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Updated 2025-02-11 17:15
GNOME 48 Now Allows Grouping Notifications By App
While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis...
Ubuntu 25.04's GNOME Web Browser Will Be Able To Play More Web Videos By Default
Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change...
Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Lands OpenCL C Support In Mesa 25.1
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack...
FLAC 1.5 Finally Delivers Multi-Threaded Encoding
FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec...
KDE Plasma 6.3 Released With Improved Fractional Scaling & Other Enhancements
Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop...
AMD AOMP 20.0-2 Compiler Adds The "flang-new" Fortran Compiler Option
AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware...
BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS Starts 2025 Off Introducing An AMD CPU Temperature Driver
The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month...
Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP
Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process...
Firefox ForkServer Getting Ready To Enhance Linux Browser Performance
Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win...
Intel's Newest Open-Source Project Is "Polite Guard"
Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard...
Apple Touch Bar Backlight & Keyboard Mode Drivers Slated For Linux 6.15
For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle...
GIMP 3.0 RC3 Released For A Final Round Of Testing
GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...
Python 3.14 Lands A New Interpreter With 3~30% Faster Python Code
Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO)...
Union Hopes To Address KDE's Fragmented Ways Of Styling Apps
KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project...
Formerly Known As YQPkg, Myrlyn Package Manager GUI Adds Repository Configuration
You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature...
New Proposal To Raise The Linux Kernel's Default Timer Frequency To 1000Hz
A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz...
RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low Latency Encoding Support
Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options...
Microsoft Continues Enhancing Its Azure Linux 3.0 Distribution With February Update
Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company...
Linux 6.14-rc2 Released With Apple Silicon Maintainer Change, Bcachefs Fixes
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.14 is now available for testing as a rather light update for the week...
Linux Patches Adjust AC Plug/Unplug Behavior During s2idle To Match Windows
A set of patches sent out on Saturday by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello seek to adjust the Linux behavior for laptops/handhelds during AC plug/unplug events during s2idle to better match that of Microsoft Windows 11...
Curious Intel Linux Driver Maintainer Changes In Recent Days
This week besides the drama over Apple Silicon maintainership for the upstream Linux kernel, in recent days there has also been a number of rather subtle changes to the maintainership of several Intel Linux kernel drivers...
Intel ISPC 1.26 Compiler Delivers Improved ARM Support
Intel's ISPC project as the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as this C language variant for Single Program, Multiple Data programming on CPUs and GPUs is out with a new release...
New Apple Silicon Co-Maintainer Steps Up For The Linux Kernel
This week was the dramatic decision by Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin to step down as upstream kernel maintainer for the Apple Silicon (ARM) code following friction with other kernel developers over Rust affairs within the kernel. He still intends to contribute code to Asahi Linux's downstream kernel and Linus Torvalds has already merged the patch dropping him as an upstream maintainer. Now a new co-maintainer has volunteered to help oversee the Apple Silicon code for the mainline kernel...
Linux FineIBT-BHI Updated For Toughening Up FineIBT Kernel Defenses
Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has updated his set of patches implementing FineIBT-BHI mitigations for toughening up the FineIBT kernel protections previously introduced. This FineIBT-BHI code depends upon newly-merged code for the LLVM Clang compiler as part of the compiler defenses...
Wine-Staging 10.1 Delivers 361 Patches Atop Upstream Wine
Following the release of Wine 10.1 on Friday for kicking off the new bi-weekly development releases after last month's Wine 10.0 stable release, Wine-Staging 10.1 is out today to get things moving once again for this experimental flavor of Wine...
SysVinit 3.14 Released: Overcomes Three Decade Limitation Of Inittab Line Length
For those continuing to make use of SysVinit as the aging init system that in the Linux world has been largely replaced by systemd, SysVinit 3.14 is out today and overcomes a long-standing limitation around the length of lines within the inittab files...
Clang Thread Safety Checks Begin Uncovering Bugs In The Linux Kernel
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were two competing solutions for new LLVM Clang capability / thread safety analysis to the Linux kernel. Two developers had separately been working on implementations for the Linux kernel to make use of Clang's "-Wthread-safety" functionality. Ultimately the upstream kernel will likely settle upon the superior or unified solution while already making use of these new checks is uncovering Linux kernel bugs...
GNU G-Golf v0.8 Released For Writing GTK Apps In Guile/Scheme
Years in the making, GNU G-Golf 0.8 was released on Friday as a significant release for this GNU project. No, it's not a golfing simulator or anything like that, but rather a Guile Object Library for GNOME so that you can develop GTK applications from the Guile/Scheme programming language...
FEX 2502 Delivers Fix For Steam, Multi-Block Improvements For Better Performance
FEX 2502 is out today as the newest monthly feature release to this user-space emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux including the likes of Wine/Proton and Steam for being able to enjoy modern games on AArch64 Linux systems...
KDE Plasma 6.3 Receives Final Polishing Prior To Release Next Week
The KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop has received a lot of last minute polishing and fixes ahead of its planned release next week. Plasma 6.3 is scheduled for its stable debut next Tuesday on 11 February...
FreeBSD 13.5 Beta Begins Preparing For The Last Of The FreeBSD 13 Series
The FreeBSD 13.5 release dance has begun for closing out the FreeBSD 13 series...
Wine 10.1 Released With Many Changes: Fixes For Battle.net, Continued Bluetooth Driver
Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 as the newest annual stable release of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine 10.1 is out today. Wine 10.1 kicks off the bi-weekly development release cycle trek that will culminate with the release of Wine 11.0 next year...
GNOME's LocalSearch Metadata Extractor Ditches GStreamer For FFmpeg
While the GNOME project has long been closely tied to the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME's LocalSearch has decided to abandon its GStreamer use in favor of using FFmpeg/libav directly...
IO_uring Zero-Copy Receive Support Ready For Linux 6.15 Networking
It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring...
Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer
Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity...
GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5
With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.
Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer
Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code...
Serpent OS Working Toward Second Alpha, More Immutable OS Features
Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution...
Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs
With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs...
NVIDIA Publishes RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTXNTC" Beta
NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit...
AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 Brings New Performance Tuning & Fixes
AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year to this official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems...
Ubuntu's crypto-config Continues Being Developed For Gradual Roll-Out
A year ago I raised attention about crypto-config as a new Ubuntu project for system-wide cryptography configuration. That crypto config tool continues being developed by Canonical engineers for a gradual roll-out into the Ubuntu Linux landscape...
VirtIO Media Driver Upstreaming Pursued For Relaying V4L2 Media Devices To Guests
Android and Chrome OS already are carrying the VirtIO Media driver as a means of enabling virtualization of host media devices into a guest while now patch review is underway in trying to get VirtIO Media upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel...
SMT Remains Very Advantageous For 5th Gen AMD EPYC Performance
After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.
AMD Talks Up IREE/MLIR Programming For Ryzen AI NPUs
While the AMDXDNA driver was merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs atop a mainline kernel build, there's still the user-space software needed for making use of the neural processing units found in Ryzen AI SoCs. AMD talked more about programming Ryzen AI NPUs last weekend in Belgium at the FOSDEM 2025 developer conference...
Intel's OpenVINO 2025.0 Brings Support For Deepseek Models, Better AI Performance
Intel's software engineers working on the OpenVINO AI toolkit today released OpenVINO 2025.0 that brings support for the much talked about Deepseek models along with other large language models (LLMs), performance improvements to some of the existing model support, and other changes...
LibreOffice 25.2 Open-Source Office Suite Released With Many Improvements
LibreOffice 25.2 is out this morning as the newest half-year update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite...
Mesa 25.0 Is Trending Well For Release Later This Month
Mesa 25.0-rc2 was released yesterday and it's rather boring on the changes, but that's a good thing during this bug fixing phase...
GNU Gold Linker Is Deprecated & Will Be Gone For Good Without New Developers
With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker...
PipeWire Is Doing An Excellent Job Handling Audio/Video Streams On The Linux Desktop
Red Hat engineer and PipeWire lead developer Wim Taymans presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend around the state of the PipeWire project for this integral component to the modern Linux desktop...
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