In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance. In some tests this has yielded as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged...

Linux 6.10 introduces DRM Panic for providing a new panic screen in case of kernel errors and situations where the VT support may be disabled. This new kernel functionality is akin to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or thanks to open-source can be adapted to take on other forms such as a black screen of death and conveying monochrome logos rather than ASCII art. New patches provide for the ability to show QR codes of error messages within the DRM Panic screens...

For years Meta/Facebook has been exploring using BOLT with the Linux kernel to optimize the layout of the Linux kernel binary. Since BOLT was upstreamed into LLVM, they've continued work around BOLT'ing the kernel. There is now a public guide for carrying out a BOLT-optimized Linux kernel build and roughly 5% better system performance to expect from such an optimized kernel...

While CentOS 7 reached end of life a few days ago, CentOS Stream 10 as the future basis of RHEL 10 continues advancing along with other ongoing initiatives in the CentOS Stream space...

UC San Diego researchers have gone public with Indirector, high-precision branch target injection attacks on the indirect branch predictor. This UCSD security researchers found Indirector impacting recent Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Intel believes though that no further mitigations are required...

Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs...

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration...

The GNU Hurd team has put out their Q2'2024 status update to outline recent activity around this micro-kernel platform...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension...

A new preview release is available of Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 operating system...

In addition to proposed opt-in data metrics collection and the new web-based installer UI, some of the other early proposals for Fedora Linux 42 that isn't due out until April of 2025 is expanding the possibilities for unprivileged users...

The Intel kernel graphics driver code being queued for the Linux 6.11 kernel already has added the initial Intel Battlemage PCI IDs, Battlemage display support, eDP Panel Replay support, Hardware Replay to help with hang debugging, SR-IOV preparations, and more Lunar Lake / Xe2 enablement. Today another unexpected last minute pull request was submitted of a bit more Xe driver code...

Back in May there were Linux kernel patches posted as a workaround for Arm CPU errata around the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) handling. Initially this workaround was just noted as the Cortex-X4 and Neoverse-V3 as being affected, but now it turns out many more exciting Arm processor cores are impacted...

Nearly every Linux kernel cycle has bought patches to bump the version of the Rust language targeted by the kernel as it worked toward having a suitable minimum version. With the latest Linux kernel patches, it looks like we may be finally approaching the point where a safe minimum version can be specified and for the Linux kernel to in turn allow supporting multiple different versions of the Rust compiler...

LLVM Clang 19 this morning landed initial support for the -std=c2y and -std=gnu2y options for targeting the next C programming language standard...

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with its monthly development summary that notes some interesting work taking place...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek has released Miracle-WM v0.3 as the newest version of this Wayland tiling compositor built atop Mir. Miracle-WM is beginning to be useful and practical enough for daily driving by its lead developer...

The kernel powering Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) has long been using the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel while finally it's now upgraded past that aging long-term support kernel and onto the current Linux 6.6 LTS series...