While the Gentoo Linux project recently established an AI policy to forbid contributions to the project made using any AI tools/assistance and NetBSD also came out with a similar policy against AI-generated code, the Debian project for now has no project-wide policy regarding AI...
May 2024 is now in the books with 285 original news articles written by your's truly last month along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. It was an interesting month with some fun new hardware launches, the Linux 6.10 merge window taking place, and other open-source software progress...
It's not too common for Intel to publish new CPU microcode updates outside of their "Patch Tuesday" regiment but that happened yesterday with a Friday night release of new CPU microcode although this time is limited to the Celeron and Pentium Silver families...
Expressed last week was a "major issue" from the GNOME Foundation side with regard to the Sovereign Tech Fund partnership for funding a number of useful improvements to the GNOME software stack just as Germany's STF has been doing to a number of other prominent open-source projects. While there still aren't many clear public details on this "major issue", a Friday night update from the GNOME side seems to indicate all is well and they are also embarking on additional development funding initiatives...
Wine 9.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...
Jean-Baptiste Kempf released Dav1d 1.4.2 as the newest version of this speedy CPU-based AV1 video decoder. With this new dav1d 1.4.2 update are yet more performance optimizations for modern systems...
Right now when dealing with quirky/buggy touchscreens a C file needs to be manually manipulated and the Linux kernel recompiled. With a new "i2c_touchscreen_props" kernel command line option on its way to the mainline kernel, the process of overriding touchscreen properties is dramatically easier for those dealing with Linux on touchscreen-enabled devices...
Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet sent in a batch of file-system fixes on Thursday for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. In that pull request he teased features that are set to arrive with the Linux 6.11 kernel later in the summer...
Last month we began seeing AMDGPU driver firmware files published for the rumored "RDNA3+" hardware as an RDNA3 refresh (also as "RDNA 3.5") for upcoming APUs. More firmware files have now landed public in linux-firmware.git for these forthcoming RDNA3 refresh products...
If the recent release of Flowblade 2.16 video editor wasn't of interest to you due to being GTK-based software, the Qt/KDE-aligned Kdenlive video editor is out this week with its Kdenlive 24.05 feature release...
Simon Ser today released Wayland 1.23 for this core Wayland code that brings some minor enhancements, bug fixes, and Wayland protocol clarifications...
Last week with the AMD EPYC 4004 review and benchmarks I tested nearly the entire product stack for these new AM5-based server processors with the EPYC 4244P (6 cores), EPYC 4344P (8 cores), EPYC 4364P (8 cores), EPYC 4464P (12 cores), EPYC 4484X (12 cores + 3D V-Cache), EPYC 4564P (16 cores), and EPYC 4584PX (16 cores + 3D V-Cache). The only EPYC 4004 class processor I wasn't able to finish testing in time was the entry-level EPYC 4124P as a 4-core processor with $149 retail price. I've now had the time to finish benchmarking that budget-focused Zen 4 server processor as well as seeing how it compares to the 4-core Skylake Xeons that were prolific for years.
It's been more than two years now talking about the Anaconda installer for Fedora/RHEL shifting to a web-based UI. Going back to Fedora 37 have been previews and plans for getting this modern user interface up to parity but it's been a long road. With repeated delays, there's at least one more delay: the Anaconda web UI was just shifted from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42...
Similar to the real-time kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced today the availability of their new real-time "RT" kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. But like with the existing Ubuntu RT kernels, this real-time support is limited to Ubuntu Pro subscriptions...
The Rust-written Servo web engine as a reminder was started as a Mozilla project but then abandoned and now developed by multiple organizations as part of Linux Foundation Europe. The Servo project has put out a new status update that highlights the work accomplished in recent weeks...
Yocto 5.0 LTS has been released as the newest version from the Yocto Project that is popular for organizations assembling their own embedded/IoT-minded custom Linux distributions. The Linux Foundation also announced today that Boeing has become a Platinum Member with Yocto...
It's rare for an advanced media briefing to involve representatives from both AMD and Intel, but that happened yesterday. AMD and Intel along with Broadcom have formed the Ultra Accelerator Link "UALink" as a new open standard they are hoping to use to take on NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink interface...
The Intel Battlemage discrete graphics support is beginning to come together for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack as the successor to DG2/Alchemist. In addition to all the Xe2 work for what's found with Lunar Lake, more Battlemage Linux kernel and user-space driver work has been appearing recently. The milestone crossed today is the initial Battlemage "BMG" platform support being merged for the Mesa 24.2 OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...
As part of Intel's Flexible Return Event Delivery (FRED), Intel open-source software engineers are now working on improving Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) source reporting for the Linux kernel...
Building off the PowerVR kernel driver merged in Linux 6.8 and PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.0 that are both focused on Imagination's newer PowerVR Rogue architecture, Google engineers are working on enabling open-source driver support for the PowerVR Rogue GX6250 as found within the MediaTek MT8173 SoC...
Last year the KDAB consulting firm typically associated with Qt work published KDGpu as a thin Vulkan wrapper to make it easier leveraging this graphics API. Out today is KDGpu v0.5 with many improvements to this Vulkan wrapper...
While VKD3D-Proton that is bundled with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) is the most common source for mapping Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API for Windows games on Linux, Wine's VKD3D upstream continues to be developed. Out today is VKD3D 1.12 as the newest feature release for this open-source D3D12-on-Vulkan implementation...
It was two months ago today that an urgent security alert was issued over XZ being hit by malicious code that turned out to be a backdoor within liblzma added by a bad actor that worked his way into XZ co-maintainership. Longtime XZ developer Lasse Collin is back at the helm and has been auditing the prior XZ commits and today released XZ 5.6.2 with the backdoor completely removed...
A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud...
Framework is out today with some exciting announcements from lowering the price of the existing Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 series SoC to announcing a new Framework Laptop 13 powered by Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and having a new 2.8K display option for this modular/upgradeable laptop shipping this summer...
Now that the Linux 6.10 merge window has wrapped up, here's a look at all of the exciting features/changes coming to this summer 2024 kernel. Linux 6.10 brings a lot as usual for the latest/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms, never-ending work on file-systems, a new memory sealing "mseal" system call, TPM bus encryption, and dozens of other exciting changes and new hardware support.
Arm today announced the latest products in the Armv9 CPU portfolio: the Cortex-X925 as their "ultimate performance" processor and the Cortex-A725 as their processor option for sustained performance...
QuestDB 8.0 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source time-series database. QuestDB continues to cater to high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries so it can handle use-cases from financial data to IoT sensors. With today's QuestDB 8.0 release, it's even faster...
The AMD shader compiler "ACO" alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has seen another batch of changes merged in preparations for next-generation Radeon RDNA4 GPUs...
Coming up on my radar today is a commit made to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adjusting the loop alignment with Intel's generic tuning path. In turn this should address "some random performance penalty in benchmarks" with coping better around cache lines...
The past year there's been a big Linux kernel patch series in the work by Intel to improve Sub-NUMA Clustering "SNC" support so it behaves well with Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel hardware. Hopefully that work will soon be ready for mainlining in the Linux kernel while this week brought the 19th revision to those patches...
SVT-AV1 that started out as an open-source AV1 video encoder at Intel and more recently an an Alliance of Open Media project quietly released SVT-AV1 v2.1 last week. With this new SVT-AV1 release are yet more performance optimizations and tuning...
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be quite busy preparing their Xe kernel driver and Mesa user-space ANV Vulkan / Iris Gallium3D driver for upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.2-devel is more Lunar Lake platform enablement work plus early support for ray-tracing with the integrated Xe2 graphics. However, more work is still needed before this Lunar Lake / Xe2 support will be ready for end-users on the Linux desktop...
Microsoft's open-source DirectX Shader Compiler that is open-source and derived from the LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure is out with a significant new release as it begins preparing for "HLSL 202x" as a big leap for the High-Level Shader Language...
Crucial last week announced the launch of their newest Crucial DDR5 Pro Memory: Overclocking (OC) Edition in white heatspreader form. Crucial recently sent over a pair of these 2 x 16GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 UDIMM memory kits that we've been putting through the paces with Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X systems. These new Crucial Pro DIMMs have been working out very well and align with the great quality we've long enjoyed from Crucial/Micron.
Sent out today as a fix for the Linux kernel's in-tree "cpupower" utility is properly handling P-State frequency reporting for upcoming AMD Zen 5 processors...
For those continuing to rely on the Enterprise Linux 8 series, AlmaLinux 8.10 has made its stable debut this morning as the newest version of this community-oriented operating system derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10...
One of the new security features coming with Linux 6.10 is TPM bus encryption and integrity protection to fend off a wave of possible attacks against Trusted Platform Module recovery keys, TPM sniffing, etc. This functionality was merged for the Linux 6.10 merge window but is now being pulled back to x86_64-only by default where it's been sufficiently tested...
The ASUS WMI platform driver for Linux that is predominantly used by ASUS laptops for enabling more functionality under Linux has a new patch series available that is enabling yet more features for the latest ASUS hardware on Linux...
Nearly one year ago to the day the openSUSE project anounced MicroOS Desktop GNOME being renamed to openSUSE Aeon while openSUSE Desktop Plasma was taking the name openSUSE Kalpa...
Phoronix