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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
664 stories archived
Linux's Staging Area To Now Reject LLM-Generated Patches, Except For Real Security Fixes
While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes...
Wild Linker 0.10 Released With GDB Index Support, Mitigation For Btrfs Performance
Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development...
Linux 7.3 To Fix MSI Claw M-Center Keys For Ryzen Z2 Extreme Powered Handheld
For those with a MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM handheld gaming system, the model powered by the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, an important addition is coming to the Linux 7.3 kernel so that the M-Center keys will be properly supported...
FFmpeg 9.0 Released With More Vulkan Acceleration, Animated WebP & More AMD AMF
FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library...
Improved GPU Reset Recovery For AMD Kaveri, Hawaii & Other GFX7 GPUs With Linux 7.3
In addition to the AMDGPU feature pull request to DRM-Next last week that landed DRM format modifiers for old AMD GPUs and a variety of other improvements, a secondary set of AMDGPU feature work followed that last week in preparation for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...
Dropbeat is yet-another slick music controller for GNOME Shell
Dropbeat is a new riff on a old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesn’t do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use (for all the bells and whistles, try the Dynamic Music Pill extension instead). But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that when clicked “shows a cool card to control your media […] You're reading Dropbeat is yet-another slick music controller for GNOME Shell , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Ubuntu’s turning another system Deb package into a Snap
Ubuntu is transitioning another of its core system Deb packages to the sandboxed snap format, a move it says will improve security and allow for better desktop integration. The package in question is hwctrl, a small command-line tool preinstalled on Ubuntu desktop and server as part of Canonical’s rust-hwlib hardware API set. Canonical engineer Sergio Costas explained in a package change that due to “planned architecture changes for integration of hwctl with gnome-control-center and other front-ends, and for increased security, the HWCTL package will be snap-only from now onward”. If you’re on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, you will be automatically moved […] You're reading Ubuntu’s turning another system Deb package into a Snap , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Twenty years of Pandoc
John MacFarlane has published a lengthy retrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter. On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the most popular program written in Haskell ; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools like Quarto and Jupyter Notebook ; that it would be installed on millions of computers around the world. How did this happen? I want to take advantage of pandoc's birthday to tell the story of the project, as best I can remember it.
Linux 7.3 Looks Like It Will Upstream FailFS
Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS...
C-Kermit 11 released
For those of us with a long memory: John Goerzen has announced the release of C-Kermit 11, the first release of this file-transfer utility in 15 years. As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn't matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not desired now; we are used to byte-identical binary transfers, and the defaults caused confusion and even some rare instances of data corruption. So I started making a few patches last year. See the changelog for details on the work that has been done. Most of us probably haven't thought about C-Kermit in years (if ever), but there was a time when it was an essential tool for moving files between machines.
[$] Buffer sizes for FUSE io_uring
The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out of the kernel. The FUSE server can use the io_uring facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single, large buffer size that is excessive for small I/O operations. He led a discussion on that topic in the filesystem track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in Zagreb, Croatia.
SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop? (JFrog blog)
The JFrog blog examines some reported vulnerabilities in SQLite , some of which made their way into high-profile vulnerability databases, that turned out to be entirely fabricated by LLMs. These LLM slop CVEs can cause organizations to waste time investigating and patching vulnerabilities that do not actually exist, as well as polluting vulnerability databases. In environments where Critical vulnerabilities are automatically prioritized or tickets are opened based on vulnerability scores, such fabricated CVEs can turn into a real burden. In environments where AI is used to automate vulnerability triage and remediation this becomes even more concerning. An AI agent that encounters a fabricated CVE may attempt to locate the vulnerable function, generate a patch, or recommend changes based on code that does not even exist. Instead of helping security teams remediate real vulnerabilities, it can lead them down a completely wrong path, potentially introducing unnecessary changes and wasting time.
Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro
With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H.
Curl dropped from Ubuntu 26.04 minimal server images by mistake
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS’s minimal cloud images have been missing curl – accidentally, it turns out, so Canonical has put it back. Curl is a commonly-used command-line tool for fetching files from remote servers. It’s called on in countless install scripts, CI pipelines and one-liners you’ve no doubt pasted into your terminal without thinking twice about. But the package has been missing from the server-cloud-minimal images of 26.04 to date. That caught those running pared-back cloud installs unawares, breaking expected workflows, has it had been available in previous versions. The manual fix is to install curl from the repos which, in […] You're reading Curl dropped from Ubuntu 26.04 minimal server images by mistake , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Four stable kernels for Monday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.6 , 6.18.42 , 6.12.101 , and 6.6.148 stable kernels. Each contains hundreds of patches—the 7.1.6 kernel has more than 700—with fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
NetBSD 11.0 released
The release of NetBSD 11.0, the 19th major version of the operating system, has been announced . There are many changes and enhancements since the 10.1 release, including a new port to RISC-V, better support for Linux system calls in compat_linux() , as well as improvements to the NPF firewall. As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this. See the full release notes for links to the binary distributions and links to the full change logs.
zlib-rs 0.6.7 Released With LoongArch LSX Optimizations, Use-After-Free Fix
zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng...
AI Slop Keeps Flooding GNOME Extensions, So They Wrote a Manual for Bots Instead
The same low-quality AI patterns kept showing up in submissions even after GNOME updated its review guidelines in December.
GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience
GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop...
NVIDIA 610.57.04 Linux Driver Delivers Many Fixes
NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes...
Linux 7.3 Expected To Drop The FreeVxFS File-System Driver
It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-ssytem used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare...
KGamma2 Makes For Easy Gamma Adjustments On KDE Plasma With Wayland
KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland...
GNOME Mutter 51 Beta Released With Wayland Background Blur, Improved Frame Scheduling
Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier...
KDE Linux Making For Easier First-Run Experience Of Java & DOS Apps
With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations...