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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
Linux 7.3 Improving RAID 5/6 Benchmark-Based Algorithm Selection
Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection...
Ubuntu Phone engineers reunited by a decade-old bug closure
A decades-old bug on Ubuntu’s Launchpad marked as invalid at the weekend led to an impromptu reunion for many of Canonical’s former engineers. Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who’d spent £700 on Ubuntu phone and tablet hardware but, on visiting the official website, found no documentation to tell him how to use them. Canonical axed the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving this bug unresolved. Until now. Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, on the Ubuntu bug triage team, marked the bug invalid this weekend, closing it with a comment to explain (nearly a decade late) that phone “efforts […] You're reading Ubuntu Phone engineers reunited by a decade-old bug closure , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Linux 7.3 Better Protects Against Buggy EFI Firmware Taking Down The Rest Of User-Space
The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely...
Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default...
Sunday's stable kernel set
The 7.1.10 , 6.18.46 , 6.12.105 , 6.6.153 , 6.1.184 , 5.15.217 , and 5.10.266 stable kernels have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.
Mourning Steve French
From Jeremy Allison we have the sad news of the passing of Steve French. He was the maintainer of the kernel's SMB filesystem code for many years, having only dropped that role due to health issues in the last week. " I've known Steve for over 20 years. He was a legend in the community, and a really good friend. He will be greatly missed. Farewell Steve. " He will indeed be missed.
ReactOS Merges Support For Job Objects As Step To Running Modern Windows Apps
Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility...
Linux 7.3 Makes Preparations Toward Upstreaming FAMFS File-System
The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system...
GCC Patch Adjusting AMD Zen 5 Misprediction Cost Nets 12% Win In Benchmark
An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4...
Linux 7.3 Introduces New AES Encryption APIs - Will Open Up More Performance
Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements...
Linux 7.3 Input Subsystem Updates Merged With Security Fixes, Other Improvements
The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries...
eCryptfs Sees Fixes For Potential Malicious Intent, Some Dating Back To Its 2006 Debut
The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS...
Redox OS Switches To EEVDF-Based Scheduler For 2.6x Throughput
The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness...
Apple HFS / HFS+ File-System Support Continues Seeing Fixes With Linux 7.3
In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel...
Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer Steps Down
There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons...
Specially Crafted NTFS File-System Image Allows Root Access On Linux With NTFS3 Driver
A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system...
AMD RDNA 4m Firmware Published For Linux Ahead Of Launch
In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics...
NVK Vulkan Video Merged For Mesa 26.3
The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!..
Sched_ext's Sub-Scheduler Support Now "Feature Complete" With Linux 7.3
The extensible scheduler framework "sched_ext" that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete...
Red Hat's Tuned 2.28 To Improve Out-Of-The-Box WiFi Power Savings On Fedora
Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat's tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems...
Open-Source Etnaviv Driver Now Able To Run YOLOX
The open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver stack that began for providing accelerated graphics support on Vivante GPU IP and since expanded to handle Vivante NPUs as well is now able to handle YOLOX object detection...
Linux 7.3 x86/mm Lands Patches To Greatly Improve Latency-Sensitive Workloads
The highlight of this week's x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that "it's certainly something to keep an eye on" in looking out for any regressions...
Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Just Used AI to Fix a Kernel Bug
The creator of Linux needed 18 boots to find a one-line fix. The AI helped him get there.
Proton Mail Wants to Organize Your Emails Automatically
The feature sorts mail into six categories using metadata alone, and full-content search is coming to mobile next.