Following the holidays, Linux 6.19-rc4 was released today in working toward the Linux 6.19 stable kernel release in early February.

Among the fixes to land during this New Year's holiday week were fixing broken MediaTek WiFi driver support for the MT792x wireless hardware and many smaller fixes throughout kernel space. Outside of the typical fixes, there were also several Dell-Alienware, ASUS, and Uniwill / TUXEDO laptop additions via the x86 platform drivers pull where just

GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by "orders of magnitude" for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head.

The headline change with ddrescue 1.30 comes down to:

"The changes in this version improve by orders of magnitude the automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head. For example, all the recoverable data in a 1 TB drive with one [

Package updates for the Arch Linux powered Manjaro Linux distribution have been pushed out for Manjaro 26.0 "Anh-Linh" while updated ISOs are expected to soon become available. The Manjaro 26.0 milestone brings KDE Plasma 6.5 and GNOME 49 but with both of those you may lose X11 session support so they are recommending their Xfce Edition for wanting wanting to continue using an X.Org desktop session.

The Manjaro 26.0 package updates have been pushed out to users while

For those with fond memories of Puppy Linux as a very lightweight Linux distribution, released last month was a new TrixiePup64 for continuing the Puppy Linux spirit atop Debian . The new TrixiePup64 is based on Debian 13 components while shipping in both X11 and Wayland flavors. Out now is TrixiePup64 2601 as the latest iteration of this lightweight Linux distribution.

TrixiePup64 2601 is now available in pulling in the latest Debian packages while continuing to use the Linux 6

Worked on back in 2024 for the Linux kernel was a built-in counter to keep track of the number of hung tasks since boot . That feature for keeping track of the number of hung tasks since boot was merged in Linux 6.13 and exposed via /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_detect_count . For helping ease use around it, new code working its way to the kernel will allow resetting that "hung_task_detect_count" counter.

From

Following Linux 6.19 adding support for CRKD guitar controllers , new patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are bringing some additional guitar controllers to Linux. This latest work is around enabling the Rock Band 4 guitars for the PlayStation 4 and PS5 consoles to work under Linux.

A patch posted Friday to the Linux kernel mailing list by Rosalie Wanders allow for the Rock Band 4 PS4/PS5 guitars to work properly under Linux.

A new feature being worked on recently for the AMDKFD kernel compute driver is batch user pointer "userptr" allocation support. With this new user-space API it will become possible to support allocating multiple non-contiguous CPU virtual address ranges that map to a single contiguous GPU virtual address.

Building off a prior patch series, today the second iteration of this batch userptr allocation support was posted while now foregoing any changes needed to the Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) subsystem as well as improved Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) integration

In addition to the release of Stoolap 0.2 as a modern embedded SQL database written in Rust, Fjall 3.0 is available as another Rust-written database solution. Fjall is a log-structured, embedable key-value storage engine akin to RocksDB but with the benefit of being written in Rust. With Fjall 3.0 its performance is now very competitive.

With Fjall 3.0 released on Friday it's described under the belief that it's " the most capable Rust-based storage engine

While Fex-Emu has been getting a lot of attention lately for being Valve-sponsored and powering the upcoming Steam Frame, Box64 continues making progress as another great open-source project for running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 Linux as well as an eye on other architectures like RISC-V.

The Box64 v0.4 emulator is out today with improvements to benefit OpenGL and VUlkan usage, improved compatibility across all architectures, opcode prefix decoder work for Dynarec, and