Phoronix

Since the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public in August there were kernel patches merged that day and since then there's been a few rounds of clean-ups and fixes for this mitigation code formally known as the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). With Linux 6.7, more SRSO mitigation clean-ups have been merged...

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is an open-source independently-developed project that implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface so that software like Mozilla Firefox can enjoy video hardware acceleration on Linux using NVIDIA's proprietary driver...

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software...

LXQt 1.4 debuted today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Qt desktop environment that was formed years ago as the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects...

The first week of the Linux 6.7 merge window began with the surprise of the Bcachefs file-system being merged and now capping off the first week is another surprise... Nouveau GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware integration that allows making use of NVIDIA's binary GSP firmware on RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs for having improved support. In turn this GSP route also provides initial support for GeForce RTX 40 series support...

The hardening updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel bring a new hardening configuration profile to help in building a security hardened kernel with some sane defaults...

The Linux kernel's subsystem for Compute Express Link that is playing a vital role in servers moving forward continues picking up new features and evolving the code-base as more CXL hardware enters the world...

As part of the effort to make GNOME Terminal and the VTE terminal emulator library render faster, the GNOME Terminal has been seeing more work lately in being ported over to using the GTK 4 toolkit. Additionally, the VTE terminal library has been working to overcome its long-standing 40 FPS rendering cap...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues to be improved upon in the mainline Linux kernel and with the ongoing v6.7 merge window has received some additional enhancements...

Blosc (c-blosc2) is a high performance compressor focused on binary data for efficient storage of large binary data-sets in-memory or on-disk and helping to speed-up memory-bound computations...

Linux 6.6 saw EEVDF merged and Intel hybrid cluster scheduling re-introduced. The core scheduler improvements merged this past week for the in-development Linux 6.7 isn't quite as exciting but still there are some healthy scheduler improvements this round...

Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL implementation "Rusticl" has added initial support for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for working on OpenGL and OpenCL interoperability...

The Linux 6.7 sound subsystem changes submitted this week by maintainer Takashi Iwai include support for a number of new audio devices/platforms...

Recently there was some tuning in Mesa Git for helping with higher quality Radeon video encoding on Linux for GPUs using Video Core Next (VCN). Similar tuning has now been back-ported for older Radeon GPUs using the VCE encode engine and UVD video decoding...

The crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel includes the usual churn like various crypto acceleration updates for different SoCs and other routine changes plus is also limiting the role of some insecure and/or obsolete crypto hashing algorithms...

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time...

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15...

Last year Intel made available a packaged "Arc Graphics Driver" for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later Ubuntu 23.04 to provide a DKMS-backported kernel driver and packaged Mesa driver to make it easier to use Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) during the phase when the upstream kernel support was still stabilizing and not yet found out-of-the-box on Linux distributions at the time. This week marked another rare update for this packaged driver...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Thursday for the Linux 6.7 merge window...

The biggest surprise this week so far with the Linux 6.7 merge window has been the landing of the Bcachefs file-system. Here is an early look at Bcachefs with Linux 6.7 and some preliminary benchmarks.