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)

Mesa Lands A Shader Statistics Framework For More Unification Across Drivers

([Mesa] 7 March 06:19 AM EST Shader Stats Framework)

The latest bit of increased driver code unification and decreasing code duplication among Mesa's OpenGL and Vulkan drivers is finally introducing a common shader statistic framework.



New Round Of Driver Optimizations For AMD RadeonSI In Mesa 25.1

([Mesa] 7 March 06:30 AM EST RadeonSI Optimizations)

Well known AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has been at it again working on some further performance optimizations to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code.



Intel VSEC Driver Preps For Diamond Rapids In Linux 6.14

([Intel] 7 March 06:14 AM EST Intel VSEC + Diamond Rapids)

Sent out today was a batch of platform-drivers-x86 fixes for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Notable among these fixes is introducing Intel Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support to the Intel VSEC driver.



Unexpected 2025 Flashback: New Linux Patches For AMD's ARM-Based Opteron A1100 "Seattle"

([AMD] 6 March 08:56 PM EST AMD Seattle ARM SoC)

A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016.



Apple Touch Bar Display Drivers Slated For Introduction In Linux 6.15

([Apple] 6 March 04:54 PM EST Apple Touch Bar Display Drivers)

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is expected to merge two new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display drivers for supporting the Apple Touch Bar displays on older Intel x86 Macs and a newer "ADP" driver for handling the Apple Touch Bar displays on the newer Apple M1/M2-powered MacBooks.



Ubuntu 25.10 Planning To Use Dracut By Default

([Ubuntu] 6 March 12:00 PM EST Ubuntu 25.10 + Dracut)

For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default.



Meta's eBPF-Powered Strobelight Software Reduced CPU Cycles By 20%

([Free Software] 6 March 11:41 AM EST eBPF Strobelight)

Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta’s top services.



SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Linux Performance

([Computers] 6 March 09:10 AM EST 35 Comments)

SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.



PipeWire 1.4 Released With MIDI 2.0 Support & Other New Features

([PipeWire] 6 March 08:40 AM EST PipeWire 1.4)

Wim Taymans of Red Hat today released PipeWire 1.4 as the newest major update for this leading open-source software to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other solutions on the modern Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams in a very excellent way.



FreeBSD Continues Working On 802.11n/802.11ac WiFi & Other Laptop Improvements

([BSD] 6 March 06:46 AM EST FreeBSD Laptop Improvements)

The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts.



Blender's Vulkan Renderer Is Making Great Progress To Production Readiness This Year

([Vulkan] 6 March 07:00 AM EST Blender + Vulkan)

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.



FEX 2503 Brings Fixes & Multi-Block By Default For x86_64 Linux Binaries On ARM64

([Free Software] 6 March 06:25 AM EST FEX 2503 Emulator)

FEX 2503 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that enables the ability to run Linux x86_64 binaries on Linux ARM64 (AArch64) hosts.



Mold 2.37 Linker Preps For Intel APX

([Programming] 6 March 06:14 AM EST Advanced Performance Extensions)

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.



AMD Announces "Instella" Fully Open-Source 3B Language Models

([AMD] 5 March 07:13 PM EST AMD Instella)

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.



Intel Engineers To Return To Working On Habana Labs Linux Driver, Gaudi 3 Expected

([Intel] 5 March 01:09 PM EST Linux Upstream Driver)

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.



Xen 4.20 Hypervisor Released With AMD Zen 5 Support, More Performance Optimizations

([Virtualization] 5 March 10:06 AM EST Xen 4.20)

The Xen Project announced the availability today of the Xen 4.20 virtualization hypervisor.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance

([Graphics Cards] 5 March 09:00 AM EST 90 Comments)

Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 5 March 09:00 AM EST 31 Comments)

In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today's embargo lift, I've also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.



Making Vulkan More Of A "Joy To Use" Discussed At Vulkanised 2025

([Vulkan] 5 March 06:57 AM EST Vulkanised 2025 Conference)

In addition to Vulkan-powered AI / machine learning talks at last month's Vulkanised 2025 conference, another interesting topic at this annual Vulkan developer conference was around improving the Vulkan API and making it easier for new developers and maximizing the potential with new GPU hardware.



FreeDesktop.org GitLab Will Be Down For Up To One Week Due To Cloud Migration

([Free Software] 5 March 06:40 AM EST FreeDesktop.org Downtime)

The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration.



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<tausq> if (cb) ((cb->obj)->*(cb->ui_func))();
<knghtbrd> tausq: who the HELL wrote that ?
<tausq> me :)
* knghtbrd flogs tausq