More Bcachefs Fixes & Recovery Improvements Land In Linux 6.9
The Bcachefs fixes continue to come in on the heavier side for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel… ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta Restores Support For Some Hardware Deprecated By RHEL
AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta is out today for this popular community-oriented Linux distribution derived from upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Besides pulling in the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux 9.4 also restores hardware support for some devices that was deprecated by upstream RHEL… ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Leap Micro 6 Reaches Alpha
openSUSE’s Leap Micro OS that caters to containerized and virtualized workloads by providing a lightweight and reliable foundation is embarking on its next major release. The openSUSE Leap Micro 6.0 operating system is now available in alpha form… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Injects Tabs To Thwart Kconfig Parsers Not Correctly Handling Them
Within yesterday’s Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can’t correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 41 Aims For More Reproducible Package Builds Thanks To A Rust Program
Continuing a trend worked on in recent Fedora Linux releases and more broadly in the open-source ecosystem at large for securing the software supply chain and ensuring unaltered binaries, Fedora 41 is aiming to ensure more reproducible package builds… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 125 Adds AV1 Support In Encrypted Media Extensions, Other New Features
Ahead of tomorrow’s official release announcement, the Firefox 125.0 release binaries have been uploaded to the Mozilla mirror this morning. Firefox 125.0 brings a number of new features and developer additions – more so than we’ve seen recently from the monthly Firefox releases… ⌘ Read more

Servo Driving Modularity To Eye Different JavaScript Engines
The Rust-based Servo web layout engine started by Mozilla that is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation and worked on by several different organizations is eyeing modularity support for its JavaScript integration. Currently Servo is closely tied to Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine but with a modularity push could see other options supported… ⌘ Read more

Archinstall 2.8 Further Refines The Easy Arch Linux Installation Experience
Archinstall 2.8 is out today as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it much faster deploying this popular Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

FEX-Emu 2404 Optimization Can Take Memcpy From 2-3 GB/s To 88 GB/s
FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines… ⌘ Read more

Vim Lands XDG Base Directory Specification Support
For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory “XDG_BASE_DIR” specification… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc4 Brings More Bcachefs Fixes, Native BHI Mitigation
As expected the Linux 6.9-rc4 test kernel is out today as Linux 6.9 works its way toward release by mid-May… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives
Going through my usual scanning of all the “-next” Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up… Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on … ⌘ Read more

AMD Prepares More Next-Gen GPU Driver Support For Linux 6.10
AMD on Saturday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics driver feature patches ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

OpenJPH 0.11 Works Toward Low-Latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 (HTJ2K)
The OpenJPH project that provides an open-source implementation of JPEG-2000 Part 15 for High Throughput J2K (HTJ2K) / JPH support is working on extending its abilities to handle low-latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 images and other capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Proposed “LibGodot” Lets You Embed Godot Game Engine Into Other Apps
Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce “LibGodot” to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps… ⌘ Read more

OpenRazer 3.8 Brings Support For Newer Razer Devices On Linux
OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc4 To Bring New Fixes For x86 Speculation Mitigations
The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week’s “x86/urgent” material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 To Account For NUMA Node When Allocating Per-CPU Cpumasks
In addition to a SLUB optimization for extreme scenarios, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, and other performance optimizations on the way for Linux 6.10, another minor one was queued up this week… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.1 Zink Lands “Super Fast” Merge Request To Optimize IO
Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he’s recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver… ⌘ Read more

KDE’s Busy Week With Landing Explicit Sync & Many Other Changes
KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction… ⌘ Read more

APT 2.9 Released: Debian’s APT 3.0 To Have A New UI With Colors, Columnar Display & More
APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There’s big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it’s certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter… ⌘ Read more

APT 2.9 Released: Debian’s APT 3.0 To Have A New UI With Colors, Columnar Display & More
APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There’s big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it’s certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter… ⌘ Read more

XWayland 24.1 Planned For Release Next Month With Explicit Sync & Other Features
The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments… ⌘ Read more

KDE Frameworks 6.1 Released With Many Improvements & Fixes
KDE Frameworks 6.1 is out today as the first monthly update since the release of KDE Frameworks 6.0 alongside KDE Plasma 6.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 SLUB Optimization To Reduce Memory Consumption In Extreme Scenarios
A patch to the Linux kernel’s SLUB allocator has been queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window to help reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios… ⌘ Read more

Dbus-Broker 36 Released For This Fastest D-Bus Implementation
David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

AMD Updates More Radeon GPU Firmware To Fix VP9 Video Decode Glitches
Back at the start of March AMD published updated VCN firmware to fix VP9 video decoding on Rembrandt APUs and other GPUs. Today is a new round of AMDGPU firmware file updates believed to firmly address the VP9 video decode glitches for a wide range of AMD GPUs… ⌘ Read more

LPython 0.21 Released For Alpha-Stage Python AOT Compiler
As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing “the best possible performance” especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages… ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.0 Will Now Prefer PipeWire Over PulseAudio
For the widely-used SDL hardware/software abstraction layer that is commonly used by cross-platform games, the upcoming SDL 3.0 release now has the logic to be able to prefer using PipeWire directly rather than PulseAudio when successfully detecting the presence of PipeWire… ⌘ Read more

TUXEDO Computers Launches First Linux Laptop With AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS
While TUXEDO Computers has already been offering powerful AMD Zen 4 laptops such as the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC, today the Bavarian company announced their first Ryzen 8000 series mobile laptop… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s Newest Software Effort For Achieving Greater Performance: Thin Layout Optimizer
Intel’s software team is today sharing their newest innovation for achieving greater performance on Linux systems: the Thin Layout Optimizer. Intel’s Thin Layout Optimizer is inspired by the likes of the Meta/LLVM BOLT optimizer and Google’s Propeller but aims to be much easier to use while still delivering measurable performance gains for optimized binaries… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Brings Some Performance Gains For AMD Threadripper 7980X / System76 Thelio Major
With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due out later this month and the beta now available, I’ve been spending more time recently testing out the latest development state for this next Long Term Support installment of Ubuntu Linux. Similar to seeing some Ubuntu 24.04 performance gains on server class hardware both from Intel and AMD, testing on workstation hardware is also showing some gains over the current Ubuntu 23.10 release. Here are s … ⌘ Read more

X.Org Server Change Allows GLAMOR To Fallback To Software Rendering For Obsolete GPUs
For those trying to use the X.Org Server’s GLAMOR accelerated 2D rendering on legacy/obsolete GPUs, there’s now a fallback in place to allow software rendering to work when encountering crippled hardware… ⌘ Read more

GCC 14 Compiler Adds AArch64 GNU/Hurd Support
While GNU Hurd continues having a tough time on x86 support and GNU Hurd x86_64 is being worked toward, the GCC 14 compiler has been working on compiler toolchain support for GNU Hurd AArch64… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Beta Now Available For Testing
The Ubuntu 24.04 beta release is now available for testing ahead of the official release later this month for this new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Radeon Driver Enables Support For Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 Encode
The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265… ⌘ Read more

Wayland 1.23 Planned For Release Around The End Of May
Wayland 1.22 released at the start of April 2023 while now Wayland 1.23 is taking shape as the next version of this core Wayland code… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Sees More Fixes For Linux 6.9-rc4, Reiterates Its Experimental Nature
Last week Bcachefs’ repair code was largely completed and in good shape for merging with the Linux 6.9-rc3 kernel. Bcachefs patches last week amounted to about one third of the kernel changes for the week. This week is a new round of fixes to further stabilize the experimental file-system… ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.17 Game Manager Brings Bug Fixes, Library Syncing & New Runners
A new release of Lutris is now available, the open-source game manager that’s popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for managing games from Steam, GOG, a number of retro game consoles and emulators, and other sources from one convenient UI… ⌘ Read more

KDE’s KWin Merges Wayland Explicit Sync Support
A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME’s Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE’s KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!.. ⌘ Read more

Lavapipe CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Implements Ray-Tracing Pipelines
Mesa’s Lavapipe driver as a software (CPU-based) implementation of the Vulkan API has now implemented support for ray-tracing pipelines… ⌘ Read more

Turbostat Becomes Semi-Useful To Non-Root Users
The turbostat utility is useful on Linux systems for reporting idle/power-state statistics, temperatures, and other useful metrics for modern CPUs. It’s also able to dive deeper and provide various MSR values and counters and other intriguing CPU bits. For much of these features root access is required and thus turbostat has bailed out up to this point if not running as root. But as a number of the metrics can still be obtained without root access, turbostat is fina … ⌘ Read more

Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q1 Brings New Filter To Transform Old Content
Intel’s FFmpeg Cartwheel is where they maintain their various yet-to-be-upstreamed patches for the FFmpeg multimedia library either to enhance/enable new Intel graphics hardware support or improve/add extra functionality to this widely-used open-source library. With the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2024Q1 release they are shipping a new filter for dealing with older content as well as several other new features… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.8.5 & Other Stable Kernel Updates Due To Native BHI Vulnerability
Due to yesterday’s Native BHI vulnerability disclosure affecting all Intel processors with this variant of Branch History Injection (BHI) not requiring BPF to exploit, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases are out today to back-port this security mitigation… ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Now An SPI Project
While the Gentoo Foundation has long existed, to reduce the organizational complexity and overhead as well as becoming effectively a tax deductible non-profit at the US federal level, Gentoo Linux has become an associated project with Software in the Public Interest (SPI)… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Rolls Out Azure Linux 2.0.20240403 With Security Fixes & Other Patches
Microsoft’s Azure Linux formerly known as CBL-Mariner for their in-house Linux distribution is out with a new version. Azure Linux 2.0.20240403 was released overnight and comes with a number of security updates and other fixes… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Maker Canonical Announces New Collaboration With Qualcomm
Following yesterday’s news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm… ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates OpenCL Intercept Layer With New Abilities
For several years Intel has been developing the OpenCL Intercept Layer to assist in debugging OpenCL software. It’s been nearly two years since the last release of this open-source OpenCL interception layer while today brings v3.0.4 with a number of optimizations and new features… ⌘ Read more

Intel HID Driver Ready For Arrow Lake & Lunar Lake Laptops With Linux 6.9
Sent out this morning were a batch of x86 platform driver fixes by Intel engineer and platform-drivers-x86 co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen. Besides a couple of fixes, worth mentioning is the Intel HID driver seeing support added for upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake platforms… ⌘ Read more

UPower 1.90.4 Fixes Excessive Disk Writes & High CPU Usage
UPower as the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux systems and allowing various battery / power supply features is out with a new feature update… ⌘ Read more