ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Rust-Based, Memory-Safe PNG Decoders "Vastly Outperform" C-Based PNG Libraries

([Programming] 9 December 09:05 AM EST Rust-Based PNG Decoders Performance)

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.


The 2024 LLVM Developers’ Meeting Videos Now Online

([LLVM] 9 December 08:36 AM EST 2024 LLVM Developers Meeting)

For those wishing to kick off the new week with some interesting technical videos and are into compiler tech, the video recordings from the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting are now online.


ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS Seeing Linux Sensors Support

([AMD] 9 December 06:48 AM EST ASUS X670E PLUS)

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.


Glibc 2.41 Adds C23's sinpi / cospi / tanpi Functions

([GNU] 9 December 06:36 AM EST GNU C Library 2.41)

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.


openSUSE Touts Improved Multi-GPU Switching Support

([SUSE] 9 December 06:19 AM EST switcherooctl)

The openSUSE project shared today that there is enhanced multi-GPU switching support to enjoy now with openSUSE Linux.


Raspberry Pi 500 Launches Along With Raspberry Pi Monitor

([Raspberry Pi] 9 December 05:51 AM EST Raspberry Pi 500)

Launched four years ago was the Raspberry Pi 400 as the Raspberry Pi 4 adapted for a keyboard form factor. Launching today is the Raspberry Pi 500 for upgrading that keyboard computer using the Raspberry Pi 5 internals. An official Raspberry Pi Monitor was also released.


Linux 6.13-rc2 Released With An Initial Batch Of Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 05:16 PM EST Linux 6.13-rc2)

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.13-rc2 with an initial serving of bug/regression fixes following last week's Linux 6.13-rc1 release that capped off the feature-packed Linux 6.13 merge window.


Linux EFI Zboot Abandoning "Compression Library Museum", Focusing On Gzip & Zstd

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 09:50 AM EST EFI Zboot)

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.


Ubuntu flash-kernel Package Looks To Drop Support For Old ARM Hardware

([Ubuntu] 8 December 06:51 AM EST flash-kernel)

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.


Linux 6.13-rc2 To Workaround Buggy Intel Lunar Lake Leading To Responsiveness Issues

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 07:00 AM EST Broken MONITOR)

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.


Manjaro 24.2 Released With GNOME 47 Updates, Powered By Linux 6.12 LTS

([Operating Systems] 8 December 06:05 AM EST Manjaro 24.2)

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.


Mold 2.35 Released With Big Endian ARM64 Support

([Programming] 8 December 05:41 AM EST Big Endian ARM64)

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.


More Kernel Bitrot: Old & Busted UltraSPARC T2 "Niagara 2" SPU Driver Slated For Removal

([Linux Kernel] 7 December 04:09 PM EST Sun Niagara 2 Days...)

Following 107k lines of old driver code within the staging area of the kernel removed for Linux 6.13, over in the crypto space they are looking at some cleaning as well with plans raised to remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) driver for the old Sun Niagara 2, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 and this SPU was also found in the UltraSPARC T3 as well.


OpenWrt Affected By Security Issue That Could Have Led To Compromised Build Artifacts

([Operating Systems] 7 December 09:00 AM EST CVE-2024-54143)

A security issue was reported to the OpenWrt project this week around their Attendedsysupgrade Server (ASU) instances that could have led to compromised firmware images being served.


UMD Direct Submission "Proof Of Concept" For The Intel Xe Linux Driver

([Intel] 7 December 06:58 AM EST User-Space Direct Submission)

One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.


AMD Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel

([AMD] 7 December 06:31 AM EST AMD HFI v7 For Linux)

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.


Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 Adds 64K Kernel Option, NFTables & Intel E800 Networking

([Microsoft] 7 December 06:18 AM EST Azure Linux 3.0.20241203)

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.


KDE Starts December By Landing A Number Of New Features

([KDE] 7 December 05:47 AM EST New Features)

While the winter holidays are quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy working on new feature code for the Plasma 6.3 desktop. A number of new features were merged this week for the KDE desktop.


OBS Studio 31.0 Released With New Features For Screen Recording & Screencasting

([Multimedia] 6 December 08:32 PM EST OBS Studio 31.0)

OBS Studio 31.0 was released this evening as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform software for live streaming and desktop screen recording purposes. OBS Studio remains a leading choice across operating systems for screen recording, game livestreaming, and similar purposes while the new v31.0 release tacks on even more features.


Wine 10.0-rc1 Released With Updated VKD3D, Initial Bluetooth Driver

([WINE] 6 December 04:04 PM EST Wine 10.0-rc1)

The first release candidate of Wine 10.0 is out today that also now marks the feature freeze ahead of this stable release expected to be out around mid-January.


More

"Brown Orifice" Is Only The Beginning

Last week security holes were found in Netscape's Java implementation that
allowed it to act as a web server. Earlier today, a hacker announced that
he had found vulnerabilities in Mozilla M17 that allow it to operate as a
web browser. And that's just the beginning.

Said "3l337h4x0r", the discoverer of the M17 exploit, "This is quite a
hack! By manipulating some internal functions, I was able to use M17 to
actually surf the web. Slashdot and Humorix rendered beautifully."

Mozilla engineers were stunned. "This shouldn't be possible. M17 contains
a newsreader, a mail client, an instant messenger client, and a whole
bunch of XUL acronymn-enriched stuff, but it shouldn't be able to handle
HTTP or HTML. We haven't been planning on adding web-surfing functionality
to Mozilla until M30... maybe M25 at the earliest. I suspect this whole
thing is a hoax."