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LWN.net

[$] Ripping CDs and converting audio with fre:ac

It has been a little while since LWN last surveyed tools for managing a digital music collection. In the intervening decades, many Linux users have moved on to music streaming services, found them wanting, and are looking to curate their own collection once again. There are plenty of choices when it comes to ripping, managing, and playing digital audio; so many, in fact, that it can be a bit daunting. After years of tinkering, I've found a few tools that work well for managing my digital library: the first I'd like to cover is the fre:ac free audio encoder for ripping music from CDs and converting between audio formats.

LWN.net

[$] An API for handling arithmetic overflow

On March 31, Kees Cook shared a patch set that represents the culmination of more than a year of work toward eliminating the possibility of silent, unintentional integer overflow in the kernel. Linus Torvalds was not pleased with the approach, leading to a detailed discussion about the meaning of "safe" integer operations and the design of APIs for handling integer overflows. Eventually, the developers involved reached a consensus for a different API that should make handling overflow errors in the kernel much less of a hassle.

LWN.net

Nix privilege escalation security advisory

The NixOS project has announced a critical vulnerability in many versions of the Nix package manager's daemon. The flaw was introduced as part of a fix for a prior vulnerability in 2024. According to the advisory, all default configurations of NixOS and systems building untrusted derivations are impacted. A bug in the fix for CVE-2024-27297 allowed for arbitrary overwrites of files writable by the Nix process orchestrating the builds (typically the Nix daemon running as root in multi-user installations) by following symlinks during fixed-output derivation output registration. This affects sandboxed Linux builds - sandboxed macOS builds are unaffected. The location of the temporary output used for the output copy was located inside the build chroot. A symlink, pointing to an arbitrary location in the filesystem, could be created by the derivation builder at that path. During output registration, the Nix process (running in the host mount namespace) would follow that symlink and overwrit

LWN.net

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openssl), Fedora (corosync, goose, kea, pspp, and rauc), Mageia (python-pygments, roundcubemail, and tigervnc), SUSE (bind, gimp, google-cloud-sap-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, ignition, ImageMagick, python, python-PyJWT, and python-pyOpenSSL), and Ubuntu (adsys, juju-core, lxd, python-django, and salt).

Phoronix

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 To Be Priced At $899 USD

At the end of March AMD announced the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 processor with both dies having 3D V-Cache. This 16 core processor with 206MB of total cache is quit exciting and will be on sale later this month but AMD refrained from commenting on the price until today...

Phoronix

Intel Arc Pro B70 Benchmarks With LLM / AI, OpenCL, OpenGL & Vulkan

Last month Intel announced the Arc Pro B70 with 32GB of GDDR6 video memory for this long-awaited Battlemage G31 graphics card. This new top-end Battlemage graphics card with 32 Xe cores and 32GB of GDDR6 video memory offers a lot of potential for LLM/AI and other use cases, especially when running multiple Arc Pro B70s. Last week Intel sent over four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards for Linux testing at Phoronix. Given the current re-testing for the imminent Ubuntu 26.04 release, I am still going through all of the benchmarks especially for the multi-GPU scenarios. In this article are some initial Arc Pro B70 single card benchmarks on Linux compared to other Intel Arc Graphics hardware across AI / LLM with OpenVINO and Llama.cpp, OpenCL compute benchmarks, and also some OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks. More benchmarks and the competitive compares will come as that fresh testing wraps up, but so far the Arc Pro B70 is working out rather well atop the fully open-source Linux graphics driver stack

Phoronix

Intel Releases OpenVINO 2026.1 With Backend For Llama.cpp, New Hardware Support

Intel's OpenVINO toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inferencing across their range of hardware platforms is out with its newest quarterly feature update. There is official support for Intel's latest hardware as well as enabling more large language models and other new AI innovations for this excellent open-source Intel software project...