Michael Larabel

Karol Herbst has been a Nouveau driver developer for over a decade working on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. He went on to become employed by Red Hat. While he's known more these days for his work on Mesa and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver. But today he announced he's resigning as a Nouveau driver maintainer due to differences with the upstream Linux kernel developer community.

The debate over the Linux kernel's Rust programming language policy continues... While some kernel maintainers are against it, Linus Torvalds has reportedly said he would override maintainers that may be against honoring Rust code. Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has also been a big proponent of Rust kernel code. He's crafted another Linux kernel mailing list post today outlining the benefits of Rust and encouraging new kernel code/drivers to be in Rust rather than C.

Zlib-rs as a Rust programming language implementation of the Zlib file format for better safety is now beginning to outperform the C implementations of the widely-used Zlib.

Following the recent Rust drama within the Linux kernel that came out in part because Christoph Hellwig expressed objections to Rust bindings for the DMA mapping helpers that he is a maintainer of, Hellwig has now stepped down as one of the DMA mapping helper maintainers.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to finally introduce a standardized way of informing user-space of GPUs becoming hung or otherwise unresponsive. This is initially wired up for AMD and Intel graphics drivers on Linux so the user can be properly notified of problems and/or user-space software taking steps to address the hung/unresponsive graphics processor.

Last year Microsoft donated the Mono Project to Wine for its stewardship under the WineHQ umbrella. Today marks the Framework Mono 6.14 release as the first major Mono release in five years and the first under the WineHQ organization.

The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues... Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation.

The drama surrounding Rust code within the Linux kernel continues... Christoph Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers and several other areas of the kernel has been an outspoken critic of Rust code or secondary programming languages within the Linux kernel kernel. Hellwig has been critical of Rust code for the Linux kernel and its long-term maintainability. Today he's out with another mailing list post where he notes that Linus Torvalds mentioned in private he would override maintainer vetoes on Rust code within the kernel.

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.

In a surprising announcement, Electronic Arts announced today that they have open-sourced Command and Conquer Red Alert under the GPL license along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and related titles.

A fix was merged to the Linux 6.14 kernel on Friday -- and also for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels over the coming days -- for fixing an annoying problem with Intel Core 2 processors. The problem, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2019, could lead to system stalls and boot delays for those still using Intel Core 2 CPUs with modern distributions.

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA.

The OBS Studio open-source screencasting and streaming app has called out Fedora's poor Flatpak packaging of the application and is threatening as going as far as legal action if it isn't addressed.

For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn't too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau's extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

For four years there has been an open bug report for Mozilla Firefox requesting the browser's GTK widget support be updated for GTK4. An independent user/developer has taken it into his own hands and has managed to get Firefox using the GTK4 toolkit up and running on Linux.

Stemming from the ongoing discussion around the issues raised with Fedora's Flatpak package of OBS Studio and how Flatpaks should be prioritized within the GNOME Software app center/store, the future of RPM support within GNOME Software raised.

Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path... Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code.

Last week Hector Martin resigned from upstream maintainership of the Apple Silicon code for the Linux kernel. At the time he was still going to contribute to the Asahi Linux project's downstream kernel but in a surprise move today, he has decided to resign as project leader of Asahi Linux.

Back in 2017 was the initial open-source DirectX Shader Compiler milestone and since then Microsoft has continued iterating on it with better Linux support, new features, and ironing out other gaps in this "DirectXShaderCompiler" project. On Friday they released the newest version of this DirectX Shader Compiler that features another newly open-sourced component.

KDE Plasma 6.3 released this week as the newest step forward for the KDE desktop. While it was smooth on the whole, there were some early bugs that KDE developers were dealing with this week. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary for the Plasma desktop.

The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken.

System76 engineers remain quite busy working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS operating system as well as other Linux distributions moving forward.

Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities.

Valve is supporting Lenovo with the Legion Go S gaming handheld running their Arch Linux based SteamOS. Beyond the fanfare at CES, Valve has been collaborating with Lenovo on engineering resources for ensuring the Legion Go S is running well with SteamOS and in turn the mainline Linux kernel. It turns out from a recent sneaky patch, Valve quietly added support to the Linux kernel for what ended up being the Lenovo Legion Go S controller/input handling.

MatterV 0.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source virtual machine management platform built atop KVM. MatterV aims to make it easy to manage VMs across different environments while with today's v0.7 release adds the ability to run unmodified VMware virtual machines atop KVM.