#linux-kernel

#linux-kernel

Engineer Jan Polensky has submitted a patch series titled “s390: enable Rust support and add required arch glue.” If accepted, it will allow Rust code to be used in the Linux kernel on IBM mainframe hardware, which the kernel still refers to as s390 after the generation of IBM mainframe kit introduced in 1990. He notes: “For now, using a nightly build of the Rust compiler does not sound to us like the sort of thing many conservative mainframe shops are likely to embrace with enthusiasm, but even big new features have to start somewhere.”

The VxD driver does a lot of the heavy lifting and is responsible for initializing WSL9x as well as handling userspace events that have to be relayed to the kernel (i.e., page faults and syscalls), which it does in a rather interesting way due to limitations in the Win9x architecture.

The last week of the release continued the same 'lots of small fixes' trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I've tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out.

The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it? The " Linux project continuity document," drafted by Dan Williams, was merged into its documentation last week, just ahead of the release of Linux 6.19-rc7. Notably, the document's path is Documentation/process/conclave.rst. It notes that the kernel development project is "widely distributed, with over 100 maintainers each working to keep changes moving through their own repositories."

tons of tools for checking code,

The new request for comments is from Collabora's Muhammad Anjum. Collabora does a lot of FOSS development, although its work on LibreOffice may be the most visible. (That may even speed up, as earlier this year, it merged with Allotropia, the company working on a WASM version of LibreOffice.)

NTFSplus is an unexpected development because for about four years now, the Linux kernel has contained a read-write NTFS driver. It's called ntfs3 and it appeared in kernel 5.15 back in November 2021. It's called NTFS3 because it effectively replaced the old ntfs driver, which just offered read-only support, and ntfs-3g which works via FUSE - meaning that it runs as an ordinary, unprivileged userspace program, which imposes performance and other limitations.

promising 'Link:' argument that I hoped would explain why this pointless commit exists, but AS ALWAYS that link only wasted my time by pointing to the same damn information that was already there.

Clement "Clem" Lefebvre and the rest of the Linux Mint team have done it again. With the release of , also known as Zara, users get a distribution that's easy to use and packed with helpful improvements to make the daily desktop experience better than ever. As a long-time Linux Mint fan, I'm delighted with this latest release. As in the last version, Linux Mint 22.1, codenamed Xia, the release is based on the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Linux distro.

According to the developer, the commit numbers and diffstat are entirely in line with expectations. The cycle has also proceeded without surprises so far. Nevertheless, there are a few notable changes, according to Neowin, including a correction for the Intel idpf network driver and improvements in the handling of system registers within arm64 KVM. Torvalds (photo) emphasizes that most of the code changes are minor, often no more than a few lines.

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions.