As of this week Oracle's latest VirtualBox development code begins to work with Linux's native KVM back-end. Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality.

GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.

One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren't upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git.

Engineers Michał Żygowski and Piotr Król of open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM in Brussels on open-source for confidential compute infrastructure. With Intel not making strides to fully open-up their FSP package, the talk was centered around the modern AMD open-source firmware efforts led by their openSIL initiative for open-source CPU silicon initialization to replace AGESA in the Zen 6 timeframe.

The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard.

Ardour 9.0 is out today as the latest major feature release to this leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for musicians, recording engineers, and other audio editing needs.

Merged a year ago to the Linux kernel's Xe graphics driver was a change to disable D3Cold across all Battlemage GPUs. This was done due instability issues around the D3cold to D0 power state transition. Finally with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle that restriction is being loosened with restoring D3cold support with Battlemage GPUs aside from a specific NUC.

LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers.

Yesterday was our first look at the Intel Panther Lake Linux performance with the Core Ultra X7 358H and focused on the CPU performance. In today's benchmarking is a look at the very exciting Xe3 graphics found with the top-tier Panther Lake models: the Arc B390 Graphics with 12 Xe cores.

Following the release of TrueNAS 25.10 for this Linux-based, OpenZFS-running operating system focused on network appliances / storage devices, iX systems has shared some of their plans for TrueNAS 26 this year.

Canonical and SpacemiT announced today that Ubuntu Linux will be officially supported on SpacemiT's new K3 RISC-V SoC. What makes the K3 interesting is being one of the first available RISC-V RVA23 designs.

The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5.

For those not fond of the increasing use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel or FreeBSD's considerations for Rust in its kernel, you can perhaps find refuge within NetBSD. One of the NetBSD developers has explained why you likely won't be finding Rust code within the NetBSD kernel anytime soon.

Intel ISPC 1.30 is now available as the latest feature update to their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a variant of the C programming language to easily target their array of CPUs and GPUs.

The Linux 6.19 merge window had introduced support for larger pages and compression with the Nouveau kernel driver, which ultimately should help provide a performance win to this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Mesa NVK driver was ready to make use of that new kernel driver functionality but then it ended up being disabled due to bugs. Fortunately, for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel those issues should be resolved so then the Mesa NVK usage of the larger pages / compression support could be restored.

Following December's release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates.

Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their "50.beta" releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March.

Microsoft engineers and other stakeholders have been developing LiteBox as a security-focused library OS written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux Virtualization Based Security "LVBS". The design is for LiteBox to operate as a secure kernel protecting the normal guest kernel via virtualization hardware.

You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian's data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian's all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don't properly communicate it to the Debian project.

Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week's worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week.