Michael Larabel

One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased "nontechnical nonsense" raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued.

The Linux kernel itself can already boot quite fast but with a simple one-line patch another ~0.035 seconds will be able to be shaved off the boot time.

Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window in mid-September is optional support for displaying a QR code within the DRM Panic handler infrastructure when a Linux kernel panic occurs.

The FreeBSD open-source operating system project published their Q2'2024 status report that outlines some interesting work happening to this leading BSD project.

Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.

Coming as a surprise this afternoon is Microsoft deciding to contribute the Mono Project to be stewarded by the Wine development community.

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

NVIDIA software engineer Andrea Righi has implemented his "scx_rustland" Linux Rust scheduler within eBPF for very promising performance results.

LinkedIn has replaced CentOS as their default server operating system choice with Azure Linux to power all of their server needs.

Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems.

Following decisions like exploring -O3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux, another newly-announced change by Canonical I must applaud is their decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream kernel code at release time.

AMD Linux engineers are preparing the kernel for Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) as a feature for AMD EPYC server processors. Smart Data Cache Injection is a nifty new feature that allows for direct insertion of data from I/O devices into the CPU's L2/L3 cache.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap that highlights all of the interesting KDE desktop changes to have landed over the past week.

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS was scheduled to ship this week but has now been delayed to the end of August in order to address some high profile upgrade bugs.

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise.

System76 today is releasing an alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 that is built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and making it very interesting is that it includes the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment. I've been playing around with this Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha in advance of today's embargo lift and it's been working out quite well.

Longtime Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has written an interesting blog post providing an analogy to types of developers compared to road builders and hotels.

Nearly three years in the making, the ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 protocols have been merged into the Wayland Protocols repository for vastly improving screen capture support on the Wayland desktop.

KDE Gear 24.08 has been released for this collection of KDE applications that pair with the Plasma desktop.

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage.

A Qualcomm engineer has posted the Linux kernel patches for adding the DeviceTree to support the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 devices powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 SoCs. This allows Linux to run on these new Snapdragon X1-powered Microsoft laptops but as with the other devices there are a number of support caveats that for most end-users will be a showstopper.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux.

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser.