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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
[$] KVM planes head for takeoff
Virtualization places a guest system into a separate security domain, typically with less privileges than software running directly on the host. Increasingly, there is interest in creating multiple security domains within a single virtualized system as well. CPU vendors (and software vendors too) are implementing solutions; each of which, of course, is different from all of the others. KVM planes, currently under development by Jörg Rödel, Paolo Bonzini, and others in the KVM community, is an attempt to provide an abstraction layer that makes all of these features available on Linux systems; it is not a small task.
Analyzing Fedora's Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake
As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Linux benchmarks and the cause/workaround for Fedora's slower performance on the Intel Panther Lake laptop.
Bernard: GNOME Shell design dreams
GNOME contributor Tobias Bernard has published a blog post that details some of the design team's ideas for the GNOME Shell over the long term: Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding). While each of these ideas may require additional discussion, prototyping, and testing, we (the design team) have collected them all together here to share our longer-term vision and to give each idea more visibility.
Flatpak 1.19 Released With Nine Security Fixes
Flatpak 1.19 was released today as a new development release along with the Flatpak 1.18.1 stable point release. Both of these releases ship a number of newly-discovered security issues with this app sandboxing and distribution tech...
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gpsd), Debian (caddy, libyaml-syck-perl, nss, and wordpress), Fedora (chezmoi, chromium, emacs, kernel, knot, libcupsfilters, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-libidn, mingw-python-pip, nghttp2, p11-kit, python-webob, suricata, and xen), Mageia (bind, openslide, php8.4, and php8.5), Oracle (gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libpng12, nodejs-nodemon, php:8.3, ruby:3.3, and ruby:4.0), SUSE (agama-web-ui, bind, bouncycastle, dhcpcd, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, freerdp, gd, gitoxide, kak-lsp, kernel-devel, librest-1_0-0, libsdb2_5_0, libssh2_org, nodejs22, PackageKit, perl, perl-Date-Manip, python-ujson, python3-sqlparse, python311, python312, python313-pymongo, ruby2.5, runc, suseconnect-ng, thunderbird, vlang, webkit2gtk3, and weechat), and Ubuntu (imagemagick and systemd).
GNOME Designers Lay Out Some Of Their GNOME Shell Dreams
GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases...
Up To 12.8x Improvement Observed For gup_test With New Linux MM Patches
Linux developer Rik van Riel has pulled off some nice Linux kernel optimizations over the years and the Meta engineer has been working on another one around batching of look-ups with Linux's follow_page_mask() that is used for translating virtual addresses to the corresponding struct page...
Raspberry Pi AXI PMU Driver Under Review For The Mainline Linux Kernel
One of the Raspberry Pi device drivers that has remained elusive from the mainline Linux kernel has been for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) for the Broadcom AXI on all Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 5 models. Thanks to the work of a Google engineer, there is a new effort working to get a mainline Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi AXI PMU...
Linux Mint Teases A Kernel Cleanup Trick That Fedora Figured Out Years Ago
The work-in-progress feature would clear out old, unused kernels automatically every week.
FastFlowLM 1.0 Released Now As Part Of The AMD ROCm Umbrella
FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella...
Rusticl Now Supports cl_ext_float_atomics
With the recent release of Mesa 26.2 the Rusticl OpenCL driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 on RadeonSI, LLVMpipe, Zink, Intel Iris, and Apple Asahi. But the work is not over and more improvements to this Rust-based, modern OpenCL driver continue to land...
Claude Opus Helped Debug & Fix Lack Of Audio On Linux For HP OmniBook X Flip 14
The HP OmniBook X Flip 14-kc0xxx is an AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" powered laptop. While most AMD Strix Point laptops work fine on modern Linux distributions, with this particular HP OmniBook X there is no working audio with current mainline Linux kernel builds. With Claude Opus 5 acting as a debugging assistant and coding agent, patches are now pending to correct the audio support for this HP OmniBook X Flip 14 laptop to function on Linux...
Open-Source NVIDIA "Nova" Driver Sees More Functionality For Linux 7.3
Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver...
Fedora CoreOS To Enable systemd-oomd & zRAM Swap By Default
Fedora's CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too...
Five More Lenovo Laptops To Report Fan Sensors With Linux 7.3
In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux...
Linux 7.3 Bringing A KCFI Optimization To Benefit Older Intel CPUs
Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors...
Linux Mint now deletes old kernel versions automatically
Linux Mint has overhauled kernel management and will now automatically delete old kernels once a week. Kernel management has also moved out of Update Manager and into the System Administration tool on both standard and LMDE versions, and the now tracks kernels by series rather than individual versions. You get to choose which kernel series’ are tracked and how many older kernels within each series the system should keep (in addition to the one you’re booted on; it doesn’t yank out the rug under its own feet). Updates for tracked series’ kernels continue to appear in Update Manager as before, […] You're reading Linux Mint now deletes old kernel versions automatically , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Qt Toolkit To Introduce Edge AI Submodule, Initially For Vision AI With Qt
The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI inferencing...
CachyOS is Laying Groundwork for The Server Edition
The CLI installer's new experimental profiles target the upcoming Server Edition, while Shelly gets a full rewrite.
Linux Mint 22.3 HWE released with Linux kernel 7.0
A refreshed Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) OS installer is available for download, powered by Linux kernel 7.0. The distro made the first Linux Mint 22.3 HWE ISO available in March, with an installer that boots Linux 6.17 by default. That image remains available to download alongside the newest one, which boots Linux 7.0, and the original Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) ISO that boots Linux 6.14. The Linux Mint HWE images provide the same core Linux Mint 22.3 experience, still based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, but it all sits on top of a refreshed hardware stack. Existing Mint users don’t need […] You're reading Linux Mint 22.3 HWE released with Linux kernel 7.0 , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Intel Xeon 678X Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Performance With The HP Z4 G6i
HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I've had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS performance benchmarks to see how the operating system performance compares for this 48 core / 96 thread workstation processor.
[$] Even more formal verification for BPF
BPF offers useful safety guarantees, but Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi wants BPF programs to be even safer. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit , he led a session ( slides ) discussing the possibility of adding domain-specific invariants to BPF programs. It was not a discussion intended to lead to the implementation of any particular kernel feature, but rather an overview of why additional formal verification might be needed, and how it could work with the existing BPF ecosystem.
Django moves to an annual release cycle
The Django Python web-framework project has announced that it has accepted an annual release cycle proposal . This means that the project is moving from a somewhat complicated schedule that interspersed short-lived feature releases and long-term-support (LTS) releases to a simpler annual cycle where each release is supported for three years. Every feature release gets three years of support: one year of mainstream bugfixes, then two years of security and data-loss fixes. The "LTS" label is retired — every feature release now carries that same, unique commitment. No more LTS gap: no racing a deadline to jump two years of changes at once. Upgrade one year at a time, whenever suits you within the support window. Three versions are supported at any time, giving third-party packages a clear, rolling target. This will take effect with the upcoming Django 2028 release, expected in January 2028.
Linux Mint Improves Kernel Management & Setting System-Wide Environment Variables
Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month...