Back in July SUSE announced its intention to acquire Rancher Labs . That deal has now closed for acquiring the Kubernetes focused cloud company.

Just as they said back in July and reaffirmed today, they intend to keep Rancher's software "100% open-source" moving forward.

Rancher Labs announced the deal being finalized today along with the SUSE statement .

SUSE's statement noted, "today, with Rancher, we offer the industry’s only adaptable Linux operating system, interoperable Kubernetes Management platform, and

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative has uncovered two more security issues with the aging X.Org Server that as we roll into 2021 is still powering most of the Linux desktops.

The security researchers found multiple input validation failures with the X.Org Server's XKB keyboard extension. Insufficient checks on different checks could lead to out-of-bounds memory accesses or buffer overflows.

Details on the two CVEs can be found via xorg-announce .

The fixes have landed in X.Org Server Git

Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has just merged one of his largest set of optimizations in recent times: 2~5x faster performance for SPECViewPerf.

SPECViewPerf is the common industry benchmark for measuring graphics performance for professional applications with benchmark viewsets from 3ds Max, CATIA, Maya, Solidworks, Siemens NX, and other programs. The performance when using Mesa drivers have been lagging but now thanks to common Mesa infrastructure improvements by Mesa, the performance is wildly improved.

With around

Linux Mint recently began developing a new open-source Linux IPTV player . That project "Hypnotix" is moving ahead and will be integrated with Linux Mint 20.1 while is also available as a standalone Debian package.

Over the course of November the developers working on Hypnotix added support for being able to configure among multiple IPTV providers, support for configuring via M3U playlists, various settings can now be controlled, and video-on-demand (VOD) libraries can also be handled for movies and TV series

The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel.

For FreeBSD 13 there is now the import of the WireGuard kernel module. This follows OpenBSD adding WireGuard earlier in the year, various Linux kernel back-ports have been adding WireGuard too now like the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel , and Android 12 looks to support WireGuard . The WireGuard port for Windows was also recently updated.

Hopefully 2021 will be the year that more VPN providers get behind WireGuard

Another month of the tumultuous year that is 2020 is now in the books... At least in November were several exciting hardware announcements to help pass the time along with the exciting evolution of open-source software.

During November were the launches of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 series graphics cards to much success along with the AMD Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, both of which generated much immense interest thanks to the open-source support and great Linux performance. There

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) already supports LZO, LZ4, and Zstd compression while a proposal would also add support for LZ4HC.

A Huawei engineer sent out the patch adding LZ4HC support to F2FS. LZ4HC is the "high compression" version of LZ4 that improves the compression ratio at slightly lower compression speed. But the higher compression ratio allows for greater storage and maintaining the same decompression speeds as LZ4.

It's quite straight-

For years there have been calls to deprecate Linux's FBDEV and work around replacing FBDEV drivers with modern Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers. While hardware vendors are now trending in the direction of DRM drivers (and the FBDEV emulation support if needed) after the embedded space was somewhat of a holdout, FBDEV drivers and the subsystem still exist as we roll into 2021. But at least one more FBDEV driver is now looking likely for removal in favor of its modern and maintained DRM counterpart.

Thomas Zimmermann