Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.

GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.

It's been a few months since running any fresh Linux graphics driver comparison benchmarks. But given the imminent availability of the first Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards, I have been carrying out some fresh Linux GPU driver testing. Given the recently-stabilized NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series and then also the newest upstream code in Linux 6.13 Git and Mesa 25.0-devel for the AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics hardware on their open-source drivers, here is a fresh look at where Intel / AMD / NVIDIA mid-range graphics stand today on Ubuntu Linux with the leading-edge drivers.

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.

For those wishing to kick off the new week with some interesting technical videos and are into compiler tech, the video recordings from the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting are now online.

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.

The openSUSE project shared today that there is enhanced multi-GPU switching support to enjoy now with openSUSE Linux.

Launched four years ago was the Raspberry Pi 400 as the Raspberry Pi 4 adapted for a keyboard form factor. Launching today is the Raspberry Pi 500 for upgrading that keyboard computer using the Raspberry Pi 5 internals. An official Raspberry Pi Monitor was also released.

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.13-rc2 with an initial serving of bug/regression fixes following last week's Linux 6.13-rc1 release that capped off the feature-packed Linux 6.13 merge window.

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.

Following 107k lines of old driver code within the staging area of the kernel removed for Linux 6.13, over in the crypto space they are looking at some cleaning as well with plans raised to remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) driver for the old Sun Niagara 2, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 and this SPU was also found in the UltraSPARC T3 as well.

A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.

One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.