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134k Lines Of Code Posted As Latest Effort For COBOL Support Within GCC
134k Lines Of Code Posted As Latest Effort For COBOL Support Within GCC
83 Minutes Ago - GNU - COBOL Frontend - 2 Comments

While it's an old language, in recent months there's been a renewed effort over a COBOL language front-end for the GCC compiler. There's been out-of-tree COBOL support for GCC that is working to get into the mainline GNU Compiler Collection codebase. This weekend saw the latest iteration of those patches amounting to 134k lines of new code.

15 February

NTSYNC Driver Fix Being Worked On For Proper User Permissions
NTSYNC Driver Fix Being Worked On For Proper User Permissions
15 February 11:05 AM EST - Linux Gaming - NTSYNC - 25 Comments

One of the great new features of Linux 6.14 is the NTSYNC driver being completed for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives so that software like Wine and Proton (Steam Play) can provide for better performance when running Windows games on Linux. But it turns out an oversight up to now has meant that in practice it's not really too usable out-of-the-box.

Karol Herbst Steps Down As Nouveau Maintainer Due To Linux Kernel's Toxic Environment
Karol Herbst Steps Down As Nouveau Maintainer Due To Linux Kernel's Toxic Environment
15 February 06:40 AM EST - Nouveau - Leaving Nouveau - 244 Comments

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.

KDE Developers Addressing Early Bugs From Plasma 6.3
KDE Developers Addressing Early Bugs From Plasma 6.3
15 February 06:27 AM EST - KDE - Plasma 6.3 Bugs - 9 Comments

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.

14 February

Dynamic Triple Buffering Merged For GNOME 48
Dynamic Triple Buffering Merged For GNOME 48
14 February 01:35 PM EST - GNOME - Dynamic Triple Buffering - 33 Comments

As quite a Valentine's Day treat, the long-in-development dynamic triple buffering support for GNOME's Mutter compositor was just merged ahead of next month's GNOME 48 desktop release!

Ubuntu Making Progress On Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut
Ubuntu Making Progress On Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut
14 February 07:00 AM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu + Dracut Future - 25 Comments

As a follow-up to the news from last October of Ubuntu considering Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation, that work remains ongoing with some improvements since having been prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release but it remains overall an active affair.

13 February

Bcachefs Freezes Its On-Disk Format With Future Updates Optional
Bcachefs Freezes Its On-Disk Format With Future Updates Optional
13 February 02:18 PM EST - Linux Storage - Bcachefs On-Disk Format Frozen - 31 Comments

The latest round of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted today for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel. Besides fixes for the current kernel, it was announced today that the on-disk format for the file-system is now considered frozen in its latest development "master" branch.

Hector Martin Resigns From The Asahi Linux Project
Hector Martin Resigns From The Asahi Linux Project
13 February 10:56 AM EST - Operating Systems - Asahi Linux - 147 Comments

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.

Device Trees For Apple T2 SoCs Slated For Upstreaming In Linux 6.15
Device Trees For Apple T2 SoCs Slated For Upstreaming In Linux 6.15
13 February 06:58 AM EST - Apple - Apple T2 SoC DTs - 7 Comments

While there has been the recent drama over upstream maintainership over Apple Silicon / Asahi Linux code, Sven Peter is continuing to move things forward for the upstream kernel and this week sent out a set of Apple SoC DeviceTree updates intended for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.

12 February

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Switching From AppArmor To SELinux For New Installations
12 February 08:47 PM EST - SUSE - OpenSUSE + SELinux - 38 Comments

SUSE/openSUSE has a long history with the AppArmor Linux security module going back to the Novell days and when AppArmor was originally known as SubDomain. OpenSUSE/SUSE and Ubuntu Linux have been big proponents of AppArmor for Linux security but now moving forward on new installations of openSUSE Tumbleweed it will be defaulting to Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

GNU Shepherd 1.0.2 Service Manager Delivers Fixes
12 February 10:00 AM EST - GNU - GNU Shepherd 1.0.2 - 40 Comments

In addition to the recent release of SysVinit 3.14 and systemd continuing to tack on new features, the GNU Shepherd system/user service manager written in Guile Scheme is out today with a new release.

Linux 6.15 To Bring More Improvements To DRM Panic "Screen of Death"
12 February 06:52 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Black Screen of Death - 19 Comments

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers.

Intel C1 Demotion Knob Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Help Newer Xeon CPUs
12 February 06:35 AM EST - Intel - Intel C1 Demotion Knob - 2 Comments

A patch has been proposed for the Linux kernel to add a C1 demotion knob via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/c1_demotion for more control over lower power state handling for recent Xeon Scalable processors. This C1 demotion knob can help with the performance of some workloads for Intel Xeon servers but at the cost of increased power consumption.

11 February

Intel CPU Microcode Updated For Five New Security Issues
11 February 12:15 PM EST - Intel - Intel CPU Microcode - 2 Comments

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved.

GNOME 48 Now Allows Grouping Notifications By App
11 February 10:18 AM EST - GNOME - Notifications Grouped By App - 48 Comments

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis.

AMD AOMP 20.0-2 Compiler Adds The "flang-new" Fortran Compiler Option
11 February 06:24 AM EST - AMD - AMD AOMP 20.0-2 - Add A Comment

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware.

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