ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux 7.0 Features Include More Preparations For AMD Zen 6 & Intel Nova Lake

([Software] 23 February 11:06 AM EST 1 Comment)

While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds' versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0.



FreeBSD's Rust Kernel Support Could Be Stable Enough To Try This Year

([BSD] 23 February 10:13 AM EST FreeBSD Q4-2025 Status Report)

The FreeBSD Project has published their Q4'2025 status report to outline progress made on their software, infrastructure, and other initiatives over the past quarter. Meanwhile among the work to look forward to this year in FreeBSD is getting their Rust kernel driver support up to scratch.



Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0

([Radeon] 23 February 09:33 AM EST AMDGPU + AMDKFD Driver)

It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel's entire codebase as the single largest driver.



Intel ANV Driver Sees Several Vulkan Video H.265 Encode Fixes

([Intel] 23 February 08:59 AM EST Mesa 26.1-devel)

For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel "ANV" open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes.



RBOS 2026-02-22 As Latest Linux Live ISO To Showcase Wayland

([Operating Systems] 23 February 06:37 AM EST RebeccaBlackOS)

While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS.



FFmpeg Lands Experimental xHE-AAC MPS212 Decoding Support

([Multimedia] 23 February 05:19 AM EST xHE-AAC MPS212)

FFmpeg developer Lynne is most known recently for all the Vulkan Video work to this open-source multimedia library while merged today to FFmpeg is another great contribution outside the scope of that: xHE-AAC MPS212 audio decoding support.



Red Hat Releases Tuned 2.27 For Adaptively Tuning Linux To Different Workloads

([Red Hat] 23 February 06:02 AM EST Tuned 2.27)

Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux's cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities.



Linux 7.0-rc1 Released With Many New Features:

([Linux Kernel] 22 February 05:16 PM EST Linux 7.0-rc1)

Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features.



Linux 7.0 Credits Now Honor The Creator Of Linux-Next

([Linux Kernel] 22 February 05:05 PM EST Stephen Rothwell)

There's the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell's contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years.



GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files

([GNU] 22 February 12:18 PM EST Gawk 5.4)

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4.



AOMedia Open Audio Codec "OAC" Aims To Be The Successor To Opus

([Multimedia] 22 February 09:57 AM EST Open Audio Codec)

While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (OAC).



AMD Zen 6 Performance Events & Metrics Merged For Linux 7.0

([AMD] 22 February 06:50 AM EST Linux 7.0 Performance Events)

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance "perf" subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors.



Yet Another Fix Coming For Older AMD GPUs On Linux - Thanks To Valve Developer

([Radeon] 22 February 06:33 AM EST Fixing Hawaii GPU Issues)

Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has been doing a fantastic job enhancing the older AMD Radeon GPU support under Linux. Last year he made enough improvements to the AMDGPU open-source driver that older Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 dGPUs switched over to AMDGPU by default for nice performance gains, RADV Vulkan driver support out of the box, and all around better experience than using the legacy Radeon driver. He's also been fixing countless bugs affecting older AMD GPUs. There is another improvement on the way for benefiting some with aging AMD GPUs.



Linux 7.0 Further Prepares For Intel Diamond Rapids With NTB Driver Support

([Intel] 22 February 06:14 AM EST Intel NTB Driver For Diamond Rapids)

The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids. Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support.



Microsoft Hyper-V Lands Some Useful Improvements In Linux 7.0

([Microsoft] 22 February 05:58 AM EST Linux 7.0 Improvements)

For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0.



Linux 7.0 Makes Preparations For Rust 1.95

([Programming] 21 February 08:16 PM EST Linux 7.0 + Rust 1.95)

Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its "experimental" in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release.



AppArmor Enhancements Merged For Linux 7.0

([Linux Security] 21 February 12:21 PM EST AppArmor)

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0.



eCryptfs Sees Renewed Patch Activity With Linux 7.0

([Linux Storage] 21 February 07:25 AM EST Linux 7.0 + eCryptfs)

We haven't heard much about eCryptfs in recent years for that stackable in-tree Linux file-system providing per-directory encryption support. The FSCRYPT framework has shown its strong capabilities in recent years with various file-systems, Canonical hasn't been pursuing its user home directory encryption like it did years ago for the Ubuntu desktop, and full disk encryption is the most secure approach for ensuring data security on your system. But to some surprise with Linux 7.0 there are the most patches to eCryptfs that we have seen in a while.



ollama 0.17 Released With Improved OpenClaw Onboarding

([AI] 21 February 06:30 AM EST ollama 0.17)

The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with a new release. The ollama v0.17.0 release is driven by new functionality around enhancing the OpenClaw onboarding process.



Ceph In Linux 7.0 Lands Support For AES256K Keys

([Linux Storage] 21 February 05:32 AM EST CEPH_CRYPTO_AES256KRB5)

For those making use of the Ceph open-source, distributed storage platform, with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel they are introducing support for the AES256K key type.



More

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: "Pray, what is youn?
For it looks like the shin o' my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin' in graveyard."

"My lad," said Troll, "this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o' lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll
For he don't need his shinbone."

Said Tom: "I don't see why the likes o' thee
Without axin' leave should go makin' free
With the shank or the shin o' my father's kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bnone over!"
-- J. R. R. Tolkien