Michael Larabel

Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons. Using Linux though and other open-source software would ease development, open more developers to being able to work on said avionics platforms, have much better documentation, and lower other barriers, but there are challenges currently involved.

Besides being curious about the Steam Survey results for indicating the size of the Linux gaming marketshare as an overall percentage, one of the interesting metrics we are curious about each month is the AMD vs. Intel CPU marketshare for Linux gaming. AMD has been on quite an upward trajectory among Linux gamers/enthusiasts in recent years not only for their Radeon graphics cards with their popular open-source driver stack but their Ryzen CPUs have become extremely popular with Linux users. With the new Steam Survey results for June, AMD CPUs are found on nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems polled by Steam.

Mozilla Firefox 115.0 official builds are now available for this notable update to this open-source web browser while also marking the new Extended Support Release (ESR) series.

Google engineers have published early code around "Device Memory TCP" (a.k.a. Devmem TCP) as a proposal for transferring data to/from device memory efficiently by avoiding the need to copy the data to a host memory buffer.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.

With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do.

While the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended days ago and there still is two months to go until that stable release, already the lead developer of the Bcachefs file-system is working to get the code merged for Linux 6.6.

As a devoted Thunderbird mail client user for the past nearly twenty years since its first release, I'm elated today by the release of Thunderbird 115.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use.

Along with detailing Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Intel as effectively a footnote to that also disclosed another exciting addition to find with future Intel CPUs: AVX10. Most notably for consumer use is that AVX10 will enable AVX-512 capabilities across both Performance and Efficient core designs with hybrid processors.

The most popular topic among the emails I received this weekend weren't of direct technical nature but the number of people pointing out Twitter's new "X" logo and the similarities to the X.Org logo.

Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture.

If there wasn't enough Red Hat drama happening in recent weeks, the Red Hat Display Systems Team is now considering to implement privacy-preserving telemetry beginning with Fedora Workstation 40.

Yesterday Oracle published an interesting announcement and doubled down on their intentions of keeping Oracle Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux following Red Hat's controversial announcement last month. Today is another very interesting response to Red Hat's recent shift, this time from the SUSE Linux folks.

Btrfs has long provided a built-in integrity checker tool into the file-system driver. However, slated for Linux 6.6 is deprecating of this integrity checker.

There's a lovely new Linux kernel patch series out that's big in working on a major clean-up of the x86 APIC code (or "decrapification" as it's called in the patches) and also bringing up for discussion the idea of killing off x86 32-bit support. It's unlikely the x86 32-bit support will be removed right now, which is "just museum pieces", but as an alternative would be making it SMP-only to at least remove the uni-processor code paths.

LXD as the open-source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) has long been closely associated with Canonical due to its founding and pushed along by the Ubuntu maker as one of their software offerings. However, it has to this point been part of the Linux Containers project except moving forward Canonical has decided to pull it more into their direct control.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn't write as much actual kernel code these days as he used to. These days he's often busy overseeing the upstream kernel development community with reviewing code, managing releases, and chiming in on mailing list discussions. Once in a while though he gets down and dirty with some low-level kernel hacking just as he's done now for Linux 6.5 with improving the user-mode stack expansion code.

It looks like the updated Family 17h microcode this morning isin relation to a new Zen 2 CPU security vulnerability being disclosed. The Linux kernel has also just received a patch for this "Zenbleed" vulnerability for older AMD CPUs.

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

Following the stunning decision last month by IBM that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, AlmaLinux quickly came out working on a path forward and Rocky Linux also shared some ideas how they may continue providing a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. We've been waiting for Oracle to comment on their plans for the RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux distribution and today they finally issued a statement.

The Hangover open-source project has been working on supporting Windows apps and games on other CPU architectures like AArch64 running Linux. RISC-V and POWER9 are other CPU architectures of interest for enabling Hangover support. Besides leveraging the Wine software, Hangover to date has relied on the QEMU emulator as part of the implementation while now they have begun integrating FEX support too.

While IO_uring has been one of the most interesting kernel innovations of recent years and can allow for great speed-ups to async I/O, there have been some security concerns and with the Linux 6.6 kernel it will be easier for Linux administrators to disable it system-wide if so desired.

Building off last month's release of Debian 12.0, Debian 12.1 is out today to ship dozens of bug fixes.

Earlier this month Canonical asserted control over the LXD project. As another step in tightening up control over this container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) is now apparently limiting LXD maintainership rights to only Canonical employees.