section
FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
319 stories archived
Not Kidding! Microsoft Just Brought Linux Commands to Windows Officially
The company that once called Linux a "cancer" is now the one shipping its core tools to Windows users.
[$] Open-source security is not a solo activity
Over time, many open-source maintainers face the same problem: they lack the time to do all of the work that their project needs, and no one else is stepping up to provide adequate help. Maintainers, though, are often reluctant to throw in the towel. The result is suboptimal all around; the maintainer is stressed out, project quality suffers, and users face security risks that they may not be fully aware of. At the 2026 Open Source Summit North America , Robin Bender Ginn spoke about this problem, when it might be time for maintainers to pass the torch, and the responsibilities of users.
Ubuntu plans to add AI voice input to all text fields
Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical VP of Engineer Jon Seager, speaking at the Ubuntu Summit in May, said the distro aims to let you “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in […] by default on every Ubuntu machine”. Speech to text will be powered by a small language parsing model like Whisper, turning any text entry point on the desktop to offer optional speech input. This means you could bark “Firefox” in the GNOME Shell overview rather […] You're reading Ubuntu plans to add AI voice input to all text fields , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Vim Classic is a Vim Fork for People Who Want Their Editor AI-Free
Drew DeVault of SourceHut fame has shipped the first release of his Vim 8.2-based fork.
Intel Preps GCC Function Multi-Versioning To Support APX & AVX10.2
Along with some GCC compiler tuning for Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids to deal with some new APX capabilities not proving beneficial for performance, new patch activity today is preparing GCC for function multi-versioning (FMV) for the AVX10.2 and APX instruction set extensions...
[$] BPF in the agentic era
Alexei Starovoitov gave " less of a presentation, more of a scream of realization " at the BPF track of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit . He shared a set of ideas for how BPF could change to avoid being swept away by the sea-change in programming represented by modern large language models (LLMs) and the coding agents based on them. In a follow-up session, the discussion covered more problems with how coding agents use tools like bpftrace, and the current deluge of patches in need of review in the BPF subsystem.
Tridgell: rsync and outrage
Andrew Tridgell has written a blog post responding to complaints that he has begun using LLM tools in his work maintaining rsync : Like many developers of open source packages I've been hit by a flood of security reports lately in my role as the rsync maintainer. Many of those reports are AI generated (not all though, there are some notable ones with very careful and high quality manual analysis). As this flood started to get more intense I realised I needed to raise the defences on rsync a lot — we needed much more thorough test suites, code coverage analysis, CI testing on a lot more platforms, deliberate and thorough scanning for possible security issues (so I find at least some of them before other people!) and the addition of a whole lot of defence-in-depth hardening techniques. [...] Now to the future, because we're not done yet by a long shot. The security reports keep rolling in. I'm working on a bunch of CVEs right now. Luckily I've been joined by some other very good developers with great systems development skills and security knowledge. Some of these people came to my attention partly because of all the rage happening at the moment, so I get some rage storm clouds have silver linings. Watch out for some credits for some great new rsync developers in the next release.
Ubuntu To Ship Newer AMD ROCm Updates Via SRUs
As noted back in April, with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS it's now possible to simply "apt install rocm" on Ubuntu Linux for installing AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. But as prominently noted there, what's shipped right now in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is already months out of date compared to upstream ROCm. Fortunately, Canonical shared today that moving forward they plan to ship newer ROCm versions as stable release updates (SRUs)...
NVIDIA Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support Moves Closer For Open-Source Nova Driver
While the upstream, open-source Nouveau driver already supports NVIDIA's Hopper and Blackwell graphics processors with the GPU System Processor (GSP) code path, the bring-up of the Rust-written Nova driver remains ongoing. Out this week is the 12th iteration of the Hopper and Blackwell enablement for this future open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...
Intel XPU Manager Adds Support For Arc Pro B65 + Arc Pro B70
Intel this week rolled out new versions of their open-source XPU Manager and Linux NPU driver software...
Microsoft Announces Coreutils For Windows: Derived From Rust Coreutils
As another interesting takeaway from this week's Microsoft Build 2026 conference beyond their open-source Intelligent Terminal project is Coreutils for Windows. Microsoft is maintaining a fork of Rust Coreutils for Windows to ease the developer experience across Windows / WSL / macOS / Linux...
New "KRAID" Compiler Merged To Mesa For Panfrost/PanVK Drivers
As a follow-up to the article last week about KRAID as a new compiler for modern Arm Mali graphics, that initial code has now been merged to Mesa 26.2 for benefiting the Panfrost and PanVK open-source drivers...
Canonical Now Considers Their Steam Snap For ARM64 To Be Stable
At the beginning of the year Canonical announced a Steam Snap package for Ubuntu ARM64 that leverages the FEX emulator for running x86/x86_64 games on ARM64. After months of testing and improvements, they now consider their Steam Snap for ARM64 to be stable...
Marek Olšák Scores Up To 100% Pixel Throughput Optimization For RADV Driver
Marek Olšák who had been a longtime AMD Linux driver engineer specializing in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, recently began working for Valve on their Linux graphics driver team. His focus has understandably shifted to working on the RADV Vulkan driver and one of his early optimizations now with the Valve hat on is up to a 100% pixel throughput optimization for the RADV driver, which is already quite well optimized thanks to years of investment from Valve, Red Hat, and others...
Canonical’s Steam Snap for ARM64 is now stable
Canonical has bumped its Steam Snap for ARM64 to the stable channel. First announced in January, the snap has been tested across ARM64 hardware including the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Radxa Orion O6 and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, with Canonical now reporting ‘solid performance’ across many popular games. Valve doesn’t provide a native ARM Linux client (not yet, anyway), so Canonical bundles the Intel/AMD Steam binary with the FEX emulator. The stable release of the Steam snap for ARM64 exposes FEX’s configuration options to users, including its library forwarding (“thunking”) toggles, of which which Mitchell Augustin, a software engineer on Canonical’s NVIDIA DGX […] You're reading Canonical’s Steam Snap for ARM64 is now stable , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Intelligent Terminal"
Microsoft today announced their newest open-source creation... Under the MIT license it's the Intelligent Terminal...
[$] Caching for extended attributes
Extended attributes (xattrs) provide a way to attach key/value metadata to inodes—files, directories, and the like—in a filesystem. As with many Linux filesystems, the FUSE filesystem supports xattrs. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit , FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a discussion about caching xattrs in kernel memory; he would like to create some common infrastructure that could be used by FUSE and shared with other filesystems.
Benchmarking The Different CachyOS Linux Kernel Flavors
CachyOS ships with a good Linux kernel configuration by default balancing the different features as well as performance. But they also ship a variety of other kernel builds for those preferring a more leading-edge kernel or the current LTS series, a hardened kernel configuration, and more. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution with some of its main kernel flavors.
KDE Plasma 6.8 Still Planning To End X11 Support, 95% Of Plasma 6.6 Users Are On Wayland
KDE developers are sticking to their plans for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in dropping X11 support. Meanwhile it turns out 95% of current Plasma 6.6 users are running already on Wayland...
[$] Trying to make sense of package-manager metadata
Package managers for operating systems and programming languages have been around for decades. Each package manager, and its accompanying packaging format, has been shaped by the needs of its respective ecosystem, but there is a growing need to make use of package metadata for more than software management: for example, in vulnerability scans, software bills of materials (SBOMs), and more. On May 19, Damián Vicino spoke at the Open Source Summit North America 2026 about his experiences in the past year trying to make sense of the varied metadata provided by more than 20 package managers.
The Linux Kernel Ready To Make TSC A Hard Requirement For x86 CPUs
Now that the Linux kernel has been removing Intel 486 CPU support and also proceeding to drop other vintage CPUs like the AMD K5 CPU support and AMD Elan, the Linux kernel is ready to make the TSC support unconditional for x86 processors...
Vim Classic 8.3 released
Version 8.3 of Vim Classic has been released. This is the first release of the Vim fork since the project was announced in March. This release is based on Vim 8.2.0148, with a number of bug fixes and patches conservatively backported from future versions of Vim upstream. We elected to clean up this version of Vim, prepare it for a release, and imagine an alternate history where Vim 8.3 was released without Vim9 script. The result is Vim Classic 8.3. We chose to take this approach in order to reduce the long-term maintenance burden of Vim Classic, acknowledging that our fork lacks the resources and institutional knowledge available to Vim upstream. However, a consequence is that there are some Vim plugins which are not compatible with Vim Classic. We have made a special effort to assess patches from Vim upstream which mitigate some of the many CVEs affecting Vim which were discovered and fixed between versions 8.2 and modern-day Vim, but we can't be sure we've got all of the security patches which are applicable to Vim Classic (and practically exploitable). This version of Vim Classic is therefore recommended for early adopters who are comfortable adopting a security posture which accounts for the fact that we may have overlooked some bugs. LWN covered Vim Classic and another Vim fork, EVi , in April.
Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Merges Mesh Shader Support
Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver now has mesh shader support as another significant step forward for this driver in being able to handle modern Linux gaming and other workloads...
Mir 2.27 Released With More Wayland Rust Code
Canonical today released Mir 2.27 as the latest version of this set of compositor libraries for easily building Wayland-based shells on Linux and fitting into the Ubuntu Linux paradigm...