DB scene today

Servo, Thunderbird, Firefox

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released version 6.6.65 of the kernel:

This release only fixes a build regression for openrisc, and a runtime regression for domU guests. If you don't have problems with them, no need to upgrade.

With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel one of the biggest features for those using new AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors is using the AMD P-State driver by default for servers/motherboards with ACPI CPPC support enabled. But even for platforms without that where ACPI CPUFreq remains the default, the Linux 6.13 kernel is still showing some nice incremental uplift at large on these new AMD server processors. Here are some Linux 6.11 vs. 6.12 vs. 6.13 Git kernel benchmarks using an AMD EPYC 9575F 64-core server.

Going back to April 2024, SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as an interesting RISC-V developer board to succeed their HiFive Unleashed that was a nice little RISC-V board. There were delays in shipping the HiFive Premier P550 but they have been making progress and are now ready to ship Ubuntu 24.04 LTS pre-installed on this RISC-V board. They have also lowered the pricing on these RISC-V boards...

For fans of OpenMandriva or just wanting to reminisce over the former Mandrake Linux days, OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 is out today as the newest update to this Linux distribution...

IBM, Debian, and more

Instructionals/Technical articles

The Linux kernel has many tunable parameters. While there is much advice available on the internet about how to set them, few people have the time to weed through the (often contradictory) explanations and choose appropriate values. One possible way to address this is a project called bpftune, a program that uses BPF to track various metrics about a running system and adjust the sysctl knobs appropriately. The program is developed by Oracle, and is available under a GPLv2 license. Bpftune is currently mostly focused on optimizing network settings, but the authors hope that the system is flexible enough to be extended to cover other settings.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (proftpd-dfsg and smarty3), Fedora (python3.14), Gentoo (Distrobox, eza, idna, libvirt, and OpenSC), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8 and edk2), SUSE (avahi, curl, libsoup2, lxd, nodejs20, python-Django, python310-Django4, python312, squid, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (expat, intel-microcode, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, and shiro).

QEMU 9.2 open-source machine emulator and virtualization software has been released today with various improvements, new features, and other changes.

Most people don’t give much thought to their operating system

It was just a little more than one month ago that AlmaLinux Kitten 10 became available for testing for this new OS release derived from the CentOS Stream 10 sources that is upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Today the AlmaLinux crew announced the first beta release of AlmaLinux 10...

Renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today that the Linux 6.12 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website.

I’ve been the Fedora Project Leader for more than ten years

Development picks

Security and Windows TCO

Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence

Back at the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting was an interesting presentation by AMD engineer Joseph Huber for how they have been exploring running common, standard C/C++ code directly on GPUs without having to be adapted for any GPU language / programming dialects or other adaptations...

Miracle-WM is the Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager that is inspired in part by the likes of i3 and Sway. Miracle-WM also has a goal to be a flagship example of a Mir-based full featured window manager with this project being led by a Canonical engineer. Out today is Miracle-WM 0.4 to deliver the latest features...