KUnit as the unit testing framework for the Linux kernel and was inspired in part by Java's JUnit when originally conceived, is now finally able to output to the JUnit format for better interoperability with other CI systems and the like that standardize on that common format.

KUnit was proposed nearly a decade ago and was merged for Linux 5.5 that released in early 2020. While KUnit was inspired by JUnit, Python unittest.mock, and GoogleTest, it's taken around six years to see JUnit

Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were patches by Broadcom engineer Rishi Chhibber for establishing the "vmw_zerocopy_driver"that will allow guest user-space applications to share pinned memory buffers with a VMware hypervisor peer using the VMCI datagram interface in a zero-copy manner. Via this driver

Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy interface within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated.

The strncpy function within the Linux kernel has been a "persistent source of bugs" for years due to counter-intuitive semantics and behavior around NUL termination along with performance issues due to redundant zero

Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM.

A patch series by Ard Biesheuvel allows for sharing of

The open-source world waited long enough for the GIMP 3.0 release that finally came last year with its GTK3 port and more, but for those with time on their hands this weekend and want to relive GIMP's past from long ago, GIMP 0.54 has been adapted for Flatpak to work on modern Linux desktops. What makes this version of GIMP from 1996 notable is that it was the last to use the Motif toolkit.

GIMP 0.54 can now easily work

In addition to open-source developer Namjae Jeon serving as maintainer for the new NTFS Linux driver , he also continues serving as maintainer to the exFAT file-system for that other Microsoft file-system popular with removable storage media.

The exFAT file-system work for Linux 7.2 is quite exciting in wrapping up an IOmap conversion port. The exFAT file-system driver on Linux is now adapted to use the IOmap infrastructure for buffered I/O, direct I/O, and LLSEEK SEEK_HOLE/SEEK

With KDE's Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release.

A feature found with some graphics drivers and operating systems for many years, monitors are now identified with color-coded number badges when configuring multi-monitor setups. This makes in turn recognizing monitors much easier for configuration, especially if having multiple displays of the same model. These color

Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the "NTFS resurrection" with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support.

The main feature of this modern NTFS driver for Linux 7.2 is handling

With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play.

A pull request opened last year by Autumn Ashton was for implementing VK_NVX_binary_import support as the Vulkan extension needed for NVIDIA DLSS support with NVIDIA GPUs. Thomas Andersen two months ago opened a new pull request to fix merge conflicts and other fixes to that earlier pull