Latest Linux and open source news from around the web

All Sources 9to5Linux Fedora Magazine Foss Force How-to Geek It's FOSS Linux Insider Linux Journal Linux Magazine Linux TLDR Linux.org Linuxiac LPI LWN.net OMG! Ubuntu Phoronix
Phoronix

Another RADV Ray-Tracing Merge Lands Some Additional Gains For Mesa 26.0

Separate from the Mesa merge request talked about earlier today for new RADV code that can deliver 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, another merge request landed today in Mesa 26.0 that was also carried out by Valve contractor Natalie Vock. That second merge request now in Mesa 26.0 delivers some additional gains for at least some ray-tracing games on RDNA3 and RDNA4 GPUs...

LWN.net

[$] Format-specific compression with OpenZL

Lossless data compression is an important tool for reducing the storage requirements of the world's ever-growing data sets. Yann Collet developed the LZ4 algorithm and designed the Zstandard (or Zstd) algorithm; he came to the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo to talk about where data compression goes from here. It turns out that we have reached a point where general-purpose algorithms are only going to provide limited improvement; for significant increases in compression, while keeping computation costs within reason for data-center use, turning to format-specific techniques will be needed.

LWN.net

[$] Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

The Debian GNOME team would like to remove the GTK 2 graphics toolkit, which has been unmaintained upstream for more than five years, and ship Debian 14 ("forky") without it. As one might expect, however, there are those who would like to find a way to keep it. Despite its age and declared obsolescence, quite a few Debian packages still depend on GTK 2. Many of those applications are unlikely to be updated, and users are not eager to give them up. Discussion about how to handle this is ongoing; it seems likely that Debian developers will find some way to continue supporting applications that require GTK 2, but users may have to look outside official Debian repositories.

Phoronix

An Early Run With Ubuntu 26.04 On AMD EPYC Turin - The Current Performance Gains Over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

There still are several months to go until the official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release -- including one month until the feature freeze and the future Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel is expected to land too before the latter kernel freeze in early April. But for those curious how Ubuntu 26.04 is looking so far for servers, here are some very early benchmarks of it on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" in its present development state. The main motivation here for this early look was stemming from the recent rolling-release CachyOS benchmarks on AMD EPYC and wanting to see how it goes up against the current development state of Ubuntu Linux.

LWN.net

Radicle 1.6.0 released

Version 1.6.0 of the Radicle peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for systemd credentials, use of Rust's clap crate for parsing command-line arguments, and more. LWN covered the project in March 2024.

LWN.net

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (sssd), Debian (linux-6.1 and python-parsl), Fedora (chezmoi, complyctl, composer, and firefox), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (buildah, libpq, podman, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and postgresql:16), SUSE (avahi, curl, ffmpeg-4, ffmpeg-7, firefox, istioctl, k6, kubelogin, libmicrohttpd, libpcap-devel, libpng16, libtasn1-6-32bit, matio, ovmf, python-tornado6, python311-Authlib, and teleport), and Ubuntu (angular.js, python-urllib3, and webkit2gtk).