Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature.

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch.

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform.

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support.

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August.

All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.

MidnightBSD 3.2 is out as the newest feature update to one of the few desktop-focused BSD operating systems still being maintained. MidnightBSD 3.2 continues to be derived from FreeBSD sources while shipping with a nice Xfce-based desktop experience.

Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Andrew Morton on Sunday sent in his "MM" pull requests for Linux 6.11 of the areas of the kernel he manages.

GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation.

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

Yann Collet released LZ4 v1.10 today as a major update to this extremely fast compression algorithm. Most significant with LZ4 1.10 is adding multi-threaded compression support for much faster performance with today's modern multi-core processors.

Konstantin Komarov with Paragon Software has prepared the latest patches for the NTFS3 kernel driver that is providing the modern NTFS read/write file-system support on Linux systems.

Way back at the start of 2023, French fabless semiconductor company Kalray posted Linux kernel patches for a "KVX" Linux kernel port to get Linux up and running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture. A year and a half later this work still is outside the Linux kernel but finally a third iteration of the KVX Linux kernel port has been posted for review.

Intel's oneAPI Video Processing Library (VPL) GPU Runtime 2024Q2 release is now available along with an updated quarterly release of the Intel Media Driver.

Back in March were a set of patches to the Linux kernel's XZ embedded compression implementation with the project having switched from public domain to the BSD Zero Clause License along with other changes to update that in-tree code. Since then the notorious XZ backdoor situation was discovered in the upstream XZ project. With those major issues behind, Lasse Collin today sent out an updated set of patches for updating the in-tree XZ code for the Linux kernel.