Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it’s being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue…

Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module…

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network…

A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies…

While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet…

Transmission 4.1 BitTorrent client is out with faster downloads, lower CPU usage, improved IPv6 support, and hundreds of fixes.

Valve released today an updated Proton 10 version, Proton 10.0-4, as the latest stable release of this open-source compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components for playing Windows games on Linux.

In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initial game load time for at least one problematic game title…

Solus has added Solseek to its stable repositories, bringing a fast, keyboard-driven TUI package manager to users.

After two decades of endowment‑backed patent defense, Open Invention Network is moving to a tiered funding model and expanding its Linux System coverage.

The post Open Invention Network Shifts to Tiered Funding and Expands Linux System appeared first on FOSS Force.

Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releasesThe Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?…

Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release…

There is a new GnuPG update for a “critical security bug” in recent
GnuPG releases.

A crafted CMS (S/MIME) EnvelopedData message carrying an oversized
wrapped session key can cause a stack buffer overflow in gpg-agent
during the PKDECRYPT–kem=CMS handling. This can easily be used
for a DoS but, worse, the memory corruption can very likley also be
used to mount a remote code execution attack. The bug was
introduced while changing an internal API to the FIPS required KEM
API.

Only versions 2.5.13 through 2.5.16 are affected.

Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments.

GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O’Donell has announced
that the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hosted
at the Linux Foundation.

While it was clear to the GNU Toolchain leadership that
requirements were coming to improve the toolchain cyber-security
posture, these requirements were not clear to all project
developers. As part of receiving this feedback we have worked to
document and define a secure development policy for glibc and at a
higher level the GNU Toolchain. While Sourceware has started
making some critical technical changes, the GNU Toolchain still
faces serious, systemic concerns about securing a global, highly
available service and building a sustainable, diverse sponsorship
model.

This has been a long-running discussion; see this 2022 article for some background.

Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems…

Godot 4.6, a free and open-source game engine, is out with improvements to the editor, performance optimizations, and usability enhancements across everyday game development tasks.

The kernel’s “kfunc” mechanism is a way of exporting kernel functions so
that they can be called directly from BPF programs. There are over 300
kfuncs in current kernels, ranging in functionality from string processing
(bpf_strnlen())
to custom schedulers (scx_bpf_kick_cpu())
and beyond. Sometimes these kfuncs need access to context information that
is not directly available to BPF programs, and which thus cannot be passed
in as arguments. The implicit
arguments patch set from Ihor Solodrai is the latest attempt to solve
this problem.

TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is “w0vncserver” as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops…

Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete…