The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors...

Philip Rebohle announced the release today of DXVK 3.0 as the latest major feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for use by Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...

The Academy Software Foundation that advances open-source efforts for the VFX/cinema industry and more with the likes of OpenVDB, OpenMoonRay, Open Shading Language, and other projects, has announced the formation of a new working group to help with Wayland adoption for artists...

Last week marked the release of an updated Raspberry Pi OS that moved to Linux 6.18 LTS from its former Linux 6.12 kernel base along with making a number of other package updates. Given the jump to the newer Long Term Support kernel and other improvements, I ran some fresh benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) to see the performance difference out of the updated operating system.

Servo 0.3 released today as the latest version of this modern browser engine developed in Rust. With Servo 0.3 the demo servoshell browser is becoming more useful and supporting additional modern web features while Servo also continues to possess much potential moving forward on the embedded front as an alternative to the likes of the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)...

Linux 7.2 is continuing the trend of removing obsolete hardware drivers for which the code hasn't seen any maintenance in years and there are no believed users left of said drivers, especially those that would be running modern mainline versions of the Linux kernel. The char/misc changes merged dropped two more obsolete drivers from the Linux source tree...

Cache Aware Scheduling is one of the most exciting kernel innovations to land in Linux this year. While it was finally merged last week to Linux 7.2, a new patch series today is already working to extend Cache Aware Scheduling and is showing some exciting performance improvements...

An AMD engineer has contributed to the upstream FFmpeg library an ONNX Runtime back-end for its DNN filter. The FFmpeg Deep Neural Network (DNN) filters allow for running AI models natively inside the video processing pipeline for upscaling, object detection, background segmentation, and more. This ONNX Runntime back-end support is notable in that it expands the GPU and NPU capabilities with FFmpeg...

Way back in 2017 for the Linux 4.12 kernel the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver was added to the kernel's staging area. Nearly a decade later, it's still being cleaned-up to suit the more rigorous non-staging area of the kernel in the formal networking subsystem. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is once again dominated by clean-ups to this Realtek WiFi driver...

Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server. There hasn't been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support...