section
FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
491 stories archived
[$] The campaign to push Northstar into Linux distributions
There is not a broad selection of mature, open-source web-browser engines for Linux users. Most of the browsers available for Linux are based on one of just three projects: Chromium's Blink , Firefox's Gecko , or WebKit . A new entrant would generally be seen as a welcome alternative, but the recent campaign to push one of the LLM-written Nordstjernen browsers into Debian and Arch Linux has raised some questions about the project's development and security processes.
Redox OS ring buffers project summary
The Redox OS project, which is a Unix-like microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, has published a report on the work that it has done in the last year to implement io_uring-like I/O . Last year, the Redox team received a grant to develop io_uring-like Ring Buffer support at the system task level, as a first step towards ring buffer communications between the application and the majority of system services. This phase of the work finished up in September, as the last pieces were put in place. [...] In addition to implementing the Ring Buffer machinery for our system services and drivers that can support it, an io_uring and liburing -like API for applications was completed and demonstrated. There was also substantial work done on support crates, including an async executor for drivers. And there was some very exciting work on various performance improvements, to allow much faster switching between applications and their system services. But I will let the team tell you all the technical details.
NetBSD Adds Alternative Text Editor To vi & xedit For Easing New Users
NetBSD-current has added a new command line text editor to its base set of packages for helping out new users as an alternative to their vi and xedit editors currently included...
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (emacs, thunderbird, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Debian (bind9, openjdk-21, pdns, php-mongodb, and thunderbird), Fedora (brotli, chromium, clevis, eog, flatpak, ghostscript, kernel, libinstpatch, libreswan, mingw-freetype, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, openssh, perl-Alien-Brotli, perl-DBI, python3.12, rust-onefetch, stargz-snapshotter, util-linux, and webkitgtk), Mageia (cifs-utils, libxml2, packages, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-Text-CSV_XS, sogo, util-linux, and weechat), Oracle (brotli, firefox, flatpak, gcc-toolset-15-gcc, kernel, libreswan, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, python-urllib3, skopeo, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Slackware (proftpd), SUSE (azure-storage-azcopy, containerd, corepack24, grok-build, ImageMagick, libsoup-2_4-1, matrix-synapse, podman, psqlODBC, python, python-M2Crypto-doc, python-Twisted-doc, and xen), and Ubuntu (authd).
X.Org XCB Co-Creator Praises Wayland's Protocol Design
Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design...
Provenance Time Proposed As A New Timestamp For Linux
While the Linux kernel and various file-system drivers already support the notion of the birth time for tracking a file/directory's birth/creation time, a slightly different provenance time "ptime" is now being proposed for the Linux kernel...
Hyprland 0.57 Released With Compiz Inspired Wobbly Windows
For those that want to reminisce over the days long ago of Compiz and Beryl on the Linux desktop, the Hyprland 0.57 Wayland compositor released today and has added Compiz-inspired wobbly windows support...
VKD3D-Proton 3.1 Released With New Features Ahead Of Big v3.2 Release
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team just tagged the VKD3D-Proton 3.1 release. This version comes with a number of new features and performance optimizations while being the stable point ahead of VKD3D-Proton beginning to see a lot of new feature code for what will then become VKD3D-Proton 3.2...
GhostBSD 26.2 Released As FreeBSD 15.1 Powered OS With New Installer
GhostBSD 26.2 is out as the latest feature release of this FreeBSD-powered desktop operating system...
Ghostty 1.4 Is Faster and Uses Less RAM, but Drops Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Support
The Ubuntu 24.04 support drop is thanks to the native builds requiring some newer dependencies. Anyhow, there’s more to this Ghostty release than that.
NTFS3 Hardened In Linux 7.4 Against Corrupted Or Maliciously-Crafted NTFS Volumes
Paragon Software's Konstantin Komarov sent out the latest NTFS3 driver updates for this in-kernel NTFS read/write driver. With Linux 7.4, the NTFS3 driver is focused on being hardened against corrupted or maliciously-crafted NTFS volumes...
Retiring BSD-Compress Proposed For Linux PPP Network Code
A patch has been proposed to remove the BSD-Compress support from the Linux kernel for the Linux networking point-to-point protocol (PPP) due to being unmaintained and having fundamental issues with the code that can lead to a fatal error...
Wine Merges Support For MESA_map_buffer_client_pointer To Improve WoW64 32-bit OpenGL
An initiative led by CodeWeavers this year has come to fruition for improving OpenGL support with WoW64 for bettering Windows 32-bit application/game support while using 64-bit system libraries...
Ubuntu firmware HWE will prevent issues on older kernel
Ubuntu is planning a new linux-firmware-hwe package, in an effort to reduce the risk of firmware updates for newer kernels causing problems for users running older ones. On Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases, you can stick with the standard (GA) kernel it was released with for the duration of its support period, or you can install the HWE update, which brings newer Linux kernel versions to existing Ubuntu LTS releases. Right now, both kernels share the same firmware package, which means firmware updates designed to work with HWE kernels can cause problems for users who stick with the GA kernel. Ubuntu developer Juerg Haefliger noted that a firmware backport for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, intended for its Linux 7.0 […] You're reading Ubuntu firmware HWE will prevent issues on older kernel , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Linux 7.4 Introduces DMA-BUF Support To I/O Path With IO_uring
Merged today for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window is the infrastructure for enabling DMA-BUF support in the kernel's I/O path with the wonderful IO_uring framework...
Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W & Raspberry Pi 4 Model A Surface In Linux Kernel Patches
It looks like a next-generation Raspberry Pi Zero is about to surface, the long-awaited Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W. And in an interesting twist in these times amid high PC component costs and supply chain constraints, a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A...
Robinson: Raspberry Pi 5 on Fedora
Peter Robinson has written a blog post about the current state of Fedora support for Raspberry Pi 5 devices. According to Robinson, the upcoming Fedora 45 release will work—with caveats—on all variants of the Raspberry Pi Model 5B; the Compute Module 5 and Pi 500+ are still works in progress. For Fedora 44 release you need to have a temporary workaround when booting. If you update to the latest kernel/firmware straight away this isn't then needed beyond the first boot. The workaround isn't needed for Fedora 45 so if you're going to try this out I suggest you go and grab your favourite flavour of Fedora from the Fedora 45 release candidates and jump straight in there! You will get an accelerated desktop with storage/network/USB. There's not currently any support for sound and a number of other things. See Robinson's post for instructions on creating an Fedora image to use with a Raspberry Pi 5.
KDE Fixes 15 Year Old Bug Over Inaccurate Notifications When Copying Files To USB Drives
A long-standing KDE bug is set to be resolved with next month's KDE Frameworks 6.32 release...
Rocky Linux Creator Built a New "Not Linux" Kernel in 11 Days Using AI
Ginux is not a Linux fork, yet it boots Rocky Linux 10 all the way to systemd. An OpenAI Codex agent wrote about 139,000 lines of it.
[$] Guidelines for panics in kernel code
Alexandre Courbot spends most of his time working on the kernel doing code reviews. Recently, he's been wondering about what the standards should be for when Rust code is allowed to panic, and how it should do error handling more generally. Unlike many of the other talks at Kangrejos 2026, his talk was not presenting some existing work, but rather hoping to solicit opinions on the topic from the assembled Rust for Linux developers. He brought along a collection of tricky cases that he had run into recently to prompt discussion.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind9.18, brotli, buildah, container-tools:4.0, container-tools:rhel8, firefox, flatpak, freeipmi, gcc, golang, grafana, httpd, kernel, kernel-rt, libreswan, libX11, lrzsz, nodejs:14, nodejs:18, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, podman, python-urllib3, python3.9, python38:3.8 and python38-devel:3.8, skopeo, thunderbird, xorg-x11-server, and xz), Debian (inkscape, swupdate, thunderbird, and valkey), Fedora (brotli, dolphin, helix, kernel, libical, mingw-python3, nsd, perl-Alien-Brotli, perl-Plack, perl-Plack-Middleware-ReverseProxy, rust-dua-cli, rust-gengo-bin, rust-gitui, stgit, unshield, and webkitgtk), Mageia (evolution, freetype2, ghostscript, kronosnet, libde265, libical, libjxl, packages, perl-DBI, perl-ExtUtils-Typemaps-Default, perl-Imager, vim, and webkit2), Oracle (bind, bind9.18, brotli, buildah, ca-certificates, firefox, flatpak, freeipmi, grafana, httpd, kernel, libreswan, libX11, lrzsz, nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, perl-DBI:1.641, perl:5.32, postfix, postgresql16-pgvector, postgresql18-pgvector, python3.9, skopeo, unbound, xorg-x11-server, and xz), Red Hat (grafana, grafana-pcp, python3.12-urllib3, and python3.14-urllib3), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, chromium, gn, cifs-utils, containerd, cpupower, cyrus-sasl, gcc13, gcc7, go1.26, go1.27, google-osconfig-agent, kernel, kubernetes-old, libsoup, libX11, libXi, openssh, podman, python-nltk, python-PyJWT, python-social-auth-core, rekor, runc, suseconnect-ng, and unbound), and Ubuntu (brotli and nginx).
Pavee OS: Ikey Doherty's New Daily-Driver Desktop Distro Being Built Atop Barney
Back in September Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux and Serpent OS notoriety as well as being a former Intel Clear Linux developer announced Barney as his planned showcase for how to "properly" build a modern Linux distribution in 2026+. Today he's provided an update on this Barney distro tooling effort as well as announcing Pavee OS as his planned daily-driver desktop distribution built atop it...
KDE Plasma 6.8.2 Released With Dozens Of Additional Bug Fixes
Debuting two weeks ago on the 30th anniversary of the KDE project was the Plasma 6.8 desktop with many exciting improvements. Last week it was succeeded by Plasma 6.8.1 with dozens of bug fixes and this week now brings Plasma 6.8.2 with yet more bug fixing...
AMD EPYC Zen 6 PML Support, ARM64 On s390 Merged For Linux 7.4 KVM
The many Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) improvements have been merged for Linux 7.4 to deliver a number of new features for different server processors...