Intel has released new CPU microcode for addressing five security issues and additionally there is newly-merged Linux kernel code for mitigating the new Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" micro-architectural vulnerability affecting Atom / E cores...

VUSec and IBM Research Europe today announced Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs) as a as a new class of vulnerabilities where thread synchronization primitives using conditional branches can be microarchitecturally bypassed on speculative paths using a Spectre-V1 attack. The researchers have dubbed CVE-2024-2193 as GhostRace and is said to affect all major CPU vendors...

Last week saw Plasma 6.0.1 for an initial batch of bug fixes for this major desktop environment that debuted the week prior. Out today is Plasma 6.0.2 with another round of bug fixes that have been addressed over the past week...

Building off last November's release of the big OBS Studio 30.0 release, OBS Studio 30.1 debuted today as the newest feature release...

David Airlie has submitted all of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates today for Linux 6.9...

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz has been known for many great Mesa improvements the past several years, especially around Zink for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa. Over the past four years he has taken on many great performance optimizations and other significant code undertakings to improve Mesa. Blumenkrantz has picked his latest battle and appears to be around Mesa's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) interfaces...

While the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.8 as this modern DRM driver that is opt-in for current generation hardware and aims to be the default for Lunar Lake / Xe2, currently with Mesa you must build the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D driver code with the "intel-xe-kmd" option to enable compatibility for this alternative kernel driver to i915. With Mesa 24.1 coming next quarter, that Intel Xe kernel driver support will be enabled out-of-the-box...

The Linux work around atomic consoles and threaded printing remains ongoing. This work is particularly interesting as it's the last major blocker before real-time "RT" kernel support can land. This work sadly isn't ready for the new Linux 6.9 cycle but at least some printk clean-ups are landing for issues discovered during the atomic consoles effort...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat who leads development of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd firmware updating utility is currently pondering plans for 2025. Among the ideas he's seeking input from the community is on whether the main focus should be on servers, desktop motherboards, laptops, or other removable hardware/peripherals...

System76 had been planning an initial alpha release of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to debut at the end of Q1 (March), but now they are delaying the first alpha to May for allowing time to wrap up feature work on their new desktop apps...

All of the ARM SoC updates and new machine/platform additions were submitted and merged on Tuesday for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month around DeviceMapper's Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) preparing to be upstreamed, it was successfully merged today by Linus Torvalds as the newest shiny feature of Linux 6.9...

The EFI updates were merged today for the ongoing Linux 6.9 merge window. This cycle the EFI kernel code is seeing enhancements for confidential computing as well as for satisfy Microsoft's requirements for getting them to sign the x86 shim loader again for UEFI Secure Boot handling...

Since the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel it's been humming along fairy well. But today the Bcachefs feature updates were sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window and Linus Torvalds isn't happy about some of the proposed code...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 24.0.3 as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release to the current Mesa 24.0 stable series graphics drivers...

The current Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series products that were announced in 2022 built off Arctic Sound M are the Data Center GPU Flex 140 and Data Center GPU Flex 170 while now a new "170G" variant was added for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

The Krita open-source graphics editor and digital art program is looking at possibly adding some AI features to its arsenal as well as possible GPU acceleration and other new features in 2024...

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release Linux distribution has begun rolling out the KDE Plasma 6.0.1, Gear 24.02 apps, and Frameworks 6.0 packages. Plasma 5 is being replaced within the Tumbleweed repository but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't yet transitioning to the Wayland session by default...

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API...