Linux

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.

There is some apprehension if all the proper fall-backs will be in place and robust enough in the event of any problems with this user-space console solution, but ultimately there was unanimous approval in the FESCo ticket for going ahead with these KMSCON plans for Fedora 44.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

These four security issues originate from within code originally inside the libxkbcommon library and back in 2018 was flagged with four CVEs. Those security issues included endless recursion resulting in a crash and three null pointer dereference issues leading to possible crashes.

This is your friendly reminder that the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series has reached end of life after being maintained for more than six years, receiving over 300 maintenance updates.

“All users of the 5.4 kernel series must upgrade to a newer branch at this point in time.”

Originally released on November 24th, 2019, the long-term supported (LTS) Linux 5.4 kernel series received six years of support, from November 2019 until December 2025. The last maintenance update is Linux 5.4.302, released today by renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

This morning, an announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list published by Greg Kroah-Hartman stated that Linux 5.4.302 is the last maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 5.4 kernel series, which is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website.

As expected, the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years.

Linux kernel 6.18 was released at the end of November 2025 with new features like support for the Rust Binder driver, a new dm-pcache device-mapper target to enable persistent memory as a cache for slower block devices, and a new microcode= command-line option to control the microcode loader’s behavior on x86 platforms.

While Linux 6.18 is making its way into the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora Linux, and others, it has already received LTS (Long Term Support) status on the kernel.org website, supported until December 2027.

AlmaLinux, an enterprise Linux distribution, is widely used as a free and reliable alternative to RHEL for server workloads. Now, somewhat unexpectedly, it’s also aiming to broaden its reach on the desktop—specifically in the multimedia and film-industry content-creation niche.

In light of this, the AlmaLinux community has introduced a new Special Interest Group focused on the Media and Entertainment sector, designed to support studios working in visual effects, animation, and post-production, as licensing shifts and rising support costs affect the software ecosystem.

Its objective is to provide a stable, community-owned, enterprise Linux platform tailored for production environments.

The Sharp PC-G801 was an impressive little pocket computer when it debuted in 1988. However, in the year 2025, a Z80-compatible machine with just 8 kB of RAM is hardly much to get excited about. [shiura] decided to take one of these old machines and upgrade it into something more modern and useful.

The build maintains the best parts of the Sharp design — namely, the case and the keypad. The original circuit board has been entirely ripped out, and a custom PCB was designed to interface with the membrane keypad and host the new internals. [shiura] landed on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to run the show. It’s a capable machine that runs Linux rather well and has wireless connectivity out of the box. It’s paired with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller that handles interfacing all the various parts of the original Sharp hardware. It also handles the connection to the 256×64 OLED display. The new setup can run in ESP32-only mode, where it acts as a classic RPN-style calculator. Alternatively, the Pi Zero can be powered up for a full-fat computing experience.

Lepton appears to be the new official name for Valve's version of Waydroid (Android in a Linux container).

We still don't have a whole lot of details about how this is all going to work, outside of Lepton enabling Android APKs for developers on the upcoming Steam Frame VR kit, but it's now that little bit more official with a proper name and even a logo.

After AlmaLinux 9.7 appeared two weeks ago, followed by Oracle Linux 9.7, the Rocky team now announced the general availability of Rocky Linux 9.7 (Blue Onyx), as the seventh refresh to the 9.x series for this RHEL-based replacement, with refreshed installation media, cloud, container, WSL, and live images now available via the project’s downloads page.

Powered by Linux kernel 5.14, the update introduces new system-wide cryptographic policy improvements, including support for post-quantum cryptography. Dynamic language stacks receive updates such as Node.js 24 and Valkey 8, while system toolchain components such as Glibc 2.34 and Annobin 12.98 receive maintenance improvements.

The Mint team has just released its regular monthly newsletter. This time, we have some exciting updates to share with you: the project has outlined the final steps toward the release of Linux Mint 22.3, codenamed “Zena,” the third refresh in the 22.x series following 22.1 “Xia” and 22.2 “Zara” releases.

The team reports that most components have now been tagged for inclusion, and a beta release is planned for the next 10 days.

According to the devs, development has entered its final phase, and packaging work has been committed to the repositories. Given that historically the gap between a Mint’s beta release and the final stable one is typically 2 to 4 weeks, with a high degree of predictability, we can expect 22.3 “Zena” around Christmas.

An important set of patches were just merged a few minutes ago to Linux Git for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel with some important performance implications.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner yesterday sent in the "core/rseq" pull request for Linux 6.19 Git that was then merged today by Linus Torvalds. This pull includes the patches rewriting the memory-mapped concurrency ID "MM CID" code within the kernel that was found to provide up to a ~14%+ performance improvement for PostgreSQL database throughput. As well, my own testing of this MM CID rewrite also showed very positive gains -- on AMD EPYC hardware used for testing. My tests of those patches were covered in Intel's Rewrite Of Linux MM CID Code Showing Some Nice Gains For AMD.

Valve released the statistics from the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2025, which shows once again that Linux use is trending nicely upwards.

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.

The Intel NPU driver support is now available via -- current "experimental" -- packages across openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Slowroll, openSUSE Leap 15.6, and openSUSE Leap 16.0. This Intel NPU driver is available as the linux-npu-driver. Yes, the name is rather poor considering it's Intel-specific and the "linux-" rather redundant given it's within the confines of openSUSE.

TLP, an advanced command-line power-management tool for Linux that improves battery life and optimizes system power usage, released v1.9, focusing on enhanced power-saving capabilities, more flexible profile switching, and stronger battery-care support across a wider range of hardware.

The highlight is the new tlp-pd daemon, which implements the same D-Bus API used by power-profiles-daemon, allowing GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, and other desktop environments to interact with TLP’s profiles through their existing interfaces.

Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the "klp-build" script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade.

My primary use case for Amber is when I need to write a Bash script but don't remember the silly syntax. My most recent Bash mistake was misusing test -n and test -z. In Amber, I can just use something == "" or len(something) == 0

NVIDIA released the beta version of the upcoming NVIDIA 590 series of their graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems.

The NVIDIA 590 graphics driver series promises improved support for Wayland users by raising the minimum supported Wayland version to 1.20 and fixing a bug that prevented the PowerMizer preferred mode drop-down menu in the nvidia-settings control panel from functioning correctly on Wayland systems.

The NVIDIA 590 series also promises better support for Vulkan apps by improving the performance of recreating Vulkan swapchains, which helps prevent stuttering when resizing Vulkan application windows, and fixing several issues that prevented Vulkan apps from working on the Venus VirtIO virtual GPU.

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.

Merged yesterday alongside other pull requests submitted by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner was the feature of allowing file-systems to increase the minimum writeback chunk size.

SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted the Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.19 on Friday, ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release that took place on Sunday. This copy-on-write file-system continues seeing some enticing feature work and other improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

With the Linux 6.18 kernel Btrfs added experimental support for block sizes greater than the page size. That "BS > PS" work continues being built out in Linux 6.19. The code now supports more operations when not using large folios, like encoded read/write and Btrfs SEND support. Btrfs' native RAID5 / RAID6 support is also now able to handle the block size being greater than the page size.

Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it's likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release.

NTSYNC has been in the mainline Linux kernel for a while now and the latest Wine 10.xx development builds along with the upcoming Wine 11.0 stable build allow making use of that kernel code for a faster implementation of emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives. But the issue at hand is the NTSYNC kernel module driver isn't auto-loaded when needed and without any users currently outside the likes of Wine or Wine-based software like Steam Play (Proton), there's little use having it unconditionally loaded.

The media subsystem updates were sent out this morning for the now-open Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some new Rockchip drivers and other media drivers that are new for Linux 6.19.

The first new Rockchip driver is the VICAP RKCIF driver. This driver has been in the works for a while and going through a number of rounds of review for supporting the Rockchip Camera Interface "CIF". This is used by the Rockchip PX30 Video Input Processor (VIP), Digital Video Port (DVP), and RK3568 Video Capture (VICAP) unit. This driver takes care of mainline support for this Rockchip Camera Interface and hardware-wise for Linux 6.19 is focused on the PX30, RK3568 VICAP DVP, and RK3568 VICAP MIPI interface.

Following yesterday's Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers.

With Linux 6.18 there are more upstream kernel drivers dependent upon binary-only firmware/microcode. Among the drivers called out this cycle are the open-source NVIDIA Nova-Core Rust driver as well as the modern Intel Xe driver. Nova-Core is exclusively designed around the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) usage and thus without its firmware the driver is inoperable. Similarly, with the newer Intel Xe driver depending upon the GuC micro-controller without its firmware the support is also rendered useless.

KDE Connect is a popular cross-platform app that allows you to send files across devices and more - with a security advisory being sent out due to a woops. Noted as CVE-2025-66270, that woops could allow an attacker to entirely skip proper authentication.

An overview of the issue:

Versions of KDE Connect released after March 2025 implement version 8 of the KDE Connect protocol. In this version, the discovery of other devices with KDE Connect on your network involves an additional packet exchange between the two devices. While the first packet is used to determine if a device is paired or not, this additional packet is used to identify the device that is connecting.

The vulnerable implementations of KDE Connect were not checking that the device ID in the first packet and the device ID in the second packet were the same. This could be abused by first sending a device ID of an unpaired device which doesn't require authentication, followed by sending the device ID of a paired device in order to impersonate it.

The vulnerable versions they list are:

KDE Connect desktop >= 25.04 and < 25.12
KDE Connect iOS >= v0.5.2 and < 0.5.4
KDE Connect Android >= v1.33.0 and < 1.34.4
GSConnect >= 59 and < 68
Valent >= v1.0.0.alpha.47 and < v1.0.0.alpha.49

The KDE developers are suggesting you stop using KDE Connect until your Linux distribution releases an update for it, or to manually patch it yourself if you're able to.

See more in the security advisory.

Almost a month after the previous 2.0.17 release, fwupd, an open-source tool designed to simplify firmware updates on Linux-based systems, has reached version 2.0.18.

The release introduces a new MOTD message that appears when a staged update requires a reboot, along with the automatic creation of a reboot-required file. Additionally, the new version also records the system state for each composite emulation and allows USI docking stations to update without requiring a manual replug.

On the bug fixes side, firmware operations now properly detect Intel SPI BIOS lock issues on MTD devices, and systems without SecureBoot support can use UpdateCapsule more reliably. Parsing of UEFI capsule result headers and USB BOS descriptors has been corrected, and firmware deployment on x86_64 systems now uses the appropriate capsule flags.