Science and Technology (old posts, page 245)

Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc7

Linus has released 6.16-rc7 for testing.

Nothing really stands out - the biggest patches in here are for some documentation and self-tests or tooling, not actual kernel code changes.

So unlike the week before, it all feels very trivial and I think we're in good shape. Knock wood,

Malicious packages uploaded to the Arch Linux AUR

The Arch Linux project has sent out an advisory warning that a set of malicious packages, containing a remote access trojan, were uploaded to the Arch User Repository (AUR). The affected packages were librewolf-fix-bin, firefox-patch-bin, and zen-browser-patched-bin. "We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary measures in order to ensure they were not compromised."

320: CachyOS, Hyprland, Chrome OS & Android Merging?, Lossless Scaling for Linux & more Linux news

video: https://youtu.be/yGQ_w0LL4Xs

Comment on the TWIL Forum

This week in Linux, we have some interesting distro news from CachyOS & Chrome OS. We've also got new releases from the open source 3d rendering powerhouse Blender & the popular dynamic tiling wayland compositor Hyprland. Then, Plasma Bigscreen is back on the air from KDE. All of this and more on This Week in Linux, the weekly news show that keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the Linux and Open Source world. Now let's jump right into Your Source for Linux GNews!

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:43 CachyOS July 2025 Release
03:41 Hyprland 0.50 Released
05:50 Blender 4.5 LTS Released
08:31 Lossless Scaling's Frame Generation for Linux
10:42 Sandfly Security, agentless Linux security [ad]
12:42 OCCT for Linux
13:38 Chrome OS is Apparently Merging with Android
15:11 Plasma Bigscreen is Back on Air
17:08 Outro

Links:

The end of Clear Linux

Intel has announced the abrupt end of its Clear Linux cloud-oriented distribution:

After years of innovation and community collaboration, we're ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository will be archived in read-only mode. So, if you're currently using Clear Linux OS, we strongly recommend planning your migration to another actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to ensure ongoing security and stability.

[$] How to write Rust in the kernel: part 3

The interfaces between C and Rust in the kernel have grown over time; any non-trivial Rust driver will use a number of these. Tasks like allocating memory, dealing with immovable structures, and interacting with locks are necessary for handling most devices. There are also many subsystem-specific bindings, but the focus this time will be on an overview of the bindings that all kernel Rust code can be expected to use.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cloud-init, glib2, glibc, kernel, and tomcat), Debian (chromium), Fedora (luajit, minidlna, nginx-mod-modsecurity, python-asteval, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, and vim), Oracle (cloud-init, glib2, glibc, java-17-openjdk, kernel, python311-olamkit, tomcat, and tomcat9), SUSE (apache-commons-lang3, bind, coreutils, ffmpeg, gnutls, gstreamer-plugins-good, kubernetes1.25, kubernetes1.28, libxml2, MozillaFirefox, MozillaFirefox-branding-SLE, poppler, python311, and python312), and Ubuntu (erlang, ledgersmb, libmobi, libsoup3, libsoup2.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux, linux-aws, linux-oem-6.8, linux, linux-gcp, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-oem-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, php7.0, php7.2, php8.1, php8.3, php8.4, python-aiohttp, and rails).

[$] Scheduler medley: time-slice extension, sched_ext deadline servers, and LRU batching.

Decades after its creation, the Linux CPU scheduler remains an area of active development; it is difficult to find a time slice to cover every interesting scheduler change. In an attempt to catch up, the time has come to round-robin through a few patches that have been circulating recently. The work at hand focuses on a new attempt at time-slice extension, the creation of a deadline server for sched_ext tasks, and keeping tasks on isolated CPUs from being surprised by LRU batching.