Page 161 - Esktop Linux News Today

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window

Btrfs in Linux 6.5 brought various performance improvements and prior to that it was a busy cycle with Linux 6.4 while now with Linux 6.6 the Btrfs file-system driver is mostly centered on delivering fixes.

To help harden the Linux kernel from memory vulnerabilities and in particular heap spraying, set to be merged into the Linux 6.6 kernel is optional support for randomized slab caches for kmalloc() calls.

The Intel-led SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder is out with a major release that delivers on more performance improvements across the board.

The EEVDF scheduler code has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features.

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.

While at the start of Linux 6.5 cycle Linus Torvalds was concerned this release 'may be one of those releases that may drag out', in the end it is releasing today and right on schedule

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a student developer took the initiative in working on an automated Gentoo Linux system updater to help begineers and ease the roll-out of security updates to users.

In addition to the fchmodat2 system call, another early pull request submitted by Microsoft's Christian Brauner even before the Linux 6.5 kernel was released is one to introduce multi-grained timestamps with Linux 6.6