System76 engineers remain quite busy working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS operating system as well as other Linux distributions moving forward.

FineIBT is a Linux kernel initiative led by Intel engineers that aimed to combine the best of Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity. FineIBT was merged in 2022 for the Linux 6.2 kernel as an alternative control flow integrity implementation. Some FineIBT weaknesses were previously addressed but now the implementation has been determined to be "critically flawed" at least until next-generation Intel processors appear with FRED.

The AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched last year offer excellent performance and power efficiency out-of-the-box. For those wanting to pursue maximum power efficiency and running in the most optimal configuration for performance-per-Watt, AMD EPYC BIOS tunables as well as recent Linux kernel driver improvements can help in driving even greater efficiency. Today's article is a look at the impact of the AMD P-State driver usage and options with recent kernel versions as well as the Power Profile Selection BIOS option for the impact on 5th Gen EPYC performance and power efficiency.

We are nearing one year since the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops shipped with Windows 11 ARM. For the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release it's looking like more of these ARM-powered laptops will have somewhat usable support at least for those wanting to avoid Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen laptops.

The latest open-source project enabling Wayland support by default today is PCSX2 as the PlayStation 2 game emulator for Linux and other platforms.

It's looking like Linux 6.15 will be the kernel that does away with the Z3fold and Zbud allocators.

The Ubuntu 25.04 feature freeze is now in effect as Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux developer community work toward releasing the "Plucky Puffin" in April.

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.