The drama surrounding Rust code within the Linux kernel continues... Christoph Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers and several other areas of the kernel has been an outspoken critic of Rust code or secondary programming languages within the Linux kernel kernel. Hellwig has been critical of Rust code for the Linux kernel and its long-term maintainability. Today he's out with another mailing list post where he notes that Linus Torvalds mentioned in private he would override maintainer vetoes on Rust code within the kernel.

For those interested in WebAssembly for the "run anywhere" prospects and container-like secure execution, Wasmer remains one of the leading WASM runtime options. Wasmer 6.0 Alpha 1 is out today as the latest to further along this quest.

For those that typically wait for the first point release before moving to a new software version, KDE Plasma 6.3.1 is out today with a few dozen fixes for the week since the Plasma 6.3 debut.

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking at including more Intel graphics driver packages as part of the hardware enablement "HWE" stacks shipped as part of Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) point releases. This would provide more comprehensive coverage of newer Intel driver components with future Ubuntu LTS point releases to benefit both the integrated and discrete graphics.

One of the AMD software projects we are very bullish on for the future is openSIL for opening up more of the CPU silicon initialization code for what will eventually replace AGESA across all client and server processors that is aiming for production readiness with Zen 6. In turn, AMD openSIL should allow easier/better Coreboot support. One of the development milestone release targets did slip but they remain working on preparing AMD openSIL releases for Phoenix client and Turin server hardware.

There is an openSUSE project called Reproducible-openSUSE "RBOS" working on a proof-of-concept for constructing openSUSE in a bit-identical manner as part of the broad Reproducible Builds effort to be able to reproduce builds bit-for-bit against what is being compiled by the distribution vendor or other software distribution. The openSUSE RBOS has achieved 100% bit-identical packages as a major milestone.

More than seven years in the making, merged yesterday for PostgreSQL is a self-join elimination "SJE" feature as a performance optimization for some queries.

Following the upstream Wayland Protocols repository landing the Wayland color management protocol for enabling HDR support and this morning's release of Wayland Protocols 1.41, the SDL library and MPV media player are the first two clients supporting this now-official protocol.

For all of those that were intrigued over the independent code porting the Firefox web browser to the GTK4 toolkit, there has been a bit more progress and all of the code is also now obtainable via GitHub for this unofficial port.

The friends at CodeWeavers have relayed work that they are looking to hire multiple Wine developers to join their paid team working on upstream Wine as well as their CrossOver products, Valve's Proton downstream for Steam Play, and related Wine-based tech.

A few weeks ago I wrote about ISD as a new open-source project for interactively managing systemd that aims to be more user intuitive especially for those that aren't veteran Linux server administrators. ISD has continued evolving and out today is ISD v0.5 with the latest enhancements for better managing systemd.

Complementing the recent Linux GPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 looking at both the Linux / Steam Play gaming performance as well as GPU compute and other areas, in today's testing is a wide multi-generation look seeing how the NVIDIA GeForce performance has evolved going back to the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell GPUs up through the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards.

Intel software engineers overnight released the newest version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch. The v2.6 release brings new optimizations for current-generation Xeon 6 processors as well as new large language model (LLM) performance optimizations.

Last month when the state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver for RDNA4 GPUs was outlined, it was noted that cooperative matrix support was missing along with DCC support and Vulkan Video for these upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 GPUs. Vulkan cooperative matrix support ended up being merged earlier this month while hitting Mesa Git today is the DCC support that is important for RDNA4 performance.

MatterV 0.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source virtual machine management platform built atop KVM. MatterV aims to make it easy to manage VMs across different environments while with today's v0.7 release adds the ability to run unmodified VMware virtual machines atop KVM.

Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities.

Wayland Protocols 1.41 is shipping today with the color management protocol added for enabling high dynamic range (HDR) support on the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.14 that will debuting as stable before the end of March.

A few weeks back the Linux kernel "Faux Bus" was proposed by Greg Kroah-Hartman as a "fake" bus solution for simple devices. Today ahead of the Linux 6.14-rc3 tagging, the faux bus code was merged and comes at the same time both with C and Rust language bindings.

For four years there has been an open bug report for Mozilla Firefox requesting the browser's GTK widget support be updated for GTK4. An independent user/developer has taken it into his own hands and has managed to get Firefox using the GTK4 toolkit up and running on Linux.