After two months of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 6.16. Among the most notable changes are: a driver for accelerating OpenVPN, a Kexec HandOver mechanism, default inclusion of five-level memory page tables for x86, removal of the DCCP protocol, a zloop block driver, the ability to send core dumps via UNIX socket, support for atomic writes in XFS, offload processing of audio for USB devices, optimizations in Ext4, virtual […]
The release of the SVT-AV1 3.1.0 library (Scalable Video Technology AV1) has been announced, featuring implementations of both the encoder and decoder for the AV1 video encoding format, utilizing the hardware parallelization extensions available in x86_64 and ARM processors for acceleration. The project was created by Intel in partnership with Netflix to achieve a performance level suitable for on-the-fly video transcoding and applications in […]
The release of the Slackel 8.0 distribution, built on the foundations of the Slackware and Salix projects, has been published and is fully compatible with the repositories provided in them. A key difference of Slackel is the use of a continuously updated Slackware-Current branch. The graphical environment is based on the Openbox window manager. The size of the boot image, capable of operating in Live mode, is 3.6 GB (i386 and x86_64). The new release is synchronized with the Slackware Current branch […]
To be included in the future kernel 6.17, optimizations and new features enhancing Btrfs performance have been proposed: Experimental support for large memory page folios. It is expected that this change will reduce overhead and improve the performance of several operations. Currently, the feature is technically ready for widespread use but has not undergone sufficient testing to declare it stable. Caching requests to […]
The release of the specialized distribution Tails 6.18 (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) has been announced, developed as part of the Tor project. This distribution is based on the Debian 12 package base, comes with the GNOME 43 desktop, and is intended for anonymous web access using the Tor tools. By default, all connections except traffic through the Tor network are blocked by a packet filter. When saving user data […]
Administrators of the Python package repository PyPI (Python Package Index) have removed the block after it was discovered that 1,500 projects were created not by malicious users, but by a security team at VK, which owns the inbox.ru domain. Their goal was to prevent potential attacks on external libraries used within VK. VK representatives have apologized and assured that this will not happen again […]
The author of WiX, an open tool for creating installation packages for Windows, is developing a Maintenance Fee initiative to address the funding problem for maintaining open projects. The Maintenance Fee initiative allows for a small monthly fee (suggested at $10) to support the financial sustainability of projects, without compromising their openness or relying on funding models like Open Core, which imply […]
The Android Canary branch, which replaces the Android Developer Preview and is used for testing features for future Android releases, has added the ability to run graphical applications built for Linux. This is accomplished through the Linux Terminal app, which allows for the launch of a virtual machine with Debian GNU/Linux within the Android environment where standard Linux applications can be executed. To start the graphical environment in the application […]
The first experimental release of the Wayback 0.1 project has been introduced, allowing the launch of desktop environments based on the X11 protocol using components built on Wayland. Wayback is a trimmed-down Wayland composite server that only supports the necessary features for running a full-screen X11 session using Xwayland (the DDX component (Device-Dependent X) for executing X11 applications in Wayland-based environments). The project's code is written in […]
The release of the OPNsense 25.7 distribution for creating firewalls has been published. This project separated from pfSense in 2015 with the goal of developing a fully open distribution that could offer functionality on par with commercial solutions for deploying firewalls and network gateways. Unlike pfSense, the project is positioned as being independent of any one company, developed with direct community involvement and […]
The release of Apache HTTP Server 2.4.65 has been announced, which fixes a critical bug in mod_rewrite causing conditions specified through the 'RewriteCond' expression to always return 'true', meaning rules always triggered regardless of the checked data. The 'RewriteCond' expression is key in mod_rewrite and is used to check conditions in most situations. The issue was caused by an incorrect change in a previous release and manifests only […]
Enrico Weigelt, the lead of the XLibre project, has prepared a pull request integrating the main drivers for X11 into the master branch of the X server after discussions with the community. The reason cited is the desynchronization between the X server and drivers due to the changing ABI that the drivers interact with, as well as the desire to provide all necessary drivers alongside the X server without the need for manual searches for compatible versions. Some community members criticize this […]