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wire 2026-05-21
stories 8
RSS Archive Reviews

© 2026 RepoJournal Home Showcase How it works Privacy

$ the-wire · showcase

EROFS CRASHES AND RCU REGRESSIONS HIT KERNEL RC

By RepoJournal · Filed · About Linux · Composed from the cited sources · methodology

The kernel RC cycle just hit two critical bugs: erofs is leaking memory and crashing on unaligned extents, while RCU's SRCU implementation is queuing work on CPUs that may never wake up.

The erofs filesystem is bleeding resources in two separate ways [1]. A metabuf reference leak in inode xattr initialization leaves folios pinned in memory on error paths [3], and a race condition in the managed cache can cause crashes when handling unaligned compressed extents [4]. Both fixes are already merged. Separately, RCU's SRCU implementation introduced a regression that queues work callbacks on CPUs marked as possible but never actually brought online [2]. As these callbacks accumulate without execution, workqueue lockups fire. The fix targets the bug introduced in commit 61bbcfb50514 and is headed to mainline.

Action items

References

  1. [1] Merge tag 'erofs-for-7.1-rc5-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xiang/erofs torvalds/linux ↗
  2. [2] Merge tag 'rcu-fixes.v7.1-20260519a' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rcu/linux torvalds/linux ↗
  3. [3] erofs: fix metabuf leak in inode xattr initialization torvalds/linux ↗
  4. [4] erofs: fix managed cache race for unaligned extents torvalds/linux ↗

$ ls linux/reviews/ # the step-back reads

the week in review Omarchy polkit PAM stack skipped system-auth the month in review Linux 7.3 rc cycle fixes cgroup kill, SMB corruption
Full archive → Weekly reviews →

Quick answers

What shipped in Linux on May 21, 2026?
The kernel RC cycle just hit two critical bugs: erofs is leaking memory and crashing on unaligned extents, while RCU's SRCU implementation is queuing work on CPUs that may never wake up. In total, 6 commits and 2 pull requests landed.
What were the notable Linux updates?
Merge tag 'erofs-for-7.1-rc5-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xiang/erofs, Merge tag 'rcu-fixes.v7.1-20260519a' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rcu/linux, and erofs: fix metabuf leak in inode xattr initialization.
♥

$ log Linux --recent

drm-fixes backs out dma-buf debug, vfs closes pathwalk use-after-frees 29 shipped Netlink stops hashing the net pointer, stmmac clears a stuck RGMII interrupt 27 shipped Poly1305 carry fix lands, Omarchy locks down N1x laptops and idle fingerprint readers 23 shipped Omarchy copies agent logins over SSH, kernel queues 7.4 merges 106 shipped

$ log --all # elsewhere on the wire

Alignment & Post-training verl rejects conflicting vLLM engine_kwargs, open-instruct adds MILES OPD behind a Megatron learner Interpretability nnsight 0.8.0 cuts import time from 7.6s to 1.6s

$ ls showcases/

Safety Evals AI Red Teaming Agent Security Interpretability Alignment & Post-training

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