Rust 1.85.0 released
the largest edition we have released". The 2024 edition guide has a detailed listing of all the changes that were incorporated this time around.
the largest edition we have released". The 2024 edition guide has a detailed listing of all the changes that were incorporated this time around.
Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced
leadership updates for Mozilla. This includes a Mozilla Leadership
Council made up of executives from each Mozilla organization, and new
board chairs for the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, the
Mozilla Corporation, and Mozilla.ai. The announcement also
indicates a desire to further "diversify
" Mozilla's focus:
We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts.
Steven Rostedt recently posted a patch set that could help improve the performance of certain user-space applications by giving the scheduler more context about when they are safe to interrupt. The patch set lets programs request a small grace window before they can be interrupted so that they can relinquish any locks, decreasing the amount of time that other threads have to spend waiting. Rostedt shared performance numbers suggesting that the patch might cut the amount of time spent acquiring locks in half for some programs — although, since his test was specifically tuned for this case, real-world projects should expect a somewhat less dramatic improvement. The change received some pushback from scheduler maintainer Peter Zijlstra, who objected to the patch set's approach.
The flashiest addition is probably the support for Vulkan 1.4 by Anv (Intel), Asahi (Apple), Lavapipe (software), NVK (NVIDIA), PanVK (Mali), RADV (AMD), and Turnip (Qualcomm). Users can expect the usual flurry of improvements across all drivers and components."
The Fedora Project has announced two milestones in its journey to supporting the RISC-V architecture: a dedicated RISC-V Koji build system instance is live in the Fedora data center, and Fedora 41-based images are now available for RISC-V. It is also possible to run Fedora RISC-V images using QEMU for those without supported hardware.
Debian Developer Thomas Lange has written a blog post in the attempt to help users find the right Debian image for their systems.
It's difficult to find the right Debian image. We have thousands of ISO files and cloud images and we support multiple CPU architectures and several download methods. The directory structure of our main image server is like a maze, and our web pages for downloading are also confusing.
[Bernhard] Wiedemann took on this 4-month-long project to create a fork of openSUSE that has 100% bit-reproducible packages. So far ring0 (aka bootstrap) and ring1 with 3,300 software packages have all successfully been patched and tested.
This build is not yet recommended for production use, though.
Kernel developers have been working to convert various internal interfaces to use folios; while this process has been progressing, there is still the occasional regression introduced by the change. In December 2024, it was discovered that installing a Flatpak application could trigger a filesystem bug in the kernel that would cause the software to read incorrect data from the disk. The problem was quickly fixed — only for an another problem caused by the folio rewrite to pop up in the same kernel subsystem. This was discovered by an Arch Linux user, who noticed that selecting files in a Flatpak application was causing kernel crashes. Now both bugs are fixed, but there may be more bugs to find.
It is a standard practice to use milestones to reflect on the achievements of a project, such as the anniversary of its first release or first commit. Usually, these are observed at five and ten‑year increments; the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release, or 25 years since from the first public announcement, etc. Lennart Poettering, however, took a different approach at FOSDEM 2025 with a keynote commemorating 14 years of systemd, and a brief look ahead at his goals and systemd's challenges for the future.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three more stable kernels: 6.13.3, 6.12.14, and 6.6.78. There was a bit of confusion that resulted in the patch for CVE 2025-21687 getting applied twice — but that doesn't result in any problems for users of the kernel, just a bit of extra noise in the CVE database, so Kroah-Hartman has decided to leave the releases as-is instead of rushing another point release.
So the first few weeks of the 6.14 release development were smaller-than-usual, but rc3 is actually right in line with normal releases at this point. Probably just timing of pull requests, and we'll see how next week goes. But nothing looks worrisome.
Along with the usual stream of fixes, this release includes the "faux bus", designed for simple drivers that just need some sort of virtual bus to be associated with; this bus come with Rust bindings from the outset.