As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.

With Linux 6.14-rc1 released I have begun trying out the new development kernel on a few systems locally. At least for high core count hardware tested thus far, Linux 6.14 at the moment during this early testing phase is sporting some performance regressions within some multi-threaded workloads.

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux.

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg.

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with a new status report to highlight the progress their developers made over the course of January.

Merged this week to FFmpeg Git for this widely-used open-source multimedia library are a number of NVIDIA video encoding "NVENC" improvements for benefiting the new GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics processors.

The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for years has been a great feature for Ubuntu users to be able to easily fetch and run the newest upstream kernel whether it's the latest stable kernel version, one of the weekly release candidates, or even the very leading-edge daily Git kernel builds. Sadly for months now this service has been out of order.

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel.

For those wondering whether Debian 13 would see the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop packages given the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" development freezes, it looks like this updated GNOME release will be squeezed in.

Igalia engineers José María Casanova Crespo and Maíra Canal presented at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels around the efforts by this open-source consulting firm to further enhance the 3D performance out of the Raspberry Pi single board computers.

Serpent OS is the original Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame and has been pursuing its own package management system and new innovations in the Linux distribution landscape. While there has been recent success and new development builds coming out, feature development on Serpent OS is expected to slowdown now due to a lack of project funding.

In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation funding work on s0ix sleep state support as part of their initiative to improve FreeBSD's support for modern laptops, they have also been funding work on a number of other objectives, including better WiFi driver coverage. A milestone now being achieved for 2025 is getting a proof-of-concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi driver support working for this BSD operating system.

Red Hat's Kpatch, Oracle's Ksplice, and SUSE's kGraft are the most well known solutions currently for Linux kernel live-patching primarily for applying security patches to running Linux servers. It wasn't on my bingo card for insurance giant GEICO working baking their own Linux kernel live-patching solution, but they announced it this weekend and it will soon be open-source.

Cloud Hypervisor 44 is now available as the newest version of this security and cloud minded Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that operates atop Linux's KVM and the Microsoft MSHV Hypervisor.

Three more PCI device IDs were added today to the Intel open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver code for Battlemage that could be for future higher-end products or along the lines of Data Center GPU Flex Series or other products.

Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position.

Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is proposing "Faux Bus" as a new "fake" bus solution for simple devices.

Mozilla Firefox 135 release binaries are now available for those wanting to grab the latest browser release right away.

Christian Schaller as Red Hat's Director of Software Engineering outlined in a blog post today some of the areas they will be focusing on this year with Fedora Workstation development. Additionally, they will be hiring at least two more Linux desktop engineers this year at Red Hat.