y cero configuraciones externas, Fedora incluye en sus repositorios principales varias herramientas de primer nivel listas para instalar con dnf.

tmux: el estándar moderno de facto

Instalación:

# como root
dnf -y install tmux

Tips de uso:

  • Iniciar sesión nueva: ``tmux`` o ``tmux new -s mi-sesion``
  • Prefijo principal: Ctrl + b
  • Dividir horizontalmente: Ctrl + b seguido de "
  • Dividir verticalmente: Ctrl + b seguido de %
  • Desacoplar sesión: Ctrl + b seguido de d
  • Reenganchar sesión: ``tmux attach -t mi-sesion``

GNU Screen: el veterano indestructible

GNU Screen es el abuelo de los multiplexores de terminal. Aunque su desarrollo es más conservador que el de tmux, sigue siendo una herramienta sumamente confiable que viene incluida en prácticamente cualquier distribución Linux.

Instalación:

# como root
dnf -y install screen

Tips de uso:

  • Iniciar sesión nueva: ``screen -S mi-jale``
  • Prefijo principal: Ctrl + a
  • Dividir región: Ctrl + a seguido de S (horizontal) o | (vertical)
  • Desacoplar sesión: Ctrl + a seguido de d
  • Reenganchar sesión: ``screen -r mi-jale``

tmate: colaboración remota instantánea

tmate es un fork directo de tmux enfocado en una sola cosa: compartir tu terminal al instante con colegas o compas de trabajo sin tener que configurar túneles SSH complejos ni abrir puertos en tu router. Al arrancar, tmate genera un enlace SSH seguro y un enlace web de sólo lectura o lectura/escritura que puedes pasar a cualquier persona.

Instalación:

# como root
dnf -y install tmate

Tips de uso:

# Iniciar tmate y obtener credenciales de conexión
tmate

Una vez adentro, tmate te mostrará en la barra inferior los comandos de conexión SSH y URLs web para compartir con tu equipo.

Kitty + Abduco: el combo minimalista estilo UNIX

Si ya usas el emulador de terminal Kitty, sabes que cuenta con soporte nativo acelerado por GPU para pestañas, paneles y ventanas divididas. Sin embargo, una terminal gráfica no gestiona sesiones persistentes en segundo plano por sí sola.

Aquí es donde entra abduco. Siguiendo la filosofía UNIX de herramientas pequeñas y enfocadas, abduco se encarga exclusivamente del detach y attach de procesos, dejando que Kitty gestione toda la interfaz visual.

Instalación:

# como root
dnf -y install kitty abduco

Tips de uso:

# Crear una sesión persistente llamada "servidor"
abduco -c servidor bash
  • Para desacoplarte de la sesión: presiona Ctrl + \
  • Para volver a conectarte más tarde: ``abduco -a servidor``
  • Para listar tus sesiones activas: ``abduco``

Los modernos con soporte en Fedora Copr

Cuando las herramientas evolucionan muy rápido o no han entrado a los repositorios base de Fedora, el sistema de empaquetado comunitario Copr es tu mejor aliado.

Zellij: el espacio de trabajo moderno en Rust

Zellij se autodefine como un workspace completo de terminal más que un simple multiplexor. Escrito en Rust, viene con una interfaz sumamente amigable, atajos intuitivos en pantalla, soporte de pestañas flotantes, layouts declarativos en KDL y un ecosistema de plugins compilados a WebAssembly (WASM).

Instalación:

# como root
dnf -y copr enable sramanujam/zellij
dnf -y install zellij

Tip

Si prefieres contar siempre con la versión más reciente directamente desde el equipo de desarrollo de Zellij, puedes instalar el binario oficial compilado con su instalador:

# Instalación directa del binario oficial de Zellij
bash <(curl -L zellij.dev/launch)

Tips de uso:

# Iniciar Zellij
zellij

WezTerm: emulador y multiplexor con aceleración por GPU

WezTerm es un emulador de terminal moderno y ultra configurable (mediante scripts en Lua) que integra su propio multiplexor cliente/servidor (wezterm-mux-server). Te permite gestionar dominios locales y conectarte a dominios remotos a través de SSH con sincronización de estado.

El autor de WezTerm (wezfurlong) mantiene su propio repositorio Copr oficial para Fedora:

# como root
dnf -y copr enable wezfurlong/wezterm-nightly
dnf -y install wezterm

Tips de uso:

Una vez instalado, puedes lanzar WezTerm con soporte de multiplexación o iniciar sesiones contra su servidor de multiplexación integrado.

La vanguardia: Go, Ghostty, Rust GPUI y Agentes de IA

En los últimos meses ha surgido una oleada de herramientas innovadoras que replantean por completo el concepto del multiplexor: interfaces modales, persistencia de estado a nivel de emulador y multiplexores pensados para orquestar agentes de codificación autónomos.

TUIOS: el gestor de ventanas modal para terminal

TUIOS lleva los conceptos de un gestor de ventanas tipo tiling (como i3 o bspwm) directamente dentro de la terminal. Desarrollado en Go, cuenta con una interfaz modal inspirada en Vim, soporte de múltiples espacios de trabajo (workspaces), barra con telemetría de CPU y RAM, servidor SSH integrado y automatización mediante archivos de guion (tape files).

Instalación:

# como root (si faltan utilerías de compresión)
dnf -y install curl tar gzip

# Descargar e instalar TUIOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Gaurav-Gosain/tuios/main/install.sh | bash

Tips de uso:

# Iniciar TUIOS
tuios

# O ejecutarlo con un tema específico
tuios --theme dracula

Boo: persistencia real construida sobre libghostty

Boo, desarrollado por el equipo de Coder, es un enfoque distinto al clásico multiplexor. En lugar de reinterpretar secuencias de escape ANSI por encima, está construido directamente sobre la biblioteca de emulación libghostty (del proyecto Ghostty).

Esto le permite a Boo guardar el estado exacto de la pantalla y la memoria del terminal, de modo que al desacoplar y reenganchar la sesión, todo queda exactamente como lo dejaste. Además, ofrece una API y comandos CLI diseñados para que scripts externos y agentes de IA interactúen con sesiones en segundo plano sin requerir una conexión interactiva.

Instalación:

# Descargar e instalar Boo mediante su script oficial
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coder/boo/main/install.sh | sh

Tips de uso:

# Crear una sesión en segundo plano
boo new mi-tarea

# Reengancharse a la sesión
boo attach mi-tarea

Okena: multiplexor nativo en Rust con GPUI

Okena es un multiplexor gráfico nativo escrito en Rust utilizando el framework GPUI (el motor de interfaz desarrollado originalmente para el editor Zed). Su punto fuerte no es el trabajo en servidores remotos sin entorno gráfico, sino ofrecer un entorno de desarrollo local donde cierras la aplicación, la vuelves a abrir y todo tu espacio de trabajo (paneles, proyectos, terminales y pestañas) se restaura al instante.

Instalación:

# como root: instalar dependencias de renderizado
dnf -y install libxcb libX11 libxkbcommon-x11 vulkan-loader libglvnd-egl

# Descargar y extraer Okena
curl -fsSL https://github.com/contember/okena/releases/download/v0.28.0/okena-linux-x64.tar.gz -o /tmp/okena.tar.gz
tar -xzf /tmp/okena.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin
chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/okena

Tips de uso:

# Lanzar interfaz de Okena
okena

# Inspeccionar comandos del cliente CLI
okena --help

Séance: multiplexor GTK4 diseñado para flujos con Agentes de IA

Séance es uno de los proyectos más interesantes del momento. Diseñado específicamente para entornos de escritorio Linux modernos con GTK4, libadwaita y libghostty, adopta una disposición de paneles horizontales con scroll infinito (similar al concepto del gestor de ventanas niri).

Está pensado desde la base para orquestar y monitorear agentes de codificación de Inteligencia Artificial (como Claude Code, Codex o Pi). Detecta automáticamente el estado de los agentes en una barra lateral (si están trabajando, esperando confirmación o inactivos) y expone una herramienta de control por socket Unix (seance ctl) para controlar ventanas y paneles por código.

Instalación:

# como root: instalar dependencias de entorno gráfico
dnf -y install fuse-libs libadwaita gtk4 libX11 fontconfig

# Descargar el AppImage oficial
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl -fsSL https://github.com/no1msd/seance/releases/download/v0.1.4/seance-0.1.4-x86_64.AppImage -o ~/.local/bin/seance
chmod 700 ~/.local/bin/seance

Tips de uso:

# Iniciar ventana principal de Séance
~/.local/bin/seance

# Controlar sesión desde CLI
~/.local/bin/seance ctl --help

Resumen de disponibilidad en Fedora

Para que tengas el panorama completo de un solo vistazo, aquí te dejo la tabla comparativa con el método recomendado en Fedora:

Herramienta Tipo de interfaz Método de instalación en Fedora Repositorio
tmux TUI clásica ``dnf -y install tmux`` Oficial Fedora
GNU Screen TUI clásica ``dnf -y install screen`` Oficial Fedora
tmate TUI colaborativa ``dnf -y install tmate`` Oficial Fedora
Kitty + Abduco GPU TUI modular ``dnf -y install kitty abduco`` Oficial Fedora
Zellij TUI moderna (Rust) ``dnf -y copr enable sramanujam/zellij && dnf -y install zellij`` Copr/Binario
WezTerm GPU GUI/Mux (Lua) ``dnf -y copr enable wezfurlong/wezterm-nightly && dnf -y install wezterm`` Copr oficial
TUIOS Modal TUI (Go) Script oficial/GitHub Releases Binario directo
Boo TUI Ghostty (Coder) Script oficial/GitHub Releases Binario directo
Okena GPU GUI (Rust GPUI) GitHub Releases + dependencias Vulkan Binario directo
Séance GTK4/AI Mux AppImage oficial + bibliotecas GTK4/Adwaita AppImage/Fuente

Conclusión

A final de cuentas, el mundo de los multiplexores de terminal ya no se limita únicamente a elegir entre tmux y screen. Hoy tienes un abanico chingón de alternativas:

  • Si trabajas en servidores remotos puros, tmux y Zellij siguen siendo los reyes indiscutibles.
  • Si haces pair programming o das soporte técnico a compas, tmate te saca del apuro en dos segundos.
  • Si quieres aprovechar tu GPU en el escritorio con layouts avanzados, el combo Kitty + Abduco o WezTerm te darán una fluidez envidiable.
  • Y si estás metido de lleno en automatización y desarrollo asistido por agentes de IA, herramientas como Boo, TUIOS, Okena y Séance están marcando el futuro de cómo interactúas con tu consola.

Pruébalos en tu instalación de Fedora y quédate con el que mejor se adapte a tu flujo de trabajo. ¿Cuál de todos estos es tu gallo para el día a día?

Chafa

Posted by Christiano Anderson on 2026-08-18 19:11:44 UTC

After reading What software do you use daily in 2026? on Lobster, I learned about Chafa.

Described as: The premier UX of the 21st century just got a little better: With chafa, you can now view very, very reasonable approximations of pictures and animations in the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator. The power of ANSI X3.64 compels you!

As a heavy shell user, I decided to install and had a lot of fun opening my images in the terminal :-)

Help us test the upcoming GNOME 51 release for Fedora 45!

Posted by Felipe Borges on 2026-08-17 08:21:29 UTC

Most of GNOME 51 is now packaged for Fedora 45. Starting today and running through the end of the week, we will be running our traditional Fedora Test Day for GNOME. If you are a Fedora user, you can help us find last-minute integration issues and iron out what’s going to become the stable Fedora 45 release.

You can either boot the latest Fedora 45 image (nightly) in a virtual machine or update an existing test setup. Follow our guided test matrix, try out different features, and record your results. Even testing for 15 minutes and reporting a single issue makes a huge difference.

Visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2026-08-17_GNOME_51_Desktop for more info. You can join the Fedora Workstation Matrix chat channel if you have more questions.

From August 10 to August 16

Posted by Aurélien Bompard on 2026-08-17 07:53:00 UTC

Across the various Fedora groups, the overarching focus this week was on the successful Fedora 45 mass branching and its subsequent release preparations, which drove extensive testing, mass rebuilds (particularly for the RISC-V architecture), and CI/CD validation efforts. Concurrently, infrastructure and engineering teams were heavily engaged in major system upgrades, notably migrating services to RHEL 10, executing planned server outages, transitioning repositories to Forgejo, and implementing network blocklists to mitigate aggressive automated scraping that temporarily disrupted operations. Policy and governance updates were also a central theme, as the Council and FESCo worked to finalize the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, establish new Conflict of Interest guidelines, and address community concerns regarding AI-integrated software and regulatory liability under the EU Cyber Resilience Act. Finally, routine ecosystem maintenance and security remained high priorities, evidenced by the active processing of non-responsive maintainers, Out-of-Band security patching for vulnerabilities like the "Zapscape" kernel flaw, and ongoing dependency and macro improvements across language stacks like Python and Go.

Announcements

On the development and infrastructure front, Fedora 45 successfully completed its mass branching on August 11 (following an initial notification), placing the release into a post-branch freeze until a successful compose. Change owners were also reminded that all F45 changes needed to be testable by August 11. Contributors should prepare for a six-hour planned infrastructure outage on August 20 for server upgrades and RHEL 10 migrations. Policy updates are also underway, with the Council seeking feedback on the proposed Fedora Forge Usage Policy for the project's internal Forgejo instance. In broader ecosystem news, Mark J. Wielaard was honored with the Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom by the Software Freedom Conservancy for his decades of foundational work on tools like Valgrind, elfutils, and Sourceware.

For those looking to get involved, the Fedora QA team is calling for volunteers for the upcoming Fedora 45 Test Days (detailed further in a Fedora Magazine article), starting with GNOME 51 on August 17 and followed by testing for RPM 6.1 and installation media. If you are a newcomer unsure of where to start interacting with the community, Episode 058 of the Fedora Podcast provides a comprehensive guide to Fedora's communication channels. Finally, users can check out a new tutorial on how to monitor NVMe and SSD drive health using Performance Co-Pilot (PCP).

Council

This week, the Council focused heavily on community policies and governance processes. Significant progress was made on the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, with the Council agreeing to adjust guidelines around Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and dropping the automated repository archival rule in favor of a mandatory "tickets" contact repository for organizations. Additionally, the Council agreed to propose a new Conflict of Interest guideline requiring neutral oversight during private decisions involving access rights.

Other major topics included a proposal by Red Hat to act as the Open Source Software Steward for Fedora under the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) to shield volunteer contributors from regulatory liability. The community also discussed user concerns over AI features embedded in packaged software, clarifications to the AI-Assisted Contributions Policy, and an updated draft of the Fedora Innovation Lifecycle to create a sandbox for large experimental changes.

Decisions

  • Agreed to update the Fedora Forge Usage Policy to include a short sentence on handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII) under the Code of Conduct section, address remaining feedback in a v.3 draft, and allow one more week of community review before voting.
  • Agreed to propose a new Conflict of Interest guideline for governance groups, stating that private decisions regarding access rights should require mediation or oversight from project leadership (FPL/FCA/FOA) if a conflict of interest exists, and to gather community feedback before formalizing the change.

See the detailed report for the Council team.

Learn more about the Council team.

FESCo

This week, FESCo held one meeting, participated in three forum discussions, and handled 19 tickets. During the meeting, FESCo noted that the completion deadline and mass branching for Fedora 45 had arrived, and briefly discussed the need for mitigations against aggressive automated scraping on the src.fedoraproject.org infrastructure. On the forums, community members initiated a discussion on whether Fedora needs a formal policy or labeling system for packages that introduce AI-powered features, highlighting concerns about data privacy and unexpected behavior.

A significant portion of FESCo's activity in tickets involved voting on Change proposals for F45 and F46, resulting in the approval of several new features including a WebUI installer for Fedora Atomic, the deprecation of the NIS profile in authselect, and the introduction of a new encapsule developer container tool. Additionally, FESCo processed multiple non-responsive maintainer tickets, resulting in the orphaning of some packages and the assignment of new maintainers to several critical components like thermald and mcelog.

Decisions

  • Approved Change: Web Based Remote Installation Support for Atomic Desktops (Ticket #3670).
  • Approved Change: Anaconda WebUI Fedora Atomic (Ticket #3666).
  • Approved Change: Encapsule isolated devel containers (Ticket #3668).
  • Approved Change: IBus 1.5.35 (Ticket #3669).
  • Approved Change: Authselect Remove NIS Profile (Ticket #3662).
  • Approved Change: Disable in Kernel Crypto Userspace API Phase 1 (Ticket #3667).
  • Approved Change: Enable systemd-oomd and zram swap for CoreOS (Ticket #3661).
  • Approved Change: Sequoia openpgpverify (Ticket #3660).
  • Approved an updates policy exception for python-cloudflare (Ticket #3674).
  • Approved a one-time updates policy exception for thermald across all Fedora branches to fix power management issues (Ticket #3673).
  • Approved the non-responsive maintainer process for the owner of python-avocado and python-aexpect, leading to the packages being orphaned (Ticket #3659).
  • Approved adding new co-maintainers for thermald, libfprint, fprintd, and fwts under the non-responsive maintainer policy (Ticket #3672).

See the detailed report for the FESCo team.

Learn more about the FESCo team.

Ambassadors

This week, the Ambassadors group received a single announcement regarding the Call for Sessions for the Everything Open 2027 conference. Fedora contributors are encouraged to submit proposals for talks or tutorials relating to Linux, open source, security, or operations by September 6, 2026. For more details, see the mailing list post.

See the detailed report for the Ambassadors team.

Learn more about the Ambassadors team.

Workstation / GNOME

This week, the scheduled Workstation Working Group meeting was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict. The primary discussion in the community centered around the future of the Ptyxis terminal emulator in Fedora, as its original author confirmed he is no longer maintaining the project.

Community members discussed potential alternatives to replace Ptyxis, including Ghostty and GNOME Console. To determine an official path forward and prevent wasted effort by community translators on an abandoned upstream project, a formal ticket was filed with the Workstation Working Group.

See the detailed report for the Workstation / GNOME team.

Learn more about the Workstation / GNOME team.

Server

During the week of August 10-16, 2026, the Fedora Server group focused on Fedora 45 branched release testing and documentation restructuring. The group celebrated the availability of group-wide CI/CD runners for the first time. Significant discussions were held regarding the Home Server spin-off, specifically evaluating a new virtualized Kiwi development and testing environment.

In documentation, the group decided to streamline by merging tutorial and use-case files into a single "Use cases" section. Testing for F45 is actively underway, though a partition type issue in the VM build requires a fix.

Decisions

  • The documentation structure will be updated by creating a new "use cases" section that merges all use-case and tutorial files, leading to the deletion of the dedicated "Tutorials" section.
  • The Working Group will finalize the specific restructuring details for the post-installation documentation sections in the related tracking ticket and vote on it during the next meeting.
  • All working group members are requested to test the new virtualized build environment by following the Home Server README to build a dummy Fedora image.

See the detailed report for the Server team.

Learn more about the Server team.

Infrastructure

This week, the Infrastructure team focused heavily on migrating services to RHEL 10, scheduling a major 6-hour outage for August 20 to handle mass updates, reboots, and VM reinstallations. To combat severe scraping traffic on Fedora infrastructure (which temporarily spiked server loads and disrupted Anubis on Pagure), the team successfully implemented a new user-agent blocklist. The team is also officially migrating the Matrix moderation bot to Fedora's OpenShift infrastructure, alongside drafting new policies for "official" Matrix rooms. Finally, the legacy retrace.fedoraproject.org server is being decommissioned due to a lack of maintenance.

Decisions

  • A 6-hour infrastructure outage is scheduled for August 20 at 20:00 UTC for mass updates, reboots, and RHEL 10 migrations.
  • The unmaintained retrace.fedoraproject.org server will be shut down and decommissioned.
  • The primary rsync servers have been switched to the BBR congestion control algorithm to improve download speeds.
  • The Fedora Matrix moderation bot will be officially migrated to Fedora Infrastructure (@moderation:fedoraproject.org).

See the detailed report for the Infrastructure team.

Learn more about the Infrastructure team.

Release Engineering

This week, the Release Engineering team successfully completed the mass branching of Fedora 45 off of Rawhide, with Rawhide officially transitioning to Fedora 46. Concurrently, the mass re-signing process for Fedora 45 packages and the generation of the Fedora 47 IMA key took place. Additionally, the team finalized the migration of all Release Engineering repositories to Forgejo (fedora-scm-requests).

Other notable activities involved fixing an early signing issue for ELN packages, updating staging environments for koji-image-builder testing, and refining internal tools, such as creating a dedicated team to validate SCM requests and reduce notification spam. Maintainers are also reminded to use the new fedpkg request-unretirement feature instead of filing Releng tickets for routine package unretirements.

Decisions

  • Fedora 45 was successfully branched from Rawhide, making Rawhide officially Fedora 46.
  • Package maintainers no longer need to open Release Engineering tickets for package unretirements; they must now use the fedpkg request-unretirement command (requires fedpkg v1.48+).
  • All Release Engineering repositories have been fully migrated to Forgejo.
  • A new group (forge-releng-scm-validators) was established to handle SCM requests directly, resolving the issue of excessive pings to all members of the releng organization.
  • The Fedora 43 signing key was removed from the coreos-pool and replaced with the Fedora 46 key.
  • Nonresponsive maintainer processes were executed for the user cleber, resulting in the orphaning of their packages.

See the detailed report for the Release Engineering team.

Learn more about the Release Engineering team.

Quality

The Quality group focused on system performance, package default configurations, and preparations for the Fedora 45 release. Significant attention was brought to performance and power efficiency regressions caused by the switch to tuned-ppd, prompting discussions on how to better adjust the default TuneD profiles. Additionally, community testers successfully verified a critical GRUB Out-of-Memory fix in Rawhide.

In Quality Engineering (QE), early manual validation testing for Fedora 45 has started and already uncovered several significant bugs. The team also prepared tooling for the upcoming release, testing Issuebot in production and marking it ready for F45.

Decisions

  • Issuebot has been successfully tested in production and is formally ready to run for the Fedora 45 release cycle.
  • The GRUB Out-of-Memory fix was verified to work in Rawhide, allowing the pending rollout to Fedora 44 to proceed.

See the detailed report for the Quality team.

Learn more about the Quality team.

Design

Between August 10 and August 16, 2026, the Design team continued to refine key graphical assets for Fedora projects and internal tools, alongside ongoing UX work for the Fedora Design Docs revamp. Major discussions revolved around finalizing the character details for the LoLa AI Package Manager mascot and aiming to complete avatars for the Fedora Matrix bots by the end of the current sprint. Additionally, historical design assets were preserved through a repository migration from Pagure to the active Forge.

Decisions

  • Migrated the legacy designassets repository from Pagure to the Design organization on Forge to preserve historical content and history.
  • Utilized the Matrix ID @admin:fedoraproject.org as the official handle for the newly rolling-out moderation bot, which will require an avatar.

See the detailed report for the Design team.

Learn more about the Design team.

Docs

The Docs team met to discuss ongoing efforts to clean up outdated Fedora Wiki pages, exploring automated approaches using the MediaWiki API to replace tedious manual deletions. They also evaluated a new experimental CI site builder relying on Podman and discussed adopting the Vale linter, deciding to introduce it as a recommendation for local authoring before enforcing it in CI. Concurrently, a community forum discussion took place regarding the documentation and rationale behind recommending a separate /boot partition in Fedora installations. Team tickets tracked a new membership request, a broken link in the Server test results wiki page, and the extensive historical wiki cleanup effort.

Decisions

  • The Vale linter will be introduced as a recommended tool for local authoring rather than a strict CI requirement to avoid blocking contributors with excessive errors.
  • Mass deletion of obsolete Docs-related wiki pages (such as Fedora 8 and 11 guides) will continue, with script-based automation via the MediaWiki API being actively explored to streamline the process.

See the detailed report for the Docs team.

Learn more about the Docs team.

Internationalization

This week, the Internationalization group received a cross-posted invitation to speak at the Everything Open 2027 conference. Community members are encouraged to submit session proposals covering topics like Linux, open source, AI, security, and operations before the September 6, 2026 deadline.

See the detailed report for the Internationalization team.

Learn more about the Internationalization team.

This week, the Legal group discussed whether Copr projects are permitted to download and use proprietary software, specifically the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit, during the build process for otherwise free and open-source packages like cuda-python. The primary concern raised was that utilizing proprietary dependencies during a build could inadvertently include proprietary code in the resulting binaries, such as through inlined headers. The prevailing consensus was that this practice is not allowed if it results in the distribution of content that violates Fedora's allowed licensing rules.

Decisions

  • Software built, hosted, and distributed in Copr must be governed entirely by an acceptable Fedora license. Downloading proprietary software (like the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit) during a Copr build process is generally unacceptable if it causes the resulting binary to include proprietary content, such as inlined code from proprietary headers.

See the detailed report for the Legal team.

Learn more about the Legal team.

COPR

A scheduled outage for the COPR servers was announced for 2026-08-12 at 07:30 UTC, lasting approximately three hours. The downtime allowed the team to update COPR packages to newer versions, providing bug fixes and new features to the general Linux community using the build service.

Community members with questions or issues were encouraged to use the Fedora Build System Matrix channel (#buildsys:fedoraproject.org) or comment on the associated infrastructure ticket.

Learn more about the COPR team.

EPEL

This week, the EPEL group focused heavily on repository architecture and package updates. The Steering Committee unanimously approved the "de-z-ification" of EPEL 10, aligning its repository structure with the upcoming EPEL 11 release by utilizing the $stream variable for CentOS while leaving RHEL without a suffix.

In package news, maintainers announced the migration of libgit2 dependents in EPEL 9 and EPEL 10 to the supported v1.9 branch to address security vulnerabilities, as well as minor updates to uv and ruff in the EPEL 10.3 testing repositories.

Decisions

  • The EPEL Steering Committee unanimously approved the "de-z-ification" of EPEL 10. CentOS streams will use suffixed repository paths (e.g., epel-10s) while RHEL uses unsuffixed paths (e.g., epel-10), aligning with the approved EPEL 11 design.
  • Packages depending on libgit2 in EPEL 9 and EPEL 10 will be migrated from the obsolete v1.7 branch to the supported v1.9 branch via pull requests.

See the detailed report for the EPEL team.

Learn more about the EPEL team.

ELN

The ELN group met this week to discuss recent updates, including the publication of bootc images, the minimization of go-vendor-tools for RHEL 11, and variant reorganizations such as moving Live images to a new AltImages variant and adding a new Extensions variant. The group also noted the F45 branching process, which temporarily paused builds, and highlighted that the next branching in six months will coincide with the RHEL 11 branching.

Additionally, the group discussed mitigating database bloat in Koji caused by failing draft build retries. A proposal was also made to adopt a separate GPG key for ELN content starting with Fedora 46 to reduce the frequency of key rotations from twice a year to once every three years.

Decisions

  • Pursue a dedicated GPG key for ELN content starting with the F46/EL11 branching cycle to reduce key rotations, initiating the process by filing a releng ticket.
  • Deploy a fix to the build sync tooling to prevent retries of consistently failing draft builds from rapidly filling up the Koji database.

See the detailed report for the ELN team.

Learn more about the ELN team.

Atomic

The Atomic group had a quiet week. During a brief meeting, members noted that ongoing Konflux integration work for Atomic Desktops is continuing. On the forums, a community member inquired about /opt and /usr/local functioning as symlinks in Silverblue and asked whether future Fedora bootc images will transition to using regular directories instead.

Learn more about the Atomic team.

CoreOS

CoreOS met once this week to discuss the Fedora 45 release schedule and a severe kernel vulnerability. Fedora 45 recently branched from Rawhide, and the team is preparing the necessary updates for coreos-installer and bootc images, alongside monitoring for F46 key signing issues in Rawhide.

The team also reviewed the recent "Zapscape" kernel vulnerability (CVE-2026-64561). They decided to issue an out-of-band kernel update for the testing and next streams to mitigate the issue for VM workloads immediately, rather than waiting for the scheduled stable release next week.

Decisions

  • Issue an out-of-band kernel update for the testing and next streams to address the Zapscape vulnerability (CVE-2026-64561) prior to the next scheduled stable release.
  • Use a package override via GitHub actions to fast-track the fixed kernel without promoting the entire testing-devel/next-devel stream.

See the detailed report for the CoreOS team.

Learn more about the CoreOS team.

ARM

During this week, the ARM group had a brief discussion regarding kernel availability for the Raspberry Pi 5. A community member inquired about a Fedora 44 (F44) kernel, noting the reliability of the current F43 kernel updates. It was confirmed that F44, F45, and Rawhide kernels are already available for the device in the existing COPR repository.

Learn more about the ARM team.

Alternative Images

In their recent meeting, the Alternative Images group announced that RISC-V tags and targets have been successfully set up, representing a major first step toward creating new RISC-V images. Furthermore, Kiwi descriptions for RISC-V have been provided by Andrea.

The group is designating the upcoming week as "image week." During this time, they will conduct their regular quarterly image updates and officially begin generating RISC-V images specifically for QEMU virtual machines and P550 hardware.

Decisions

  • To begin generating RISC-V images specifically targeting QEMU and P550 hardware during the upcoming week.
  • To proceed with the regular quarterly image updates next week.

Learn more about the Alternative Images team.

AI & ML

The AI & ML SIG met to discuss the upcoming ROCm 7.14 update for Fedora 46 and the use of the pi-coding-agent tool (available in Fedora 45) for automating day-to-day packaging review tasks. A major point of discussion was a proposal to split the AI/ML SIG into two distinct groups (packaging vs. end-user AI adoption). The group unanimously decided against the split, opting to maintain a "big-tent" approach while improving documentation to clarify roles. In other news, an all-new Electron RPM was submitted to unblock Podman Desktop in Fedora, alongside updates to Podman Desktop in COPR and a proof-of-concept Atomic Fedora CSB bootc image.

Decisions

  • The proposal to split the AI/ML SIG into two separate groups (Packaging and AI Use) was rejected; the SIG will maintain a unified, "big-tent" structure.
  • Clarified that membership in the general ai-ml-sig FAS group does not grant packaging commit rights, maintaining a clear security boundary for compliance efforts like the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

See the detailed report for the AI & ML team.

Learn more about the AI & ML team.

RISC-V

The Fedora 45 RISC-V mass rebuild is 85% completed (around 20,000 packages), significantly aided by community members and Red Hatters who contributed new builders to parallelize the process. You can view the rebuild status numbers here. Other focus areas included investigating a failed LLVM build with RISC-V patches, co-writing Koji querying scripts, and exploring "Agentic SDLC" ideas for automated FTBFS triage and image boot testing.

A major challenge this week involved AI scrapers bringing down the Koji hub over the weekend, which resulted in numerous build failures.

See the detailed report for the RISC-V team.

Learn more about the RISC-V team.

Security

The Security group held an open-floor meeting this week, where members discussed their roles, kernel maintenance, and the upcoming packaging of module-jail for Fedora. On the forums, a mass scan report from OpenScanHub was published for Fedora 45 Critical Path Packages, calling for maintainers to review AI-flagged security findings. Additionally, a complex architectural issue regarding systemd-run0 and SELinux was brought to the mailing list, with a request for community input on the best path forward.

Decisions

  • Justin Forbes will maintain the Fedora package for module-jail and work to integrate it into the proper repositories as an opt-in security feature.

See the detailed report for the Security team.

Learn more about the Security team.

Go

The Go SIG met this week and primarily discussed the upcoming Go 1.27.0 release, which is expected soon alongside embargoed CVE patches for the 1.26 and 1.25 branches. The group also discussed architecture support, noting that i686 (32-bit x86) builds are increasingly being excluded from specific packages, though linux/386 remains a first-class port in the Go ecosystem and cannot be entirely purged yet due to system dependencies.

Decisions

  • The SIG will run a mass prebuild once Go 1.27.0 is released to identify and fix any broken packages before requesting a mass rebuild.

See the detailed report for the Go team.

Learn more about the Go team.

PHP

This week, the PHP group received an update regarding an ongoing dependency resolution issue in EPEL where php-devel incorrectly pulls in php8.4-devel instead of the default PHP 8.3 stack. Remi Collet reported that although the package itself has been fixed, both the affected and fixed versions currently coexist in the EPEL-10.3 buildroot, meaning the issue remains unresolved.

Learn more about the PHP team.

Python

This week, the Python group evaluated a provisional dependency patching macro to simplify package builds and discussed formalizing its behavior. They also reached consensus on an RFC to expand automatic python(abi) dependencies to all file types installed in Python library directories.

Additionally, discussions were opened regarding a migration strategy for the upcoming flit-core v4 release to ensure compatibility ahead of the Fedora 46 branch, and guidance was provided to packagers dealing with upstream applications that pollute the global Python namespace.

See the detailed report for the Python team.

Learn more about the Python team.

Other Discussions

This week in Fedora, there were updates to the package review process and SCM request infrastructure, along with a multitude of package updates, soname bumps, and mass branching for Fedora 45.

Orphaning packages

Package updates

New contributor introductions

  • Dirk Nehring introduced themselves as a long-time Linux user and VDR plugin author, looking for a sponsor to help package and maintain VDR plugins in Fedora.

Contribution opportunities

Community members with hardware access or environments for testing can immediately contribute to quality assurance efforts across various groups without needing prior team membership. Testers are needed to validate Fedora 45 bare-metal and VM builds, monitor Rawhide for CoreOS key signing breakages, and test new out-of-band CoreOS kernel updates addressing Zapscape. Users with specific hardware can test kernels on Raspberry Pi 5 or prepare to test upcoming RISC-V and P550 alternative images. Additionally, general contributors can test pi-coding-agent in Fedora 45, evaluate the provisional Python %pyproject_patch_dependency macro, run the Home Server README image build, clone the experimental docs-fp-o-ci-test site builder, or evaluate the separate_check feature in Mock 6.8. Those experiencing performance drops on modern hardware can also assist the Quality team in debugging TuneD configuration profiles.

Developers and packagers can step up to adopt orphaned packages (such as python-avocado, evtest, bottles, and Zim), or sponsor new maintainers like Dirk Nehring (Ticket #13470 for rust-plotters-backend). There is a high demand for fixing Fails To Build From Source (FTBFS) issues during the Go 1.27.0 mass prebuild, RISC-V LLVM patches, and EPEL migrations. Scripting opportunities include refining mass rebuild scripts (Ticket #13428, PR #13051), improving Bodhi update checks (Ticket #13468), assisting with a test assets repository server, packaging Zig applications for Workstation, or designing UI-side Ansible tasks for Zabbix. Additionally, package maintainers should review the August 2026 OpenScanHub report to resolve static analyzer findings or take over the retrace.fedoraproject.org service.

Contributors with writing or visual design skills can pick up valuable tasks without deep technical setups. The Design team welcomes interns and new contributors to illustrate Community Personas or create event flyers using tools like Inkscape. Writers can restructure the Server post-installation guide into self-contained AsciiDoc topics, write Kickstart coverage for dnsmasq, clean up legacy wiki pages (Issue #43), fix documentation links like relval (Issue #61), or propose content to the AI/ML documentation (Issue #38). Contributors can also clear legacy pagure.io links from the Fedora Ansible repository comments. Translators, however, are asked to pause localization on Ptyxis until a new default Workstation terminal is finalized.

Anyone in the wider community can provide valuable feedback on overarching project governance, legal policies, and community advocacy. Open discussions seeking input include the Fedora Forge Usage Policy, the Innovation Lifecycle proposal, Workstation WG issue #520 regarding terminal emulators, and the overarching policy on packages containing AI-powered features. Legal experts can evaluate open-source licensing edge cases involving dynamic linking or draft the GPU Acceptable Use Policy (Issue #35), while SELinux experts can advise on systemd-run0 integration. Finally, all contributors are encouraged to share their Fedora-related expertise by submitting session proposals to the Everything Open 2027 conference before September 6, 2026.

On finding vulnerabilities and shipping fixes

Posted by Fabio Alessandro Locati on 2026-08-17 00:00:00 UTC

Over the last year, I’ve watched AI models and tools that find vulnerabilities in code take a central role in security industry communications. Every few weeks, a new product announcement promises impressive results, such as AI tools that detect SQL injection, spot memory corruption bugs, identify logic flaws at scale, or chain tens of known vulnerabilities together. This can be impressive for attack purposes, but it is more an interesting novelty than defensive security.

SeedboxSync 4.0 : Fusion de l’IHM et du CLI

Posted by Guillaume Kulakowski on 2026-08-16 08:30:08 UTC
La v4.0.0 de SeedboxSync marque un tournant majeur : fusion du CLI et du frontend en une seule application, migration de la configuration en base de données, planificateur Python natif et passage à SQLite WAL. Tour d'horizon des nouveautés et des changements d'architecture.

misc fedora bits: second week of aug 2026

Posted by Kevin Fenzi on 2026-08-15 19:59:50 UTC
Scrye into the crystal ball

Another week gone by, hard to understand that it's almost fall here now. Here's a recap of things from this last week:

Fedora 45 branched

Fedora 45 has branched off of rawhide. rawhide is now marching toward Fedora 46. Overall the actual branching went pretty reasonably, a few minor issues. There was a lot of issues with the last minute dnf repos move change that landed hours before branching. This caused a lot of work to try and get a compose with it, without reverting. Perhaps we should make sure all changes that affect the compose process have to land a week or so before branching or will just be reverted.

Some minor things:

  • The new rawhide release in bodhi had 'f46' as it's branch name, but it was supposed to be 'rawhide' because this is used to match against the git branch. Easily fixed, but hopefully not something that happens next time.

  • The openh264 repo is a bit of a problem at branching time. We need things setup for the new rawhide before we can build it and sign it with the new key and send it out to cisco. The choice then becomes if we want it to just 404 (not be there) or redirect it to the fedora-45 one (which is signed by the fedora-45 key). I've done the latter for now and we are syncing the new rawhide build out. Hopefully updated early next week.

  • noarch_arches wasn't set on the new rawhide build tag in koji. I submitted a pr to fix the branching script for this case and it's corrected for f46-build

  • eln composes were not fully resigned by the new rawhide key, the docs around this process were not very clear, we should fix them for next time. However, eln is going to just move to their own seperate key, so we just don't have to worry about this next time.

  • Somehow fedora 44 base repos got their permissions messed up. I can only assume it was a script failing somewhere, but I've not been able to track it down. This meant that some mirrors deleted their f44 trees and then had to sync it again. Lots of unwanted churn when there's already a bunch of mirror churn due to the new branched compose and newly resigned rawhide.

BBR on downloads

It was suggested to me by John 'Warthog9' Hawley that we might want to look at moving our download servers to BBR. Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), is a tcp congestion control algorithm developed by Google. It's used by them at youtube and other places.

So, I switched our download servers over and... it seems to have resulted in a nice performance increase for mirrors syncing from the master mirrors.

We will see how it goes moving forward.

RHEL10 migrations

Managed to get in a few migrations this last week. There are now just 33 hosts left. Of those:

  • I am hoping to do the last 5 vmhosts next thursday (see below)

  • We have a plan for rabbitmq clusters (6).

  • zabbix is planned soon (2)

  • The last bastion server and logs server I also plan to do thursday.

  • The database servers ( 12 ) I plan to start on once we are in beta freeze for staging, then prod after we are out.

  • A few oddball ones will be hard to do now due to resource constraints (fedorapeople and torrent), so might defer them for now.

Outage next week

We will be doing a mass update/reboot/reinstall fest next week. Monday I am out on PTO (it's my b-day!). Tuesday will be staging, Wed a bunch of non outage causing things, and thursday the main event. Everything will get updated/rebooted, then I will reinstall the last 5 vmhosts and our last bastion server. Friday will be openshift clusters (but those should just not cause much notice).

Beta Freeze coming up

The week after next we go into beta freeze. I have to say I have thought about doing away with them, but I find them a nice time to focus on other work and relax a bit. Faster is not always better.

Scrapers

So, of course I can't post one of these these days without talking about the scrapers. (Whats the collective noun for scrapers? :)

We were getting hit really hard last weekend and early this week, but... Ryan thought to fight ai with ai and had a LLM dig through a bunch of our logs for any patterns. It managed to come up with some patterns that we likely wouldn't have seen, but blocking those things has made a MASSIVE improvement. Basically it's like they aren't even there right now.

Load on the backend for src.fedoraproject.org that had started hovering at 180 or so is down under 1 pretty much all the time now. I know that this will not last and they will change their patterns, but it's nice to have some respite at least for a little while.

As always, comment on the fediverse: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/117101412562880287

replyfast 0.4.0 is available

Posted by Kushal Das on 2026-08-15 07:57:55 UTC

Yesterday I released replyfast version 0.4.0, which is a Python module to receive and send messages on Signal

You can install it via

python3 -m pip install replyfast

or

uv pip install replyfast

I have a script to help you to register as a device, and then you can send and receive messages. You can use the same script to re-register.

I also have a demo bot which shows both sending and rreceiving messages, and also how to schedule work following the crontab syntaxt.

    scheduler.register(
        "*/5 * * * *",
        send_disk_usage,
        args=(client,),
        name="disk-usage",
    )

replyfast is written using presage library, which does the actual work of communication via Signal protocol.

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