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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
317 stories archived
Linux Firmware Repository Preps For AI Coding Agents
The linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the de facto home of all the binary blobs used by the mainline Linux kernel open-source drivers has now introduced AGENTS.md documentation and other preparations for embracing AI coding agents...
AMDGPU Linux Driver Preps For HDMI 2.1 Compliance Testing
While not as exciting as features like HDMI 2.1 FRL and Display Stream Compression itself, as part of AMD's efforts to provide a fully open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for AMDGPU, new code is being prepped for their kernel driver to support the HDMI compliance testing efforts...
Linux's KVM Preps For APX Support In VMs
Among the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window are preparations for supporting Advanced Performance Extensions within KVM virtual machines...
RADV Driver Now Leveraging RDNA3+ Hardware Feature For Better Instruction Cache Prefetching
Initially introduced in RDNA3 (GFX11) GPUs is INST_PREF_SIZE to specify the number of instruction bytes to prefetch prior to a wavefront beginning execution. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now making use of this feature in RDNA3/RDNA4 GPUs for better instruction cache prefetching...
Linux Sees Patches For "Critical" Vulnerability Affecting Many Arm CPUs
Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI...
Alpine Linux 3.24 Improves Installer Experience, Adds COSMIC Desktop Option
Alpine Linux, the Linux distribution popular especially for containers / micro-services and embedded devices, is out with its newest feature release...
Firefox for Android adding Google Integrity checks
Mozilla is added support for Google’s Play Integrity API, known for blocking users of custom ROMs from accessing banking apps, to Firefox for Android. According to a resolved issue in Mozilla’s public tracker, a new lib-integrity-googleplay library has been added to Firefox’s Android codebase. It requests a Play Integrity token, which is then passed to Mozilla’s MLPA (Machine Learning Proxy) server. The token gates access to Firefox’s server-side AI tools, like Smart Window, for rate-limiting purposes. It means Mozilla can ensure that only unmodified, Play-installed copies of Firefox on Google-certified devices can use its compute resources. Per documentation, developers can: “…call the […] You're reading Firefox for Android adding Google Integrity checks , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Future of Ubuntu MATE
Thomas Ward has published an update about the future of the Ubuntu MATE project, which did not have a 26.04 release with the other Ubuntu flavors in April: There is a new team working on Ubuntu MATE who have stepped up to help take over flavor management. They haven't formally introduced themselves yet, but I can safely say that other developers HAVE stepped up for the future of the MATE flavor, despite its prior team lead having stepped down. [...] Ultimately, this means that they are working to cover the missed items and gaps, and may quite possibly have a 26.10 release in October of 2026, which I believe they most likely are targeting. This also means that bugs in the MATE environment and in packages they normally would have shipped had they have a 26.04 release are still going to get attention and fixes. So, effectively, nothing has changed. The only difference is that there was no 26.04 installer image released. For those looking to install a MATE desktop on a "clean" install of Ubuntu 26.04, Ward suggests installing Ubuntu Server and then installing the ubuntu-mate-desktop package.
[$] Eliminating long-lived credentials with trusted publishing
Trusted publishing is an authentication mechanism that relies on short-lived credentials to reduce the risk of supply-chain attacks. At the 2026 Open Source Summit North America , Mike Fiedler walked the audience through why trusted publishing exists, how it works, and made the case for its adoption. It is not a silver bullet against all attacks, but it does offer protection against theft of long-lived credentials used to publish to package registries.
ONLYOFFICE DocSpace 3.7 Lets You Generate Files Using AI
The update also adds DeepSeek, xAI, and Google AI support alongside a revamped form-filling experience.
macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation...
Asahi Linux warns users not to upgrade to macOS 27 beta
The Asahi Linux project, which brings Linux support to Apple Arm-based Macs, has warned its users not to upgrade to the macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta. Apple has changed how the boot picker and Startup Disk applications detect valid OS boot volumes. When using either from macOS 27, your Asahi partition will not be visible! We believe this to be a bug, and have filed a report (FB22994760). If you have already upgraded to the beta and noticed that your Asahi partition has disappeared, do not stress. Your Asahi partition is still there, and you have not lost any data. The Asahi Linux installer has been patched to prevent use with macOS 27 for now, but any users already bitten by the change will need to use macOS 26 to restore access to Asahi Linux.
RISC-V CPU Performance Up 8x In Five Years: SiFive HiFive Unmatched To SpacemiT K3
Recently I published some initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has come compared to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board from five years ago.
[$] BPF loop verification with scalar evolution
The BPF verifier has, in the course of wrestling with the difficult problem of statically analyzing loops, grown special support for many kinds of loops over its history, but its fundamental approach to simple for loops has not changed. When it encounters a loop, it evaluates it, iteration by iteration, until reaching an exit condition — a process that can cause the verifier to mistakenly hit the limit on the number of allowed instructions where a better implementation would not. Eduard Zingerman spoke at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about his in-progress work on improving the verifier's treatment of loops, especially nested loops.
Collabora's CODE 26.04 Release Might Be Its Biggest One Yet
The experimental online office suite gets AI tools across all three editors and a lot more in this release.
Linux App Summit 2026 (Heise)
Heise is carrying a report from the Linux App Summit , held in Berlin in May. The slightly more than a dozen talks were symbolically framed between the opening keynote by systemd creator Lennart Poettering and the closing talk by Jorge Castro, initiator of the Universal Blue project, from which the modern Linux systems Bluefin and Bazzite emerged. Both Castro and Poettering call for a fundamental rethink of how Linux operating systems are delivered but pursue different approaches.
Asterinas 0.18 Released For Rust-Written, Memory Safe Linux Alternative OS
In addition to Redox OS continuing to evolve quite nicely for that from-scratch, Rust-based open-source OS, Asterinas OS is also continuing to move forward for that Rust-based operating system striving for Linux compatibility...
LLVM/Clang Lands Initial Compiler Targeting For Hygon x86 CPUs
Following the recent Hygon C86-4G CPU support added to the GCC 17 compiler, the open-source LLVM Clang compiler has similarly seen Hygon c86-4g-m4 / c86-4g-m6 / c86-4g-m7 CPU support merged...
Three stable kernels for Tuesday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.12 , 6.18.35 , and 6.12.93 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
Linux 7.2 Preparing Intel Key Protection Technology "KPT" For Next-Gen QAT
Going back to the launch of 1st Gen Xeon Scalable processors in 2017 was Intel Key Protection Technology (KPT) promoted and there have been Key Protection Technology references in QuickAssist (QAT) documentation since 2016. Surprisingly we are only now seeing Key Protection Technology references for the upstream Linux QAT driver as Intel engineers prepare for their next-gen "Gen6" QuickAssist hardware support...
Lightweight Pragtical Code Editor Adds SDL GPU Backend
Pragtical, the lightweight open-source code editor that prides itself on using just ~50MB of RAM and ~10MB of disk space while being a full-featured code editor, is tacking on more features. Most notable with the new Pragtical release is adding an SDL-based GPU back-end for this MIT-licensed editor...
Vortex 3.0 Released As Full-Stack, Open-Source RISC-V GPU Now With 3D Pipeline
The open-source developers at Georgia Tech working on Vortex as an OpenCL-compatible RISC-V GPGPU implementation are out with their next major release for this open-source GPU design...
Ubuntu MATE Is Continuing Despite No Ubuntu MATE 26.04 Release
Back in March, Martin Wimpress stepped down as the longtime Ubuntu MATE leader and was looking for contributors to keep this Ubuntu derivative going with its GNOME2-derived desktop. That change in leadership paired with no Ubuntu MATE 26.04 release having occurred led to some concerns among users, but the plan is still for Ubuntu MATE to continue moving forward...
Fedora 44 RISC-V Images Released, Including New "Omni" Kernel For Broader RISC-V Hardware Support
Following the official Fedora 44 images released one month ago, Fedora 44 RISC-V images were published today for those wanting to run this newest Fedora Linux on RISC-V hardware...