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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
435 stories archived
Qualcomm Snapdragon C Announced For $300+ Laptops
For competing with the Apple MacBook Neo, Google Chromebooks, and other entry-level laptops, Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon C series SoCs...
Intel Arc G-Series Processors Announced For Handheld Gaming Devices
Ahead of Computex, Intel today announced the introduction of the Arc G-Series. While taking on the "Arc" branding, this isn't a new graphics card from Intel but rather their new processors with integrated graphics for handheld gaming devices...
[$] Separating memory descriptors from struct page
The kernel's memory-management subsystem is currently partway through a multi-year project to replace the page structure (which represents a page of physical memory) with memory descriptors . At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit , Vishal Moola ran a fast-paced session in the memory-management track to describe the current state of that work and what is likely to happen next.
KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta 2 Released With More Bug Fixes
Building off the KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta release earlier in May, a second beta was declared today in preparing for the Plasma 6.7 stable debut in mid-June...
24 Years After The ATI R300 Launched, Open-Source R300 Driver Continues With Big Rework
While there has been talk of potentially branching off the older Mesa graphics drivers, the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver just won't die yet. The R300 Gallium3D driver for supporting ATI R300 through R500 graphics cards saw a big rework merged today in restructuring the driver's intemediate representation (IR) handling...
KRAID Being Developed As New Compiler For Modern Arm Mali Graphics
KRAID is a new Rust-written shader compiler currently being developed for the Panfrost/PanVK open-source Arm Mali driver code. KRAID is designed for Mali's Valhall graphics processors and new as a modern, clean sheet design...
O3DE 26.05 Released With New Open Particle System, Other Engine Improvements
It's been nearly five years already since the start of O3DE as the Open 3D Engine that began as Amazon's Lumberyard project spun into an open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Out this week is O3DE 26.05 for shipping the latest improvements to this cross platform game engine...
GTK Introduces Snapping Feature For Better Fractional Scaling Experience
The upcoming GTK 4.23.1 development release is introducing a new feature called Snapping, which should enhance the experience when dealing with fractional scaling on today's high resolution displays...
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 28, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : Dirk and Linus talk; BPF and GCC; private memory modes; BPF page-cache policies; major page faults; LLM kernel review; tiered-memory support; transparent huge pages; page mappings; Model Openness Tool. Briefs : Stenberg security stress; GTK PDF problems; Morton 2004 keynote; OpenBSD 7.9; Bambu's AGPLv3 violations; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Mesa 26.0.8 Released To End Out The Series
Eric Engestrom announced the release of Mesa 26.0.8 today as the latest stable point release of that Q1'2026 driver series and the last planned update for that stable series...
NVIDIA CUDA 13.3 Rolls Out CUDA Python 1.0, CUDA Tile For C++
NVIDIA on Tuesday released CUDA 13.3 as another significant advancement for their unified GPU programming stack for NVIDIA hardware...
Interview session with Jonathan Corbet
The Linux Foundation will be hosting a live interview with LWN co-founder Jonathan Corbet. The event will take place on Tuesday, June 2 at 8:00AM Pacific daylight time (UTC-7). Registration is open for those who would like to attend.
Don't Expect a Raspberry Pi 6 Until At Least 2028
Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton confirmed that in a Reddit AMA recently.
Ubuntu 26.10 Planning To Ship With The Linux 7.2 Kernel
Canonical's kernel team confirmed today their intention of shipping the Ubuntu 26.10 release with what will be the Linux 7.2 kernel...
VKD3D-Proton Merges Vulkan Descriptor Heap Support
Valve's VKD3D-Proton component to Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API has landed its descriptor heap (VK_EXT_descriptor_heap) support as a big step forward...
[$] MOT: a tool to fight openwashing in AI
Many large language models (LLMs) are described as open source, but if one looks a bit deeper it turns out that is not actually so; the model may be free to download, it may be " open weight ", but it does not fit the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Open Source Definition (OSD). Assessing the actual openness of models is not easy, as Arnaud Le Hors explained in his talk about the Model Openness Tool (MOT) at Open Source Summit North America 2026. The tool is designed to help users of LLMs understand to what degree a model is (or is not) open, and to combat the openwashing that is prevalent with LLMs.
Andrew Morton's 2004 OLS keynote
I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit ; it included a suggestion that reading (or re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive. This talk, given immediately after the Kernel Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel's development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where it is today. The text of that speech was hosted on Groklaw, and has since been replaced by crypto spam, which is rather less useful. In the hopes of preserving this seminal moment, the transcript has been rescued from the Wayback Machine and is presented here.
Canonical’s Workshop: sandboxed, reproducible dev environments
Canonical has released Workshop, a new open-source tool to create reproducible development environments from a single YAML configuration file. The same setup can be reproduced across different hardware and devices, it reduces dependency issues and configuration drift within teams. Environments in Workshop are built from SDKs (packages that install languages, frameworks and tools). Most of these come from the SDK Store, which supports versioned channels similar to the Snap Store so that projects can define specific SDK versions to use. Canonical offers SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but users can create and define project-specific […] You're reading Canonical’s Workshop: sandboxed, reproducible dev environments , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Cache Aware Scheduling Shows Nice Wins For AMD Zen 5 On PostgreSQL, Valkey, Network Performance
The long-in-development work on Cache Aware Scheduling looks like it will come to a head soon with it looking like Cache Aware Scheduling will land for Linux 7.2. Ahead of the upcoming merge window I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at different areas where this feature is shining.
[$] Further progress toward removing the page map count
The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings (page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it. This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to bring up this topic.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, buildah, compat-libtiff3, compat-openssl11, containernetworking-plugins, crun, delve, dnsmasq, dovecot, edk2, firefox, freeipmi, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, git-lfs, glib2, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, iputils, jq, kernel, krb5, libcap, LibRaw, libsndfile, libsoup, libsoup3, libssh, libtiff, libvirt, linux-sgx, luksmeta, mingw-glib2, NetworkManager, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, openexr, openssh, openssl, opentelemetry-collector, p11-kit, PackageKit, podman, python-jwcrypto, python-markdown, python-tornado, python3.11, python3.12, python3.14, python3.9, qemu-kvm, rsync, skopeo, sudo, systemd, thunderbird, tomcat, unbound, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (imagemagick, kdenlive, memcached, node-shell-quote, and samba), Fedora (chromium, curl, editorconfig, haproxy, perl-Crypt-DSA, perl-HTTP-Tiny, poppler, rust-afterburn, rust-coreos-installer, rust-eif_build, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-chameleon-gnupg, rust-sequoia-git, rust-sequoia-keystore-server, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-openpgp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-sqv, and uriparser), Oracle (compat-libtiff3, dnsmasq, firefox, freeipmi, kernel, and uek-kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (assimp, firefox, glibc, gnutls, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, kernel, kubevirt, leancrypto, libarchive, libsndfile, mcphost, nginx, openssh, podman, python-GitPython, rsync, and samba), and Ubuntu (ayttm, dnsmasq, libssh2, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.17, linux-iot, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, ngtcp2, onnx, opencc, protobuf, python-git, samba, xdg-dbus-proxy, and xmlrpc-c).
Linux Developers Looking At Retiring The x32 ABI
The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn't enjoy much adoption over the years and is now looking at possible removal from the Linux kernel...
Linux Driver To Expose Voltage Inputs For Raspberry Pi SBCs
The Raspberry Pi hardware monitoring driver "RASPBERRYPI-HWMON" is being extended to allow exposing voltage measurements on these ARM single board computers...
Intel TDX Runtime Updates Looks Like It Will Land For Linux 7.2
A feature that has been worked on for a while now by Intel Linux engineers is for allowing run-time updates of the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) module without having to reboot the running server. For Linux 7.2 it looks like that feature will be all-set for allowing the easier roll-out of security updates and the like for this confidential computing capability on modern Intel Xeon servers...