LibreOffice 26.2 Beta 1 is now available for testing in working toward the stable release in February for this cross-platform, open-source office suite solution.

The LibreOffice 26.2 Writer word processor brings improvements to its spell checking dialog, tracking improvements to document changes, Start and End paragraph alignment, and other changes. The Calc spreadsheet program in LibreOffice 26.2 adds connector support for Calc, support for xmlMaps.xml, improvements to the Sort dialog options, Biff12 clipboard format

KDE Gear 25.12 is out today as the collection of the latest KDE desktop/mobile applications for running nicely on the Plasma 6 desktop.

KDE Gear 25.12 features a wide assortment of changes to its many bundled applications. Some of the changes standing out the most with KDE Gear 25.12 include:

- The Kate 25.12 text editor brings improved Git support.

- KDE's Photos image viewer now has a crop tool among its basic image editing features

Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the "Hornet" Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It's been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they "reintroduced" it to the Linux kernel community.

Blaise Boscaccy of Microsoft's Linux team posted the latest iteration of their Hornet Linux security module for providing signature verification on eBPF programs. Their focus is on providing better security and audit integrity as well as TOCTOU attack prevention.

Last month the Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing extension was merged after 5+ years in development . VK_EXT_present_timing ended up debuting at the end of November within the Vulkan 1.4.335 spec update to much excitement for providing functionality to obtain information on the presentation engine's display for accurate timing information and to assist in scheduling a present to happen no earlier than a desired time. This is a big win for helping avoid game stuttering and more while now the Mesa

Linus Torvalds merged the Device Mapper "DM" changes overnight that include one stand-out change for Linux 6.19.

Most exciting with the DM changes for Linux 6.19 is adapting the crypto hashing code to make direct use of the Linux kernel's crypto library with simpler integration yet faster performance and lowering the kernel stack usage. As part of the conversion, the DM-VERITY code has been adapted to support two-way interleaved hashing for furthering the performance.

DM-VERITY is the Device

Following yesterday's release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today's llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements.

Going the route of llm-scaler-vllm continues to be

The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement.

Some of the most intriguing highlights of the Linux 6.19 networking updates include:

- Replacing a busy lock at the transfer queuing layer with a lock-less list to yield a 4x improvement in

Merged today to the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0 is introducing a shader VMA allocator. Long story short this new allocator steps toward enabling Vulkan ray-tracing capture/replay support, which can come in hand for debugging issues with Vulkan ray-tracing on Intel graphics hardware under Linux and similarly to assist in optimizing for better performance.

Hitting Mesa Git this evening is anv: shader vma allocator . It isn't a particularly sexy feature but the commit as part of that

The GNU C Library's malloc implementation is now enabling 2MB Transparent Huge Pages (THP) by default for AArch64 Linux. This is being done in the name of better performance -- a healthy 6.25% performance improvement is noted for SPEC with this change.

Arm engineer Dev Jain explained with this commit to Glibc enabling the 2MB THP by default on AArch64:

"malloc: Enable 2MB THP by default on Aarch64

Linux supports multi-sized Transparent Huge Pages (