Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content...
The newest Mesa 26.0-devel code as of today has landed initial support for Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics into the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Adreno Gen 8 graphics so far are most notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC with its X2-85 GPU as well as the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Adreno 840 graphics...
RAM and SSD prices are skyrocketing as manufacturers prioritize AI servers over consumer PCs.
Bcachefs 1.33 Linux filesystem introduces a new reconcile engine that unifies data and metadata handling while simplifying replication and recovery tasks.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the standards body responsible for the TLS encryption standard — which your browser is using right now to allow you to read LWN.net. As part of its work to keep TLS secure, the IETF has been entertaining proposals to adopt "post-quantum" cryptography (that is, cryptography that is not known to be easily broken by a quantum computer) for TLS version 1.3. Discussion of the proposal has exposed a large disagreement between participants who worried about weakened security and others who worried about weakened marketability.
Jon Seager, VP of engineering for Canonical, has announced a plan to develop a universal Public Key Infrastructure tool called upki: Earlier this year, LWN featured an excellent article titled "Linux's missing CRL infrastructure". The article highlighted a number of key issues surrounding traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but critically noted how even the available measures are effectively ignored by the majority of system-level software on Linux. One of the motivators for the discussion is that the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) will cease to be supported by Let's Encrypt. The remaining alternative is to use Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs), yet there is little or no support for managing (or even querying) these lists in most Linux system utilities. To solve this, I'm happy to share that in partnership with rustls maintainers Dirkjan Ochtman and Joe Birr-Pixton, we're starting the development of upki: a universal PKI tool. This project initially aims to close
Manjaro 25.1 "Anh-Linh" preview ships major upgrades, but users are warned to wait due to several breaking changes requiring manual intervention.
Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton...
Google engineers for the past number of months have been working on the Live Update Orchestrator as a new way of applying live Linux kernel updates. The Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" builds atop the Kexec Handover "KHO" functionality already within the kernel. Google has since been deplyoing LUO in their production environments for faster security updates to kernels, especially when involving VMs. LUO is now upstream in Linux 6.19...
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, krita, lasso, and libpng1.6), Fedora (abrt, cef, chromium, tinygltf, webkitgtk, and xkbcomp), Oracle (buildah, delve and golang, expat, python-kdcproxy, qt6-qtquick3d, qt6-qtsvg, sssd, thunderbird, and valkey), Red Hat (webkit2gtk3), and SUSE (git-bug, go1, and libpng12-0).
Firefox 146 lands with smoother visuals on Linux Wayland thanks to new fractional scaling support and important graphics updates across platforms.
Sometimes derivative Linux distros are better than the original.
Firefox 146 open-source web browser is now available for download with various new features and improvements. Here's what's new!
Ventoy 1.1.08, an open-source tool for creating a bootable USB drive to load multiple ISO files, now supports FreeBSD 15.0.
It has been a while since I've done hardware reviews. Hopefully, some of you may recall the article 'Rock Pi 4 and Android TV'. Since the Rock Pi 4, by Radxa, there have been a few newer boards. In this article, I will cover the Rock 5T board. Specifications There is a lot of hardware on this board. This is a major update to the Rock Pi 4. Let's look at some of the hardware specs in the Rockchip RK3588... https://www.linux.org/threads/radxa-rock-5t-review-a-powerful-arm-single-board-computer.57752/
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