Open-source News

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork...

NVIDIA Engineer Posts New NOVA Driver Patches - Still Far From Doing Anything Useful  Phoronix

Linux Kernel 6.13 Reaches End of Life, It’s Time to Upgrade to Linux Kernel 6.14  9to5Linux

Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library...

The FreeType library for rendering text onto bitmaps that is widely used by a variety of applications has landed a set of three patches today providing an important performance improvement to address a significant inefficiency within the existing FreeType codebase...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a few new Linux kernel stable point releases today for Easter and also capping off the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle in the process...

The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel...

OpenVPN DCO Driver Queued In Net-Next Ahead Of Linux 6.16  Phoronix

Just a few days ago there was talk of potentially removing the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the Linux kernel considering they had been orphaned for a decade and beginning to cause a maintenance burden. After briefly being marked for deprecation, it now looks like the drivers may be maintained with new maintainers alleging to step-up to the role...

Parallels Desktop 20.3 Brings Linux VM Fixes to Mac Users  OMG! Ubuntu

Why I Dual-Boot But Choose Linux Over Windows Almost Every Time  How-To Geek

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH" allows for offloading sensor polling and other tasks to a low-power co-processor to help reduce overall system power consumption for extending battery life with tablets, embedded devices, and 2-in1 laptops...

Intel Simplifies Its Firmware License For The Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH"  Phoronix

While the FFmpeg multimedia library merged Vulkan Video encode support last year, it was initially limited to H.264 and H.265 formats. With a new patch posted for review this week, AV1 encode support using the Vulkan Video API is now underway...

Rogue npm Packages Mimic Telegram Bot API to Plant SSH Backdoors on Linux Systems  The Hacker News

Nitrux, a Debian-Based Linux Distro With Modern Apps  The New Stack

Android 16 lets the Linux Terminal use your phone's entire storage  Android Authority

GNU/Hurd has long struggled with hardware support and is still working on its x86_64 support while having a host of various hardware limitations but it also appears they are eager to explore Hurd on RISC-V platforms...

Engineers from Google are proposing that distributed ThinLTO build support be introduced for LLVM/Clang when compiling the Linux kernel. The distributed ThinLTO mode for link-time optimizations can lead to quicker build times than the current in-process ThinLTO mode while also being more convenient and work with kernel live-patching solutions...

KDE developers continue to be very busy working toward the Plasma 6.4 desktop release and making other enhancements throughout this open-source desktop...