Michael Larabel

Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks.

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!

Less than twenty-four hours after Bcachefs was submitted for Linux 6.7, this new open-source file-system has been successfully merged for this next kernel version.

Overnight the mainline Linux kernel has retired support for Intel Itanium (IA-64) processors.

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software.

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default.

In addition to the many x86/x86_64 and AArch64 improvements this round for Linux 6.7, on the RISC-V architecture side are some exciting kernel advancements too.

The latest software offering announced today by Canonical with an enterprise focus and their hopes of driving new Ubuntu Pro and support subscriptions is MicroCloud. Their MicroCloud software aims to make it easy to deploy a private cloud that is a "fully functional cloud in minutes" atop Ubuntu Linux.

The Linux 6.7 merge window has been downright exciting with additions like Nouveau GSP support and the Bcachefs file-system being added. It's also been downright massive as one of the largest merge windows in recent history in terms of code changes. Here's some statistics of the Linux 6.7 merge window ahead of today's Linux 6.7-rc1 release.

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.

One of the great niche features of Ubuntu Linux has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA that's been maintained by Canonical for providing daily kernel builds of the Linux Git kernel state as well as of all point releases and release candidates. Sadly it's now been broken for one month for this very convenient feature.

Another merge window, another attempt for Bcachefs to be mainlined. This file-system was submitted again today for the now-open Linux 6.7 merge window and it stands better chances this cycle of being upstreamed.

One of the many early pull requests sent in for Linux 6.7 were the x86/boot changes that are headlined by a rework to the PE header generation in order to generate a modern, 4K-aligned kernel image view to ultimately aim for better system security.

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion.

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward.

Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.

Slint as a reminder is a Rust-written open-source graphical toolkit that on Linux uses Qt currently underneath. Slint has been making good progress on its goals and today marks the availability of Slint 1.3.

Wine 8.20 is out today and it takes care of quite a vintage bug report... A feature request from 2010 to be able to register URL protocol handlers under Linux.

Following some release delays the past few weeks, it's been decided today that Fedora Linux 39 is now ready to ship next week.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial "request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C.

Systemd 255-rc1 is out this morning and it's packed with even more features for this dominant Linux init system and a growing list of other system utilities. Systemd 255 even is introducing systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" for displaying important error messages during boot failure, systemd-vmspawn as a new tool to spawn virtual machines, and other new features.

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release and in turn also marking the Netplan 1.0 release.

Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux.