It has been quite a long time since my last post with release news for GVfs. I haven’t had much time for upstream development recently. Furthermore, I was out for health reasons for almost the entire last year, so development has been mostly focused on bug fixes. Still, there are some changes in GVfs 1.62 and 1.60 worth mentioning.

Auto-unmount of inactive backends

The biggest addition is the auto-unmount feature ( !330 ), which fixes a very old feature request ( #31 ). This feature introduces a mechanism where certain backend can be automatically unmounted after a defined period of inactivity. This was enabled for the most of auto-mounted locations (i.e., admin , computer , http , network , recent , trash ). This solves a long-standing issue where auto-mounted locations couldn’t be easily unmounted via the file manager, causing their daemons to run until the end of the session and needlessly waste system resources.

Security fixes

The current influx of CVEs hasn’t missed GVfs. The highlight of the 1.62 release is a fix for a local privilege escalation issue ( CVE-2026-88924 ), which I describe in more detail in a separate post . Aside from that, several other lower severity CVEs were addressed ( CVE-2026-28295 , CVE-2026-28296 , CVE-2026-84267 , CVE-2026-84268 , CVE-2026-84269 , and CVE-2026-84270 ). Also other potential security vulnerabilities that didn’t receive specific CVE assignments were patched across these releases.

Deprecating backends

I am also continuing to clean up the codebase. As part of this effort, the legacy burn backend and several deprecated APIs have been completely removed. Additionally, the afp and archive backends were marked as deprecated and will be removed in future releases. The google backend has also been disabled and marked as deprecated, however, there is an ongoing effort to restore this functionality, but it did not make it into this release cycle though.

I would like to thank all the GVfs contributors who helped keep the project moving forward, especially while I was away. Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts on the recent changes!