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Today's disclosure of XZ upstream release packages containing malicious code to compromise remote SSH access has certainly been an Easter weekend surprise... The situation only looks more bleak over time with how the upstream project was compromised while now the latest twist is GitHub disabling the XZ repository in its entirety...

AMD GPUOpen's Orochi project as a reminder is the effort for allowing dynamic runtime switching between the Radeon HIP and NVIDIA CUDA APIs to allow better cross-GPU portability. Today marks the availability of Orochi 2.0 for enhancing this API to target NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP hardware...

Red Hat today issued an "urgent security alert" for Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide users over XZ. Yes, the XZ tools and libraries for this compression format. Some malicious code was added to XZ 5.6.0/5.6.1 that could allow unauthorized remote system access...

Now that the Linux 6.9 merge window is past I've begun testing out this in-development kernel on more hardware platforms in the lab. While some performance boosts like Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" running faster on Linux 6.9 was to be expected given EPP tuning in the new kernel specific to those SoCs, one of the unexpected delights has been seeing AMD 4th Gen EPYC performance with some nice performance gains over Linux 6.8 stable.

Fedora 39 had hoped to use the DNF5 package manager by default as the next iteration of this package management solution for RPM-based distributions. But DNF5 wasn't ready and then delayed to Fedora 41 -- skipping over the Fedora 40 series due to the RHEL 10 branching from it and not wanting the very new DNF5 to be part of that merge. Now the change proposal has been re-filed for introducing DNF5 by default in Fedora 41...

Merged on Thursday to GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the linux-drm-syncobj-v1 Wayland protocol that is used to handle the global migration to explicit synchronization...

Intel is ending out the month and quarter with the latest update to its open-source Compute Runtime and Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code that enables OpenCL and Level Zero support on Linux systems and is also used by their Windows driver too...

CodeWeavers' Elizabeth Figura has been working on the NTSYNC driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel in order to help the performance of various Windows games running on Linux by the likes of Wine / Valve's Proton (Steam Play). The third iteration of that driver was posted overnight as it seeks to go into the mainline Linux kernel...

Since the mid-90's with the P6 micro-architecture for the Pentium Pro as the sixth-generation x86 microarchitecture, Intel has relied on the "Family 6" CPU ID. From there Intel has just revved the Model number within Family 6 for each new microarchitecture/core. For example, Meteor Lake is Family 6 Model 170 and Emerald Rapids is Family 6 Model 207. This CPU ID identification is used within the Linux kernel and other operating systems for identifying CPU generations for correct handling, etc. But Intel Linux engineers today disclosed that Family 6 is coming to an end "soon-ish"...

Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis...

While the uutils Rust-written Coreutils effort has been chugging along, the upstream GNU Coreutils effort is showing no signs of slowing down. Out today is GNU Coreutils 9.5 with yet more feature work and bug fixes including a security fix for a chmod issue that's been around since the beginning...

While Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" has been working out well under Linux already -- especially with regards to the enticing integrated Arc Graphics -- with the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel it's looking even better for the CPU performance. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake performance with Linux 6.8 vs. 6.9 Git.

Arm China is looking at upstreaming their "Zhouyi" NPU driver into the Linux kernel via the recently-created accelerator "accel" subsystem. The Arm China Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver in its current form has both an open-source kernel and user-space stack...

Simon McVittie issued the Flatpak 1.15.7 pre-release on Wednesday with a few notable changes for this widely-used open-source app sandboxing and distribution framework...

Patches posted today by an Intel engineer allow for importing scanout buffers from other devices with the VirtIO DRM driver that is used in the virtualization space. The importing of scanout buffers from other devices/drivers can allow for more efficient use by avoiding excess copies...

Adding to the Linux 6.9 features is a minor post merge window change: the read-only EROFS file-system is no longer treading its FSDAX support as experimental...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso recently began the effort of creating an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for the Rockchip NPU found in some of the latest Rockchip SoCs. After succeeding at open-source NPU driver support for the VeriSilicon NPU IP, Vizoso took up the challenge of working on Rockchip NPU support. With his open-source user-space driver he's already got his first model running. Not only is it running but it's doing so at similar performance to the proprietary driver...

Some time ago I ran through a number of benchmarks of Google Cloud's C3D VMs powered by AMD EPYC Genoa processors. The AMD EPYC 9004 series showed terrific performance with strong generational improvements over the Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Following that a request came in to examine the PingCAP TiDB database performance given its growing popularity. In this article we'll review those benchmarks showing how GCE C3D delivers strong performance advantages for TiDB.

Samba 4.20 is out as the newest feature update to this free software implementation for SMB networking protocol support and others to enhance file/print interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems...

Besides its desktop-level customizations, further differentiating System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution from its Ubuntu LTS package base is the tendency to roll down newer versions of the upstream Linux kernel once validated across System76's portfolio of laptops and desktops. The latest on that front is Pop!_OS now shipping with the fresh Linux 6.8 stable series...