Phoronix

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.

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported...

The AppArmor Linux security system has picked up a few improvements and new features with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel...

One of the great open-source achievements for 2023 was DreamWorks Animation open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer as the OpenMoonRay project. Since then DreamWorks along with other open-source stakeholders have continued advancing this open-source renderer and today marks the release of OpenMoonRay 1.4...

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support...

While confidential computing is a hot area right now, there's been a limited amount of cross-vendor cooperation with AMD having their own route with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel designing the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) that is still available in limited form. As one improvement coming with Linux 6.7, "configfs-tsm" has been submitted for pulling as a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports...