Open-source News

Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Lands Improvements For ReBAR  Phoronix

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...

Sway 1.9 Elevates Linux Desktop Experience with Major Wayland Compositor Update  BNN Breaking

GPU‐punishing FurMark 2 released with cross-platform support for Windows, Linux - macOS and Raspberry Pi support ...  Tom's Hardware

Samba Network Shares for RHEL-Based Linux Distributions  The New Stack

Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

Linux 6.8 x86/urgent Update Beefs Up Protection Against Side Channel CPU Bugs  Phoronix

Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9...

Microsoft's in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution has routinely seen weekly-ish updates to this open-source code used within Azure, WSL, and other areas of the Redmond company. But it's been one month since the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 release... That changed Saturday night with a shiny new release...

What Is X86-64-v3?  Hackaday

GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input...

Kubuntu Focus M2: Linux laptop appears in new version with greater performance capabilties, also with GeForce RTX ...  Notebookcheck.net

CachyOS 240224 was released today for this Arch Linux derived desktop distribution that focuses on being a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" with a variety of desktop options, employing LTO and other optimizations for packages, optional x86-64-v3 binaries, and other tuning to make for a speedy out-of-the-box Linux experience...

CachyOS Moves To Glibc 2.39 & Other Package Upgrades For February  Phoronix

Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system...

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling...

Proton 9.0 now in Beta with improved game compatibility for Steam Deck / Linux  GamingOnLinux

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened...

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1...