Linux Kernel Daily: The Rc5 Cleanup Wave
This cycle's networking pull brought over two hundred fixes into the tree, with a clear cluster around memory safety in older subsystems: drop monitor, mptcp, and the ovpn driver all got patched for use-after-free, refcount, and info-leak bugs. Separately, the SMB client and a new Broadcom RDMA driver each picked up targeted bounds and sizing fixes.
Duration: PT2M26S
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: 2026-07-24T06:01:13Z
- Audio duration: PT2M26S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning. It's July 24th, 2026, and this is Linux Kernel Daily.
The signal today isn't any single fix — it's how many of them are memory safety bugs surfacing in code that's been stable for years. Jakub Kicinski's networking pull, commit d326f83, folded in fixes touching Bluetooth, WiFi, and a long tail of protocol handlers, and three separate subsystems show the same pattern:…
Start with drop monitor. Eric Dumazet landed two fixes — commit 7089f7a and fd098a2 — for thirty-two bit architectures, where packet trace attributes were under-sized and stats updates were happening after interrupts were re-enabled, risking corrupted counters. Right alongside that, Yehyeong Lee's commit 5e9c8ba…
Then there's mptcp and ovpn, both showing refcounting fragility. The mptcp misc-fixes series, merged in 1d4da82, includes a use-after-free in the userspace path manager and a stale socket reference on subflow close. The ovpn pull, d73a2e8, lists five separate reference and use-after-free fixes in one merge,…
Two more worth flagging. The SMB client pull, 48a5a7a, fixed a file handle leak and a bounds check in directory listing — good hygiene work from Steve French's tree. And Vikas Gupta's commit…
Wh…
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