Linux Kernel Daily: Release Candidate Three Locks Down Security Fixes
The 7.2-rc3 merge window brought in a wave of out-of-bounds and use-after-free fixes across staging, USB, tracing, and TPM subsystems, plus a standalone fix closing an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in TPM character devices.
Duration: PT2M32S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-07-13T06:00:37Z
- Audio duration: PT2M32S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good day. This is Linux Kernel Daily for July 13th, 2026.
Today's activity is dominated by one theme: release candidate three is a hardening pass. Across nearly every pulled subsystem, the common thread is memory safety fixes catching out-of-bounds reads, writes, and use-after-free bugs before they ship in a stable kernel.
Start with staging. Greg KH's pull in commit 940d91c bundles a long string of rtl8723bs wifi driver fixes, out-of-bounds reads and writes when parsing information elements from untrusted access points. That's a real-world attack surface: a malicious wifi hotspot could previously trigger heap corruption just by…
The char-misc pull, commit bffa972, tells the same story in the binder driver. Two separate use-after-free fixes landed, one in binder_free_transaction and one in binder_thread_release, alongside rust binder cleanups for the same class of lifecycle bugs. USB followed suit in commit 534f8f0, with a slab…
Tracing wasn't spared either. The trace pull, commit 6205562, fixes a use-after-free in user_event_mm_dup and adds out-of-bounds protection to event filter glob matching, plus a fix so ring buffer reads don't silently drop events.
Standing alone, but fitting…