Re: Lots of kernels

On 5/18/26 2:35 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.
>
> Has anybody else noticed that we're getting rather a lot of
> gentoo-sources kernels in recent codebase updates?
>
> It seems we're getting around one every two days, completely unmasked.
> For example, gentoo-sources-6.18.26 was released on 2026-05-01, 6.18.32
> today, and no version in between was keyworded.  That's 7 versions in
> the space of 17 days.
>
> This doesn't particularly bother me, but I am somewhat puzzled.
> Recently there have been quite a few high ranking vulnerabilities
> discovered in Linux, and I'm wondering if all these kernels contain
> fixes for these.  But I keep a clone of the Linux "stable" sources, and
> there is no mention of these CVEs in the clone's log files.
>
> Can anybody shed any light on this?
>
> Thanks!
>
These are all apparently security fixes for bugs that were recently 
uncovered by Anthropic's AI tool.

I inquired about it in the forum about two weeks ago 
(https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=1177629), and didn't really 
learn much except "the patches are necessary". I did subscribe to the 
kernel mailing list at https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-kernel/ -- as 
you can see, the kernel team has been very busy lately. I'm not sure how 
to make sense out of all the patches ... that's probably easier to do at 
the main Linux kernel web site.

-- 
D. Bryant
Canyon Lake, Texas