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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
[$] BPF, continuous testing, and stable kernels
Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to test BPF updates in stable kernels more thoroughly. The BPF subsystem's CI tests are in a good place, they said; even so, Solodrai and Yu have a handful of possible avenues toward enabling better test coverage in the future.
Python packaging council candidates announced
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced the candidates running for the Python packaging council that was approved by the Python steering council in April . This inaugural election fills all five seats on the PPC. The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes shall be designated Cohort A with a two year term, and the three candidates receiving the next highest number of votes shall be designated Cohort B with a one year term. In future elections, each cohort will be elected for a full two-year term in alternating years, so that roughly half of the PPC turns over each cycle. There are 17 candidates running for the five open seats. PSF voting-eligible members must affirm their intention to vote in this election by August 25. Voting begins on September 1, and ends on September 15.
Features Coming For Linux 7.3 From Optimizing Intel Hybrid CPUs To Old AMD Athlon XPs
With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday...
Patches Posted For Fixing The Linux DRM Scheduler's Fair Policy
Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there will be the fair scheduler becoming the default...
Open-Source exFAT Programs 1.4.3 Improves Fsck & Mkfs
Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight...
Slackware-Based Zenwalk Linux Aims For "True Low Latency Desktop Experience"
It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler...
LightDM is Back From The Dead, But Canonical isn't in Charge Anymore
It took years of silence, new maintainers, and a release to bring LightDM back.
AMD GAIA 0.23 Delivers Ability To Install/Run AI Agents From The Terminal
AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements...
KDE, Techpaladin & Kubuntu Focus Announce The Bullet-Proof KDE Software Initiative
KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software...
The Best Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, AMD Zen 6, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL
With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases...
Updated Coreboot/Dasharo For MSI PRO Z690-A / Z790-P Motherboards, Adds Overclocking
In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards...
Domas: Bypassing memory protection with AMD's memory controllers
Christopher Domas has published a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the platform security processor . Among other things, this allows code running at the kernel level to directly manipulate the meaning of processor instructions, potentially bypassing other security measures such as memory encryption and virtual machine isolation. This is not, strictly, unexpected behavior: it is documented in AMD's manual (on page 113 of that PDF). But the fact that it can be used to access arbitrary memory and thereby rewrite supposedly immutable parts of the computer's firmware without crashing the host machine seems like an unintentional side-effect of the design. Fortunately, since enabling bank swizzle mode requires kernel-level privileges, the vulnerability is not an immediate problem for most software. Still, it seems likely that this technique will end up being used for nefarious purposes eventually.
GeForce NOW’s Linux app exits beta, gets official Flatpak repo
GeForce NOW’s native Linux app has exited beta after seven months of testing, with official support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. The app is a frontend for Nvidia’s game streaming service, with more than 4,500 PC titles running in the cloud on Nvidia servers. Users get GeForce RTX-class performance, ray tracing and DLSS without the need to own the relevant hardware. In a blog post to announce its ‘graduation’ from beta, Nvidia say GeForce NOW for Linux has picked up “performance, stability and polish” improvements thanks to community feedback during the beta test period. The company also touches on […] You're reading GeForce NOW’s Linux app exits beta, gets official Flatpak repo , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+
The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H across the Linux 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 kernels.
rsync 3.5.0 released
Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes : This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -- plus several robustness hardenings. CVE IDs were assigned by VulnCheck (CNA); the precise "introduced in" version ranges accompany each advisory, and many are much narrower than "everything before 3.5.0". Every fix ships with a regression test in the test suite that fails on the unfixed tree.
[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm
The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some Arm systems, for example, can use 56 of those bits to access up to 72PB of memory. So it might be surprising that the Arm architecture is evolving to support even larger page-table entries (PTEs). This patch set from Anshuman Khandual adds support for 128-bit PTEs, but who will benefit from this capability is not entirely clear.
GeForce NOW On Linux Native App Exits Beta
At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA...
MSI Claw Gamepad Driver Set To Be Merged For Linux 7.3
The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel...
Omarchy Bets Its Future on AI Agents While the Linux World Stays Cautious
While some open source projects are locking AI out of their codebases, Omarchy's upcoming v4 release treats AI as part of the system.
Linux Patches Enable Apple M4 NVMe Support
While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4...
Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 Ships With 233+ CVE Fixes
While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era...
Intel XPU Manager 2.1 Released For Monitoring Arc Pro Graphics On Windows/Linux
Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components...
VLC is Wrongly Blamed for Microsoft Defender's Clumsiness
VLC takes a long time to play MP3 on Windows? Blame it on Microsoft Defender, not VLC.
Rsync 3.5 Released As "Extraordinary" Update To Fix 33 Security Issues
Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update...