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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
497 stories archived
openEuler is Revamping the Development Experience of the Open Source Community With an AI Toolchain
AI now reviews code and fixes CVEs in the community's pipelines, DevStation moves to a 2-week update cycle, and openEuler is layering an agent-native OS on top.
LineageOS 24 released
The LineageOS project, which produces an Android-based distribution for mobile devices, has announced the release of LineageOS 24.0. We're a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone. On December 24, 2026, LineageOS will celebrate 10 years. It's a remarkable milestone for a project built by a passionate community of developers, maintainers, contributors, and users who have kept so many devices alive along the way. [...] We've been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17's release in June. Android 17's first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17's code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We're early this year!
Linux May Get a New Home for AI Agent Skills
A proposed agents directory would hold skills and other resources for coding assistants, starting with one that finds the commit behind a bug.
Firefox 158 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support By Default
With Mozilla's bi-weekly release cycle for Firefox, the Firefox 158 release binaries are now available. Making Firefox 158 particularly notable is finally having JPEG-XL support enabled by default...
Linux 7.4 To Upstream Support For Three Snapdragon X2 Elite Laptops
For those looking to run Linux on new Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 hardware, there are laptops from ASUS, HP, and Lenovo that are powered by the X2 Elite and will be supported with the mainline Linux 7.4 kernel...
Linus Torvalds "Did What I Preach", Used AI To Make Code Decipherable & Uncovered More Bugs
After using Claude Code to draft code to help make a fundamental improvement to the Linux kernel, Linux creator Linus Torvalds continued using AI this weekend and talking up its benefits. Beyond generating initial patches and a test program for that noted I/O enhancement, he separately talked up using AI/LLMs for making patches more decipherable to understand in the process the AI noted more long-standing bugs within the Linux kernel...
Intel Posts Updated Linux Driver Code For HDMI 2.1 FRL On Meteor Lake & Newer
Following AMD completing their HDMI 2.1 implementation for the open-source AMDGPU Linux driver after beginning with HDMI FRL patches earlier in the year, Intel's open-source driver developers are following in their footsteps...
EXT4 Introducing IOmap Buffered I/O Path With Some Performance Gains
EXT4 with the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel looks like it will introduce opt-in support for IOmap buffered I/O in replacing the file-system's buffer_head usage with IOmap...
Linux 7.3-rc7 Released With Linux 7.3 Hopefully Out Next Weekend
Linus Torvalds has made available what is hopefully the final release candidate before Linux 7.3 is ideally minted next Sunday...
Kernel prepatch 7.3-rc7
The 7.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus: " As always, I would have preferred to see a smaller rc, but it's not like anything in here looks like a reason to delay the final release. So that's still set for next weekend unless something new comes up. " One notable change that slipped into the mainline this week is the deprecation of the ext4 data=journal mode; it will be removed entirely at the beginning of 2028.
Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been known to use AI to help with kernel debugging and outside of the kernel tree has also done some vibe coding with Google's Antigravity. He has previously said he views AI as a useful tool. It turns out he's even now using Claude Code for working on new Linux kernel features...
Ubuntu’s App Center now supports installing media codecs
Ubuntu 26.10’s new Add-ons page in App Center can now install restricted media codecs as well as hardware drivers. The new flow should make things simpler for those who don’t select the opt-in to “install restricted codecs” in the Ubuntu OS installer (not everyone thinks they need it) and for those who install without an active internet connection, as that box is greyed out. While apt makes it easy to get the relevant codecs if you know the right gstreamer-* , App Center doesn’t show system or library packages in search results (and “media codecs” is a bit of a […] You're reading Ubuntu’s App Center now supports installing media codecs , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Stable kernels 7.2.10 and 6.18.56
The 7.2.10 and 6.18.56 stable kernels have been released. Each contains another several hundred important fixes.
Linux Landing Kernel Workaround For AMD TLBI Erratum #1718
AMD TLBI Erratum #1718 was worked around in CPU microcode for addressing a defect in certain Zen CPUs where the Translation Lookaside Buffer Invalidate Instruction use could lead to to stale translation entries. But for those on affected AMD CPUs and not running the updated microcode, a kernel workaround is being introduced with today's Linux 7.3-rc7 kernel and to be back-ported to prior kernel versions...
Microsoft Contributes Para-Virtualized IOMMU Hyper-V Driver For Linux
Microsoft is contributing a new kernel driver for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. Queued up into the IOMMU subsystem's "-next" branch is a new para-virtualized IOMMU driver for benefiting Linux guest VMs running on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform...
Auto Vectorizing The RISC-V Linux Kernel Shows Promising Results
The Linux kernel build for RISC-V doesn't currently make use of the CPU ISA's Vector extension. but leveraging it with compiler auto vectorization is showing the ability to provide nice performance results for enhancing RISC-V Linux performance...
Drgn 0.3 Released For This "Natural" Programmable Debugger From Meta
Drgn is the open-source project out of Meta developing a very versatile debugger with the intent being a debugger focused on programmability with it striving to "make scripting as natural as possible so that debugging feels like coding." Drgn 0.3 released this weekend with the latest round of improvements...
Corsair Novablade Pro & 8BitDo Pro 2 Controllers To Be Supported With Linux 7.3-rc7
Sent out today as part of this week's input subsystem fixes are device ID additions to the XPad driver for enabling two more gaming controllers to work nicely under Linux...
Rolling Release Distros Superior To LTS Distros In The Patch-Heavy GenAI Era?
As some interesting food for thought and weekend forum discussions, this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, Qualcomm engineer Khem Raj questioned the relevance of Linux Long Term Support (LTS) distributions in the era of generative AI with the constantly heavy patch flow and bug reports. Khem Raj argued the benefits of rolling release distributions in the GenAI era and the benefits it provides staying up-to-date with mainline...
Many Laptop & Gaming Handheld Support Improvements Coming For Linux 7.4
Many x86 platform driver improvements have been queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window to offer a variety of laptop and gaming handheld device improvements with this next kernel version...
KNOD Progressing For Linux In-Kernel GPU Offloading For Network Packet Processing
A while back we covered KNOD as an experimental solution for in-kernel network offloading to AMD GPUs. The open-source KNOD project allows leveraging GPUs to handle packet processing in a very performant and energy efficient manner without needing any specialized hardware. KNOD has continued and a development update was shared this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague...
Linux Networking Diverts 50+ Fixes To Next Kernel, Still Bombarded With AI Fueled Churn
Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc7 kernel due for release on Sunday, this week's batch of networking fixes were submitted and merged. The vast networking subsystem of wired and wireless drivers plus the various other networking features continues to see a lot of activity due to AI-driven bug reports and patches...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Ready For Release Next Week, Sees Last Minute NVIDIA Fix
KDE Plasma 6.8 is gearing up for its official debut next week in coinciding with the 30th anniversary since the KDE project began...
SQLite 3.54 Released With Faster Performance, Drops Windows XP Support
SQLite 3.54 released today for this wildly popular embedded SQL database engine used by countless applications and other software. With SQLite 3.54, support for Microsoft Windows XP and older is finally removed...