Xen 4.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this open-source hypervisor backed by AMD, Arm, AWS, and other organizations. Plus with Xen’s use within automotive environments, Ford and Honda too…

The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 6.5.3 as the third maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.5 desktop environment series with more improvements and bug fixes.

This week marks two years since the debut of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors. Given the occasion, I decided to revisit the Linux performance of the Threadripper 7980X compared to original benchmarks from November 2023 to see how the latest Linux software stack performs for these Zen 4 HEDT processors.

The Linux kernel
supports a large number of architectures.
Not all of those are supported by Linux distributions, but Debian does support
many of them, officially or unofficially. On October 26, Bastian Blank

opened a discussion about the minimum version of these architectures
that Debian should support: in particular, raising the de-facto minimum
versions in the next Debian release (“forky”). Thread participants were generally in favor of
keeping support for older architecture variants, but didn’t reach a firm
conclusion.

In mid-October, the Xubuntu
download site was compromised and had directed users to a malicious
zip file instead of the Torrent file that users expected. Elizabeth
K. Joseph has published
a postmortem of the incident, along with plans to avoid such a breach
in the future:

To be perfectly clear: this only impacted our website, and the torrent
links provided there.

If you downloaded or opened a file named “Xubuntu-Safe-Download.zip”
from the Xubuntu downloads page during this period, you should assume
it was malicious. We strongly recommend scanning your computer with a
trusted antivirus or anti-malware solution and deleting the file
immediately.

Nothing on cdimages.ubuntu.com or any of the other official Ubuntu
repositories was impacted, and our mirrors remained safe as long as
they were also mirroring from official resources.

None of the build systems, packages, or other components of Xubuntu
itself were impacted.

Recordings from the GStreamer
Conference 2025, held in London in late October, are now
available on the GStreamer Conferences Archive site. Includes the
GStreamer
State of the Union talk by Tim-Philipp Müller, State
of MPEG 2 Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) by Edward Hervey, and many
others.

Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it’s not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it’s RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the Linux driver enablement has begun…

Last week’s Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering “SER” is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance…

Intel engineers today posted Linux kernel patches for plumbing a brand new Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” driver for the next-generation memory controller design debuting with Xeon Diamond Rapids…

Back in September the Qualcomm X2 Elite SoCs were announced for next-gen Windows 11 on Arm laptops. Since then some initial X2 Elite enablement patches for the Linux kernel have arrived and for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel more of that work will reach mainline. Excitingly, Linux 6.19 is now bringing GPU and display support for the Adreno X2-85 found within the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC…

Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores…

Systemd 259 RC1 previews the removal of SysV init script support and introduces major compatibility changes ahead of the v260 transition.

ClamAV will retire outdated signatures on December 16, reducing both databases by about 50% to improve performance and trim update costs.

When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn’t seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say “the best is yet to come” in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts…

Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA “Nova” driver continues taking shape albeit isn’t yet ready for end-user usage…

Intel’s ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilities and now the GCC compiler has received similar treatment…

Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard…

Make Application and Active Window Application be transparent on KDE Plasma

Don’t leave deleted files behind—Raider File Shredder offers an uncomplicated solution for permanently erasing data.

The post Raider File Shredder: For Those Times When Simple Deletion Isn’t Enough appeared first on FOSS Force.

Thought it was the victim of a ‘hyper-scale DDoS attack’ before finding the fixCloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has admitted that the cause of its massive Tuesday outage was a change to database permissions, and that the company initially thought the symptoms of that adjustment indicated it was the target of a “hyper-scale DDoS attack,” before figuring out the real problem.…