Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs.

There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such as FTRFS and VMUFAT being some of the most recent and then even having multiple NTFS drivers for Linux, there is now documentation in place to formally lay out criteria for new file-systems to be accepted.

It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution.

The Btrfs file-system feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with a few noteworthy changes for this copy-on-write file-system.

Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.

Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.

A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.

Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system.

Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver.

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.

The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag.

The power management changes merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel are aplenty as usual. New hardware support, dropping obsolete hardware support, and various bug fixes and other enhancements throughout this important area of the kernel.

After Linux 7.1 dropped support for old i486 CPUs and also began removing some old ISA and PCMCIA device drivers, there is some additional old hardware relics being cleared out of the in-development Linux 7.2 driver... The frame-buffer device driver for the old Hercules Monochrome ISA graphics card is now removed from the Linux kernel after decades at play.

Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.

After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system.

In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage.

The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July.

The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux.

The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI.