ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Servo Engine Lands Support For Rendering Inline SVG Elements, More Performance

([Free Software] 25 September 03:57 PM EDT Servo)

The Servo open-source browser engine project has published their monthly status update that covers all the improvements they made over the course of August. There's been a lot of progress on this Rust-based browser engine that has a lot of potential particularly for embedded/CEF-like use-cases.



Linux 6.18 Linear RAID "md-linear" To Support Atomic Writes

([Linux Storage] 25 September 12:00 PM EDT md-linear + atomic writes)

Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.



PostgreSQL 18.0 Released With Async I/O, Performance Improvements

([Programming] 25 September 09:57 AM EDT PostgreSQL 18)

PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features.



BPF With Linux 6.18 To Support Signed Programs & Deferred Task Execution

([Linux Kernel] 25 September 09:34 AM EDT bpf-next)

Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions.



Intel Posts New Linux Patches To Reduce Overhead Of VMSCAPE Mitigation

([Linux Security] 25 September 08:07 AM EDT Less Costly VMSCAPE)

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors.



Wild: A Very Fast Linker Written In Rust, Aims To Outperform Mold Linker

([Programming] 25 September 06:33 AM EDT Wild Linker)

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild.



Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 Prepares For Panther Lake

([Intel] 25 September 06:14 AM EDT Intel Media Driver 2025Q3)

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode.



Qualcomm Begins Posting Linux Patches For Snapdragon X2 Elite, 8 Elite Gen 5 SoCs

([Hardware] 25 September 05:56 AM EDT Snapdragon X2 Elite + Linux)

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel.



Intel Releases IGSC 1.0 For Applying Firmware Updates To Graphics Cards

([Intel] 25 September 05:41 AM EDT IGSC 1.0)

Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices.



Raspberry Pi 500+ Benchmarks: Mechanical Keyboard Computer, 16GB RAM & NVMe SSD

([Computers] 25 September 03:00 AM EDT 27 Comments)

Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.



SUSE Announces Better Support For NVIDIA CUDA

([NVIDIA] 24 September 08:25 PM EDT SUSE + NVIDIA CUDA)

SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms.



Qualcomm Announces X2 Elite SoCs - Up To 18 Cores & Up To 5.0GHz Boost Frequency

([Arm] 24 September 05:35 PM EDT Qualcomm X2 Elite)

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency.



Linux Laptop Vendor MALIBAL Attempting To Pursue Made-In-USA Laptops

([Hardware] 24 September 01:05 PM EDT Made In America Laptops?)

Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads.



The Massive AI Performance Benefit With AMX On Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids"

([Processors] 24 September 10:20 AM EDT 15 Comments)

Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.



Mesa's PowerVR Vulkan Driver Gets Rid Of Its Old Hardcoded Shader Code

([Mesa] 24 September 09:10 AM EDT Hard Coded Blobs)

Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders.



Intel Moves Pre-Arc Graphics To "Legacy" Driver On Windows - Linux Users Need Not Worry

([Intel] 24 September 08:28 AM EDT Intel Legacy Graphics)

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about.



GCC 16 Will No Longer Treat Function Multi-Versioning As Experimental On ARM64

([GNU] 24 September 06:40 AM EDT ARM64 FMV With GCC 16)

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete.



FFmpeg Introduces MPEG-H 3D Audio Decoding Support

([Multimedia] 24 September 06:28 AM EDT MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding)

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding.



Sony DualSense Controller Audio Jack Handling Ready For Linux 6.18

([Linux Gaming] 24 September 06:18 AM EDT DualSense Audio Jack Handling)

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller.



SquashFS Optimization Achieves 15,277x Performance In Developer Benchmark

([Linux Storage] 23 September 08:23 PM EDT SquashFS Sparse)

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system.



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