Svobodný software

While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds' versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0.

The FreeBSD Project has published their Q4'2025 status report to outline progress made on their software, infrastructure, and other initiatives over the past quarter. Meanwhile among the work to look forward to this year in FreeBSD is getting their Rust kernel driver support up to scratch...

It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel's entire codebase as the single largest driver...

For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel "ANV" open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes...

While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS...

Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux's cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities...

FFmpeg developer Lynne is most known recently for all the Vulkan Video work to this open-source multimedia library while merged today to FFmpeg is another great contribution outside the scope of that: xHE-AAC MPS212 audio decoding support...

Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features...

There's the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell's contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years...

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4...

While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (OAC)...

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance "perf" subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors...

Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has been doing a fantastic job enhancing the older AMD Radeon GPU support under Linux. Last year he made enough improvements to the AMDGPU open-source driver that older Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 dGPUs switched over to AMDGPU by default for nice performance gains, RADV Vulkan driver support out of the box, and all around better experience than using the legacy Radeon driver. He's also been fixing countless bugs affecting older AMD GPUs. There is another improvement on the way for benefiting some with aging AMD GPUs...

The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids. Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support...

For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0...

Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its "experimental" in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release...

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0...

We haven't heard much about eCryptfs in recent years for that stackable in-tree Linux file-system providing per-directory encryption support. The FSCRYPT framework has shown its strong capabilities in recent years with various file-systems, Canonical hasn't been pursuing its user home directory encryption like it did years ago for the Ubuntu desktop, and full disk encryption is the most secure approach for ensuring data security on your system. But to some surprise with Linux 7.0 there are the most patches to eCryptfs that we have seen in a while...

The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with a new release. The ollama v0.17.0 release is driven by new functionality around enhancing the OpenClaw onboarding process...

Following last week's main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round of fixes to these Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Dominating most of the code changes in this latest pull were AMDGPU fixes, including more enhancements for aging Radeon graphics processors...