The crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 kernel includes the usual churn like various crypto acceleration updates for different SoCs and other routine changes plus is also limiting the role of some insecure and/or obsolete crypto hashing algorithms…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Reducing The Roles For Some Insecure/Obsolete Crypto Algorithms

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6 Alpha Approaches Next Week With The Soft Feature Freeze

FreeBSD 14.0-RC4 was issued today and as a last minute change they have decided to keep (non-PNP) ISA and GIANT-locked drivers around until FreeBSD 15…

Source: Phoronix – After A Delay, ISA Drivers Will Be Kept Around Until FreeBSD 15

Last year Intel made available a packaged “Arc Graphics Driver” for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and later Ubuntu 23.04 to provide a DKMS-backported kernel driver and packaged Mesa driver to make it easier to use Arc Graphics (DG2/Alchemist) during the phase when the upstream kernel support was still stabilizing and not yet found out-of-the-box on Linux distributions at the time. This week marked another rare update for this packaged driver…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Updates Its Packaged Arc Graphics Driver For Ubuntu

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Thursday for the Linux 6.7 merge window…

Source: Phoronix – KVM Virtualization With Linux 6.7 Adds LoongArch, Up To 4096 x86 vCPUs

The biggest surprise this week so far with the Linux 6.7 merge window has been the landing of the Bcachefs file-system. Here is an early look at Bcachefs with Linux 6.7 and some preliminary benchmarks.

Source: Phoronix – Trying Out & Benchmarking Bcachefs On Linux 6.7

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Networking Adds New Hardware Support, A ~20% Perf Boost For Single TCP Flow

The AppArmor Linux security system has picked up a few improvements and new features with the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – AppArmor Adds IO_uring Mediation & Some Performance Optimizations

One of the great open-source achievements for 2023 was DreamWorks Animation open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer as the OpenMoonRay project. Since then DreamWorks along with other open-source stakeholders have continued advancing this open-source renderer and today marks the release of OpenMoonRay 1.4…

Source: Phoronix – DreamWorks’ OpenMoonRay 1.4 Released With Intel OIDn GPU Acceleration

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support…

Source: Phoronix – Landlock Access Controls Extended To Networking With Linux 6.7

While confidential computing is a hot area right now, there’s been a limited amount of cross-vendor cooperation with AMD having their own route with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel designing the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) that is still available in limited form. As one improvement coming with Linux 6.7, “configfs-tsm” has been submitted for pulling as a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Adds A Cross-Vendor Solution For Confidential Computing Attestation Reports

Following some release delays the past few weeks, it’s been decided today that Fedora Linux 39 is now ready to ship next week…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora Linux 39 To Be Released On Tuesday

One of the last major blockers before the remaining real-time “PREEMPT_RT” patches can be upstreamed is sorting out threaded / atomic console printing. With the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel, there’s been more work upstreamed in that endeavor…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Continues Work On printk Threaded Printing

Last week with the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver, AMD removed support for Polaris and Vega GPUs from this official open-source Vulkan driver. But as mentioned this doesn’t impact the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by Valve, Red Hat, and other open-source developers. In fact, this week another optimization for Vega/GFX9 was merged for Mesa 24.0-devel…

Source: Phoronix – AMDVLK Dropped Vega While Mesa’s RADV Is Continuing To Make Vega Faster In 2023

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6.0 Approved For Fedora 40 – Including Dropping The X11 Session

Following Red Hat’s decision to limit access to the RHEL source code to their customers, various RHEL-based Linux distributions were caught in a tailspin. CIQ (Rocky Linux), SUSE, and Oracle decided to form the Open Enterprise Linux association (OpenELA) to collaborate around the development of distributions with compatibility against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensuring open and free access to EL source code. Today they are announcing initial source available for their EL8 and EL9 packages…

Source: Phoronix – OpenELA Publishes Initial Source Code For Building RHEL Derivatives

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial “request for comments” set of patches that re-implement Android’s Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C…

Source: Phoronix – Google Rewriting Android’s Binder In Rust With Promising Results

We’ve been impressed with AMD Zen 4C cores with their initial appearance in Bergamo with the flagship EPYC 9754 and then over the summer with Siena for the likes of the EPYC 8324P(N) plus the EPYC 8354P(N) review soon. Today AMD is confirming what many had anticipated: Zen 4C cores will be coming to new Ryzen laptop SoCs.

Source: Phoronix – AMD Announces Zen 4C Cores Coming To Ryzen Laptops

There is some interesting new Arm and RISC-V SoC support to be found in the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – AMD-Pensando Elba SoC & A Massive RISC-V 64-Core Chip Supported In Linux 6.7

Overnight the mainline Linux kernel has retired support for Intel Itanium (IA-64) processors…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Itanium IA-64 Support Removed With The Linux 6.7 Kernel