January 11, 2026

Transcript

Good morning, this is Linux Kernel Daily for January 13th, 2026.

No merged pull requests today, but Linus Torvalds integrated nine maintenance commits addressing critical fixes across multiple subsystems.

The most significant updates include a RISC-V security fix that prevents branch predictor poisoning attacks by sanitizing syscall table indexing under speculation. The RISC-V merge also resolves CONFIG_RELOCATABLE boot failures and fixes a deadlock in SBI ecall tracing.

Character and miscellaneous driver fixes arrived with a much-reported rust_binder spinlock fix and new device IDs for the MEI driver. Counter driver interrupt handling also received corrections.

The IRQ subsystem saw two targeted fixes: a gic-v5 endianness bug correction and a reverted commit that was causing issues in the RISC-V IMSIC driver.

Additional fixes span multiple areas. The scheduler received a NULL pointer dereference fix in memory context handling. Performance events got a swevent hrtimer destruction regression fix. The x86 SEV subsystem disabled GCOV instrumentation for better code robustness.

Thomas Gleixner consolidated his email addresses across the entire kernel tree, switching to his kernel.org account. Rust subsystem documentation and build issues were resolved for optional CONFIG options.

Self-test improvements include a fix for tracing test stalls when buffer sizes fall below twelve kilobytes.

What's next: These RC5-level fixes suggest the 6.19 kernel release is stabilizing. Watch for final release candidate activity as critical bug reports decline.

That's your Linux Kernel Daily update. I'm your host, keeping you informed on kernel development.