Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

This month in Kernel News: Spanking Linus; Controlling Boot Parameters via Sysfs; Finessing GCC; and Dealing with Loose Build Dependencies.
Spanking Linus
Dave Airlie posted an update to the DRM code awhile back. One of the Linux kernel's little jokes was to take the established acronym for Digital Rights Management, which is essentially an anti-open source concept, and repurpose it to mean Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel subsystem that deals with video card GPUs.
It was a standard update, except Linus Torvalds got his knuckles rapped at the end of it.
Linus received the patch, saying, "thanks, looks good to me," and life proceeded. The tracker bot announced that the patch had been merged. However, once Linus built the kernel with clang – an alternative to the GNU C Compiler (GCC) – he found that clang reported some fishy looking code in Dave's patch.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.