One of the Linux distributions we hear very little about in the industry for cloud/VM usage is Gentoo Linux. But that could change with the Gentoo project now putting out official QCOW2 disk images to make it easier deploying this source-based Linux distribution within virtual machines.

Google engineers themselves haven't been energetically pursuing Wayland support within the Ozone abstraction layer for the Chrome/Chromium web browser but thankfully the consulting firm Igalia continues pushing this native Wayland support along. Nick Yamane with Igalia has out a new blog post covering the remaining items being addressed.

The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues... Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.

Mesa's generic Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has landed support for cl_khr_gl_sharing, the extension that allows using OpenGL buffer / texture / render-buffer objects as OpenCL memory objects for better interoperability between the OpenGL and OpenCL APIs. This is important as in turn it is needed for the Zink driver to be used with the popular DaVinci Resolve video editor application.

Rust 1.85 is out today and it is also the release that stabilizes the Rust 2024 Edition.

OpenRazer 3.10 was just released as the newest update to this set of community-maintained, open-source out-of-tree driver packages for enabling Razer device support on Linux.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to finally introduce a standardized way of informing user-space of GPUs becoming hung or otherwise unresponsive. This is initially wired up for AMD and Intel graphics drivers on Linux so the user can be properly notified of problems and/or user-space software taking steps to address the hung/unresponsive graphics processor.

Following last week's delay due to a packaging mishap, Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS is available today as the newest point release for this current Long Term Support version of Ubuntu Linux.

SK has been working on a Linux kernel feature dubbed Lazy Unmap Flush "LUF" to defer TLB flushes until folios have been unmapped and freed are eventually allocated again.

The Debian Policy 4.7.1.0 is now available as the updated manual around policy requirements for the Debian distribution for packaging mandates, design issues, and other details to abide by for Debian developers.

On top of all the recent x86/x86_64 Linux kernel crypto improvements made recently by Google engineer Eric Biggers to better laverage AVX-512 and other modern x86 ISA features, a new patch-set posted today by Biggers would help make all x86/x86_64 kernel encryption/decryption at least slightly faster.

A new debug option was merged on Wednesday to Mutter Git ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release. This new debug option is to override the GPU copy mode handling for multi-GPU setups.

Zstandard 1.5.7 was released a short time ago as the newest update to this widely-used compression algorithm backed by Meta. Zstd 1.5.7 packs more than 500 commits, including new performance optimizations and other enhancements.

Just a few weeks after the ROCm 6.3.2 update, ROCm 6.3.3 is out this evening with a few more incremental improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack.

The Fedora Project is rolling out expanded coverage of RISC-V hardware moving forward and making it easier for those with RISC-V developer boards to run Fedora Linux.

Mesa 25.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers used on Linux systems by multiple hardware vendors.

A set of patches were posted today for review by the upstream Linux kernel developers in providing driver support for the Apple web camera and image signal processing (ISP) for Apple M-Series devices. This is enough to get the web camera support working on recent MacBooks while this code is now undergoing review for hopefully being mainlined in the Linux kernel.

VKD3D 1.15 is out today as the newest version of this upstream Wine project for implementing the Microsoft Direct3D 12 APIs atop the Vulkan API for better Windows gaming on Linux and other D3D12 workloads on Linux or macOS when paired with MoltenVK.

The debate over the Linux kernel's Rust programming language policy continues... While some kernel maintainers are against it, Linus Torvalds has reportedly said he would override maintainers that may be against honoring Rust code. Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has also been a big proponent of Rust kernel code. He's crafted another Linux kernel mailing list post today outlining the benefits of Rust and encouraging new kernel code/drivers to be in Rust rather than C.

One of the most logical paths forward for the Servo web browser engine is making it compelling for embedding within applications as an alternative to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), WebKitGTK, and other browser engines. Servo developers recently realized though it's around 200 lines of Rust code to embed Servo compared to around 50 lines of C code if targeting WebKitGTK... So improvements are being made to the Servo embedding API.