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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.

For those interested in WebAssembly for the "run anywhere" prospects and container-like secure execution, Wasmer remains one of the leading WASM runtime options. Wasmer 6.0 Alpha 1 is out today as the latest to further along this quest.

For those that typically wait for the first point release before moving to a new software version, KDE Plasma 6.3.1 is out today with a few dozen fixes for the week since the Plasma 6.3 debut.

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking at including more Intel graphics driver packages as part of the hardware enablement "HWE" stacks shipped as part of Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) point releases. This would provide more comprehensive coverage of newer Intel driver components with future Ubuntu LTS point releases to benefit both the integrated and discrete graphics.

One of the AMD software projects we are very bullish on for the future is openSIL for opening up more of the CPU silicon initialization code for what will eventually replace AGESA across all client and server processors that is aiming for production readiness with Zen 6. In turn, AMD openSIL should allow easier/better Coreboot support. One of the development milestone release targets did slip but they remain working on preparing AMD openSIL releases for Phoenix client and Turin server hardware.

There is an openSUSE project called Reproducible-openSUSE "RBOS" working on a proof-of-concept for constructing openSUSE in a bit-identical manner as part of the broad Reproducible Builds effort to be able to reproduce builds bit-for-bit against what is being compiled by the distribution vendor or other software distribution. The openSUSE RBOS has achieved 100% bit-identical packages as a major milestone.

More than seven years in the making, merged yesterday for PostgreSQL is a self-join elimination "SJE" feature as a performance optimization for some queries.

Following the upstream Wayland Protocols repository landing the Wayland color management protocol for enabling HDR support and this morning's release of Wayland Protocols 1.41, the SDL library and MPV media player are the first two clients supporting this now-official protocol.

For all of those that were intrigued over the independent code porting the Firefox web browser to the GTK4 toolkit, there has been a bit more progress and all of the code is also now obtainable via GitHub for this unofficial port.

A few weeks ago I wrote about ISD as a new open-source project for interactively managing systemd that aims to be more user intuitive especially for those that aren't veteran Linux server administrators. ISD has continued evolving and out today is ISD v0.5 with the latest enhancements for better managing systemd.

The friends at CodeWeavers have relayed work that they are looking to hire multiple Wine developers to join their paid team working on upstream Wine as well as their CrossOver products, Valve's Proton downstream for Steam Play, and related Wine-based tech.

Last month when the state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver for RDNA4 GPUs was outlined, it was noted that cooperative matrix support was missing along with DCC support and Vulkan Video for these upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 GPUs. Vulkan cooperative matrix support ended up being merged earlier this month while hitting Mesa Git today is the DCC support that is important for RDNA4 performance.

Intel software engineers overnight released the newest version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch. The v2.6 release brings new optimizations for current-generation Xeon 6 processors as well as new large language model (LLM) performance optimizations.

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.

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.

Wayland Protocols 1.41 is shipping today with the color management protocol added for enabling high dynamic range (HDR) support on the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.14 that will debuting as stable before the end of March.

A few weeks back the Linux kernel "Faux Bus" was proposed by Greg Kroah-Hartman as a "fake" bus solution for simple devices. Today ahead of the Linux 6.14-rc3 tagging, the faux bus code was merged and comes at the same time both with C and Rust language bindings.

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.

The GNOME 48 Beta release was officially announced this morning as the latest stepping stone toward the official GNOME 48 desktop release due out in mid-March.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will be adding support for Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet.

Btrfs-Progs 6.13 was released this weekend as the newest routine update to the user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system.

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.

Following last week's FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 1 release to kick off this next FreeBSD 13 point release that will also end the series, FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 2 is out this weekend for testing.

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 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 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 nearly three year old Serpent OS Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus fame is going to re-brand as AerynOS.

Go 1.24 was released this week by Google engineers as the newest step forward for this popular programming language.

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!

A change queued up by an Amazon engineer ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will ensure that PlayStation 5 controllers on Linux load with the correctly desired driver.

Fwupd 2.0.6 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source solution for system and peripheral device firmware updating under Linux.

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.

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.

If you wish to show your appreciation for all of the Linux hardware reviews, Linux benchmarking, and open-source news provided on Phoronix each and every day, you can join Phoronix Premium this Valentine's Day weekend at a discounted rate.

Vulkan 1.4.308 was quietly released last week and besides a few fixes what makes it interesting is the provisional VK_NV_present_metering extension.

Valkey as the open-source in-memory store forked from Redis is preparing for its next feature release.

TrueNAS 25.04 beta was released on Thursday as another step toward unifying the TrueNAS CORE OS derived from FreeBSD and the Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE.

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.

The Zed code editor for macOS and Linux systems has proven to be quite popular for this Rust-based editor started by the creators of the Atom editor. Their latest feature being introduced is Zeta as an open-source edit prediction model to further enhance this code editor with AI capabilities.

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.

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.

Submitted today via the x86 platform driver updates ahead of Linux 6.14-rc3 on Sunday are some Lenovo ThinkPad patches that may interest some users.

For those preferring the AOM-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder over SVT-AV1, Rav1e, or other AV1 encoders, Google this week unveiled AOM-AV1 3.12.

As a quick follow-up to the article earlier today... The Wayland Color Management and HDR protocol support is now merged to upstream Wayland Protocols!

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.

Similar to the Autonomous Performance Level Selection and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) support already found within the Intel P-State and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers for their modern processors, NVIDIA engineers are working on similar support for the CPPC CPUFreq driver that can benefit their Grace processor.

Today could finally be the day. In the works for 5+ years, the Wayland color management and HDR protocol additions look like they will finally be merged in the coming hours.