Michael Larabel

Red Hat today issued an "urgent security alert" for Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide users over XZ. Yes, the XZ tools and libraries for this compression format. Some malicious code was added to XZ 5.6.0/5.6.1 that could allow unauthorized remote system access.

Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed.

Today's disclosure of XZ upstream release packages containing malicious code to compromise remote SSH access has certainly been an Easter weekend surprise... The situation only looks more bleak over time with how the upstream project was compromised while now the latest twist is GitHub disabling the XZ repository in its entirety.

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release.

The Linux 6.9 kernel will be able to boot systems with large amounts of memory -- and in particular making use of HugeTLB pages -- much faster than with previous kernels, netting a noticeable reduction in boot times.

The open-source Rust-written Redox OS has enjoyed "significant" performance and correctness improvements to its kernel recently as it further shows off the capability of this from-scratch OS.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution.

With time Microsoft's Linux kernel contributions have extended beyond just the initial business focus on Hyper-V support and other needs for Azure as well as around Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to more general contributions. Microsoft has also hired more key Linux contributors along with stakes in other projects like systemd. Earlier this week were patches from a Microsoft engineer working out Rust language improvements for the Linux kernel while now in ending out the holiday weekend are patches for making the Linux kernel language more inclusive.

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired.

A new release of Llamafile is available this Easter Sunday from the Mozilla Ocho group. Llamafile is a means of distributing and running large language models (LLMs) from a single file, making LLMs much easier to distribute and use by developers and end-users. Llamafile remains one of the more interesting non-browser projects out of Mozilla in recent times that so far has a bright future.

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm.

Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis.

The latest file-system driver with notable mentions for Linux 6.9 is that for Microsoft's exFAT file-system.

With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there's been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic.

What a time we live in where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support. A previously unimaginable combination of Microsoft, the Rust programming language, and the Linux kernel.

All of the x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. As usual, most of the x86 platform driver work is around better supporting various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops under Linux.

With the SDL library that's widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par.

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear.

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements.

While Linux 6.9 brings many great changes and new features / hardware support, on the deprecation side it's deprecating the classic EXT2 file-system driver.

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops.

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess.

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code.

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation.