Week of January 06 - January 13, 2026

Transcript

Good morning. This is your Linux Kernel Daily weekly recap for January 6th through 13th, 2026.

Zero pull requests merged, 100 additional commits this week.

With no merged pull requests, activity centered on maintenance updates and subsystem fixes through Linus's integration work.

**Driver Updates**

The char and misc driver subsystem received fixes for the widely reported rust_binder issue, removing problematic spin_lock calls in the shrink_free_page function. Counter driver fixes addressed incorrect return values in IRQ handlers, and the MEI driver added support for Nova Lake Point S devices.

**Architecture Fixes**

RISC-V saw significant security and stability improvements. Key changes include fixes for CONFIG_RELOCATABLE kernel boots, protection against branch predictor poisoning attacks through syscall table sanitization, and resolution of SBI ecall tracing deadlocks. The Zk extension bundle definition was corrected to include the missing Zknh extension.

**Core Infrastructure**

Driver core updates focused on Rust integration issues, fixing build problems when optional subsystems like PCI and auxiliary bus support are disabled. Documentation received corrections for swapped example values in sysfs SoC bus ABI documentation.

**Security and Crypto**

The crypto library gained MMU protection for AES S-box operations. IRQ chip drivers fixed an endianness bug in the gic-v5 driver and reverted problematic changes to the RISC-V IMSIC driver.

**System Components**

Thomas Gleixner consolidated email addresses across the kernel tree to kernel.org accounts. Additional fixes addressed GCOV instrumentation conflicts in x86 SEV code, scheduler crashes in memory context ID handling after execve, cgroup compiler warnings, and IOMMU build configuration issues.

Next week expect continued focus on release candidate stability as the 6.19 cycle progresses toward final release.

That's your Linux Kernel Daily weekly recap.