What's more annoying: half-baked AI slop open-source patches or April Fools' Day with programmers trying to have some fun? This year, April 1 is seeming more patches than usual.

Besides the [1]Linux patches to allow IPv6-only builds and to allow deprecating "legacy" IPv4 that does carry some elements of actual intent for better separating IPv4 and IPv6 in the kernel, there are also other April 1 patches this year on the Linux kernel mailing list.

There is a patch floated to [2]block any "emacs" binary from executing. If the filename matches "emacs", it will return a new "EMACS" error for those that aren't fans of GNU Emacs.

Meanwhile given all the ongoing concerns around US states [3]pursuing user age verification/attestation at the OS level and the impact on open-source software, veteran Linux developer Christian Brauner posted a VFS kernel patch for his take on the situation. With the patch he posted today, new files would not be created on the file-system unless there is a prctl(PR_SET_BIRTHDATE) set with the user's birth date. Without a birth date or at least not being 18 years old, the VFS layer would not allow new files to be created.

That patch is [4]here for those curious.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-IPv6-IPv4-Legacy-Knobs

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260401131226.4011156-1-mjguzik@gmail.com/T/#u

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Colorado-Maybe-Exclude-OSS

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260401135125.GK6202@frogsfrogsfrogs/T/#m1ac84ea9a1775a8718f2b513dd3ef35cda312c38