Linux Kernel: VFS Fixes and Performance Tool Updates

Transcript

Good morning. This is your Linux Kernel briefing for May 19th, 2026.

Linus Torvalds merged a substantial VFS fixes pull request from Christian Brauner, addressing multiple filesystem issues across 31 commits. The fixes target critical bugs in the netfs library, including write skipping problems, folio handling issues, and potential use-after-free conditions. The update also resolves an out-of-bounds write in ID mapping operations and fixes return value problems in JFS and OrangeFS mkdir functions.

A second merge brings performance tooling updates from the perf-tools tree. This routine synchronization updates header files used by the perf trace syscall beautifier, adds new beautifier scripts for clone and fsmount flags, and introduces a new make check-headers target for build validation.

Nathan Chancellor contributed a targeted fix for HID core format specifiers, resolving compiler warnings on 32-bit platforms where size_t format strings were incorrectly specified. The fix changes format specifiers from %ld to %zu for proper size_t handling.

David Howells addressed undefined variables in the CIFS filesystem code, fixing issues introduced by a previous patch that addressed tearing in remote file size and zero point handling. These variables were caught by clang but missed by GCC's standard warnings.

A minor media subsystem fix corrected inverted error logic in the ttusbir driver.

What's next: Watch for additional VFS stability updates as the AI-assisted review process continues to surface edge cases. Performance tooling synchronization will likely continue with regular header updates.

That's your kernel update for today. I'm your host, and we'll be back tomorrow with more development news.