Michael Larabel

Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech.

Google is proposing a new mseal() memory sealing system call for the Linux kernel. Google intends for this architecture independent system call to be initially used by the Google Chrome web browser on Chrome OS while experiments are underway for use by Glibc in the dynamic linker to seal all non-writable segments at startup.

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue.

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.

Queued up this week as part of the HID subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel test release has been a rather embarrassing bug: unplugging Logitech USB receivers has for the past several months been causing the Linux kernel to crash. After a number of bug reports around this issue from unplugging Logitech keyboard/mice receivers to simply switching away on a USB switch with the device(s) attached, the Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel is carrying the fix and it's also marked for back-porting to existing stable Linux kernel series.

Valve has just released Proton 8.0-4 as stable on the Steam client for enhancing the experience for running Windows games on Linux for this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play.

With the newest AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops there is "Ryzen AI" as a dedicated AI engine based on Xilinx IP to help accelerate machine learning with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. Sadly though this Ryzen AI with their new Zen 4 laptops is only supported under Microsoft Windows at this point. But it could change with sufficient customer interest.

For those that happen to have QLogic 10Gb PCIe Ethernet adapters, the mainline Linux kernel is planning to remove this driver from the kernel source tree unless any active users step-up.

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

The widely-used Curl project as a command-line tool and library for transferring data via a variety of protocols is preparing to roll-out Curl 8.4 early in order to address a particularly nasty vulnerability.

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode.

Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged "/usr" file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed.

While the Linux kernel tends to keep around drivers for even very old hardware, once there are no known users left that would still be updating to new Linux kernel versions or the drivers pose a significant maintenance burden, it's eventually time to let them go. We've seen the WiMAX wireless code removed and now the latest on the Linux wireless networking side inching close to the chopping block are old WiFi drivers.

Earlier this year Intel posted x86-simd-sort as a blazing fast sorting library that makes use of AVX-512. When the popular Numpy began using it they found up to 10~17x faster sorts for 16-bit to 64-bit data types. Today Intel software engineers released x86-simd-sort 3.0 and it also comes minutes after OpenJDK merged a modified version of this speeding sorting code into that reference JDK codebase.

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

For those making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with the latest AMD Radeon graphics hardware on Linux, the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release will support the high-quality AV1 preset for offering higher quality encodes.

A new release of Fwupd 1.9.6 is out today and it's notable in that AMD graphics cards can now enjoy firmware upgrades under Linux. This AMD GPU firmware updating works with Navi 3x GPUs and future hardware on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

Today the review embargo lifts on the first AMD-powered Framework laptop. There's one of the AMD Framework laptops in the lab for Linux testing and benchmarking but unfortunately no review for launch day due to being held up by a BIOS regression and thus unable to properly utilize accelerated graphics until a new BIOS revision is made available in the coming days.

System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code.

Friedrich Vock with Valve presented yesterday at XDC 2023 on the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance. Last year at XDC 2022 it was dubbed "the world's slowest raytracer" but thanks to the work done by Valve and others, the RADV ray-tracing performance is now quite capable and also enabled by default since Mesa 23.2. The RADV ray-tracing performance also continues inching closer to the AMDVLK Vulkan performance for that official open-source AMD Vulkan driver.

Google, Cloudflare and AWS today disclosed a new zero-day vulnerability called the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack. This attack that is being seen in the real-world relies on a weakness in the HTTP2 protocol for carrying out "hyper volumetric" Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon.

A set of patches posted last week can improve the Linux kernel's performance of accounted kernel memory allocations by around 30%.

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

Thursday marked the 18th birthday of the Geany open-source text editor / lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) project. In celebrating Geany turning 18, the Geany 2.0 release was made available. Geany 2.0 continues to strive toward the project goal of being a fast and easy to use text editor for coding.