Michael Larabel

The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.

I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel.

The US and western government sanctions around the Russian government and its defense industry/companies due to their war in Ukraine has caused interesting issues in the open-source world. A few days after ipmitool was archived/suspended on GitHub that turned out to be due to the current maintainer's affiliation with a Russian tech company, separately there is now a blocking of Linux kernel contributions from selected Russian developers.

One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid.

Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support.

While Adobe Flash is officially -- and thankfully -- dead, those interested in Adobe Flash Player for nostalgia or archival purposes, Ruffle is working to emulate Adobe Flash support via this open-source project making use of the Rust programming language.

If better open-source AMD Coreboot support was on your bingo card for years but long thought to be a lofty dream, get ready to celebrate... AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" as it concerns open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library, complete with AMD Coreboot support.

I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.

The GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor have completed their migration off GTK3.

Earlier this week Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 6.3 kernel merge window.

A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

On this last day of the Linux 6.3 kernel merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the patch dropping support for Intel (ICC) compiler support. Specifically this is Intel's long-standing ICC compiler now known as the "Intel C++ Compiler Classic" prior to its transition to being LLVM/Clang-based with the modern Intel DPC++ compiler.

Linux 6.4 is set to remove the old CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 options that are used for running newer versions of the Linux kernel with very old Linux distributions and user-space tools. Pre 2007~2008 distributions as a result would likely run into trouble trying to run on Linux 6.4+ kernels.

The Godot engine developers are starting off March with a bang... The much anticipated Godot 4.0 engine that has been in development for years has been released as stable!

The Linux 6.3 merge window has been off to a good start with Linus Torvalds receiving plenty of pull requests in advance, the other early pulls all coming in quite orderly, and no colorful commentary on any of the material set for Linux 6.3 even with the likes of Microsoft Pluton (TPM2 CRB). But today Torvalds' did feel the need to share some wisdom around Git merge log message advice.

While Ubuntu Linux hasn't provided Flatpak support out-of-the-box due to their preference of using their own Snap app packaging/distribution format, Ubuntu flavors/spins have to this point been able to pre-install Flatpak support if they desired. However, for the 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" cycle and moving forward, Ubuntu flavors will no longer be permitted to install Flatpak packages by default.

For those doing large Linux kernel builds such as with the "allyesconfig" build option for including as many of the available drivers as possible into the assembled Linux kernel image, objtool improvements ready to go with Linux 6.3 should cut down on the RAM usage and also speed-up the kernel build time. These improvements were motivated by Linux kernel developers beginning to run out of memory when trying to carry out the "allyesconfig" kernel builds on desktops with 32GB of RAM.

The RISC-V architecture updates were merged this Saturday for the Linux 6.3 merge window.

A patch series is proposing that the SLOB memory allocator be removed from the Linux 6.4 kernel this summer.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76.

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for the month prior and it points to Steam on Linux as a percentage dropping as well as a similar pullback in the Steam Deck hardware usage.

The beta of Fedora 38 is out and on-time this morning for those wanting to test this latest major update to Fedora Linux.

The networking subsystem feature updates for the Linux 6.3 kernel were submitted today that feature not only some prominent networking driver enhancements and new wired/wireless hardware support but also core networking improvements like BIG TCP for IPv4.

As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release.

TikTok owner Bytedance this week hosted their CloudFW Open System Firmware Symposium in Beijing where they celebrated the launch of CloudFW 2.0 as they implement Coreboot to replace UEFI.