An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure". Red Hat engineer and KVM maintainer Paolo Bonzini has merged the kvm-chainsaw branch to KVM's "next" Git branch. With this KVM Chainsaw work now in the next branch, it should be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle. The KVM Chainsaw work deals with the kvm_mmu structure being overloaded with multiple uses and splits it down into three parts for better handling current KVM usage. Paolo explains of KVM Chainsaw with the merge to the KVM.git next branch: "The kvm_mmu is a "god data structure" that includes three different tasks: describing the guest page table's format, walking the guest page tables and building the page tables. This means that the (already poorly named) nested_mmu is only used in part, since it has no page tables to construct. Furthermore, some parts are reused across guest and host page tables (such as the reserved bits detector) but others are not; for example permission_fault is replaced by simplified code such as is_executable_pte(). This series cleans this up by splitting kvm_mmu in three parts...

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Today, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications, based on Coinbase's contributed x402 protocol. Backed by companies including AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, the effort aims to make payments work directly over HTTP (assuming users are comfortable letting AI agents handle financial transactions). "The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC last month when the company announced the protocol. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."

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Have you ever needed a Linux application which only exists in the Windows world? Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM writes: Windows does have a lot of useful app (but smaller than "power apps"). Some of these are closed source, some are open, but they're not all available in Linux yet. My list would have to contain Gimp Tookit versions of: IrfanView image manager, which I think is unequaled in Linux (though it does work to some extent under Wine). I also miss the full version of 7-Zip, because of its better compression settings, which File-Roller does not provide, though the Linux port p7zip is available (though unnoticed by common distributions). Lastly, I think that Notepad++ would be a good addition to Linux. That last one drew some pushback from long-time Slashdot reader jesco. "If there's one area where Linux shines, then it's the availability of high-quality text editors. Last time I looked Kate was still pretty nice, and there's Emacs, Vim and Neovim" if you're partial to command lines. But are there any daily-drive apps you still find yourself needing? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Which apps aren't available on Linux?

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The blog Linuxiac reports: A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records. The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field. Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as "surveillance enablement"... The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases.

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Tech Times reports: Linux 7.2's merge window closed out a cleanup campaign on Friday that most kernel developers had stopped expecting to see end: the complete removal of strncpy(), a C string-copy function that the kernel's own documentation labels "actively dangerous," from every subsystem, driver, and architecture-specific file in the kernel source tree. The merge landed June 20, 2026. After around 362 commits spread across six years of incremental work, no call site using the function remained, and the function itself — including the last per-CPU-architecture optimized implementations — was struck from the source. The removal matters beyond housekeeping. strncpy() is a persistent source of a specific class of memory error: kernel buffers that contain sensitive data can leak bytes past an unterminated string boundary, a pattern that enables memory disclosure vulnerabilities. Eliminating the function from the tree removes that entire class from the kernel's attack surface — and, critically, makes strncpy() unavailable to any future contributor, turning a best-practice suggestion into an enforced policy. Phoronix notes it's replaced by five different functions: In place of strncpy, Linux kernel code should use strscpy() for NUL terminated destinations, strscpy_pad() for NUl-terminated destinations with zero-padding, strtomem_pad() for non-NUL-terminated fixed-width fields, memcpy_and_pad() for bounded copies with explicit padding, or memcpy() for known-length memory copies. "The reason five functions were needed," explains Tech Times, "is that different parts of the kernel were using strncpy() for five semantically distinct memory operations — each with a different intent, different termination requirement, and different padding behavior. " The original function obscured all of those differences under a single ambiguous name. The 362-commit campaign to replace it was, in effect, a codebase-wide audit that forced every call site to declare its actual intent in code That is an engineering outcome with lasting value: the kernel's string-handling semantics are now explicit where they were previously implicit, and future maintainers can read a function name and understand what a copy operation actually does.

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