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)

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.


Linux 6.15 Preparing Support For The XP-Pen Artist Pro 19, A Big 4K Drawing Tablet

([Hardware] 5 March 06:30 AM EST XP-Pen Artist Pro 19)

Linux already supports a number of XP-Pen drawing tablets while the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to include support for another one: the XP-Pen Artist Pro 19. This XP-Pen Artist Pro 19 is a big, 4K resolution display drawing tablet that retails for nearly $800 USD and features dual stylus, 16K pressure levels, and a nice display for this 19-inch drawing surface.


More Apple SoC DeviceTree Additions Being Upstreamed For Linux 6.15

([Apple] 5 March 06:13 AM EST Apple SoC DT)

Sven Peter continues work on upstreaming more of the Apple SoC support to the mainline Linux kernel. On the DeviceTree side following the DT support for Apple T2 SoCs sent out last month, another set of updates were submitted this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.


AMD ZenDNN 5.0.1 Released To Help With EPYC Inferencing For Recommender Systems & LLMs

([AMD] 4 March 04:35 PM EST AMD ZenDNN 5.0.1)

Released last year shortly after the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 for Zen 5 optimized CPU inferencing with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. ZenDNN 5.0 delivers up to a 400% performance uplift according to AMD engineers. Out today is ZenDNN 5.0.1 with further optimizations, particularly around recommendation engines and large language models (LLMs).


LLVM/Clang 20.1 Released With AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AVX10.2, AMD GFX950 & Much More

([LLVM] 4 March 03:25 PM EST LLVM 20.1 Released)

LLVM 20.1 was just tagged in Git as the first stable version of the LLVM 20 compiler stack including sub-projects like the Clang 20 C/C++ Compiler.


Firefox 137 Beta Now Available With VA-API Accelerated H.265/HEVC On Linux

([Mozilla] 4 March 11:51 AM EST Firefox 137.0 Beta)

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.


Intel Finds More Women Getting Involved In Open-Source, Maintainer Burnout Continues

([Intel] 4 March 10:54 AM EST Intel Survey)

Intel has been running an annual open-source developer survey and they recently wrapped up their survey for 2024 and today published the results to provide various insight into the health of open-source development.


ExpressVPN Adds A GUI To Their Linux App

([Linux Networking] 4 March 10:07 AM EST ExpressVPN Linux App)

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package.


NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 4 March 09:00 AM EST 29 Comments)

Ahead of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics cards seeing retail availability tomorrow, today the review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics cards. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5070 under Linux and today have a number of GPU compute benchmarks to share.


Perforator 0.0.5 Released - Switches To Apache 2.0 License, Drops CLA Requirement

([Free Software] 4 March 08:35 AM EST Yandex Perforator)

Open-sourced back in January was the Yandex Perforator as a new software project for uncovering code inefficiencies and potentially "save billions of dollars" in expenses. Perforator has continued evolving since its open-source announcement and out today is Perforator 0.0.5 as the latest milestone.


RADV Driver Adds CI Coverage For Aging Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs

([Radeon] 4 March 06:30 AM EST AMD Hawaii GPUs)

While AMD hasn't released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU.


Linux's AMD Radeon Vulkan Driver Adds Experimental Support For The BC-250 Mining Board

([Radeon] 4 March 06:49 AM EST BC-250 + RADV)

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.


Direct3D Video Decode To Vulkan Video API Being Worked On For Wine

([WINE] 4 March 06:32 AM EST Vulkan Video Under D3D11 Video)

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API.


Intel Revises DRM Sharpness Property For Use With Lunar Lake Sharpening Capabilities

([Intel] 4 March 06:18 AM EST DRM Sharpness Property)

Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That's culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted.


Rust-Written Redox OS Expands Use Of Dynamic Linking

([Operating Systems] 3 March 08:17 PM EST Redox OS)

The Redox OS open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language is continuing to enjoy nice progress in 2025 on its goals. The Redox OS project has published their February 2025 status update that highlights achievements made over the past month.


Godot 4.4 Open-Source Game Engine Released With Many Improvements

([Linux Gaming] 3 March 12:18 PM EST Godot 4.4)

Godot 4.4 is out as stable today for serving as the newest feature release to this leading open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine.


GNOME Mutter 48.rc Released With Wayland Color Management, Dynamic Triple Buffering

([GNOME] 3 March 12:07 PM EST GNOME Mutter 48.rc)

Ahead of the GNOME 48 stable release due out later this month, tagged now is the Mutter "48.rc" release candidate milestone. While the feature freeze passed last month, there has been a lot of last minute improvements merged for Mutter to squeeze into this GNOME 48 release.


Firefox 136 Available With AMD GPU Linux Video Acceleration, AArch64 Linux Binaries

([Mozilla] 3 March 11:46 AM EST Firefox 136)

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times.


How The Ubuntu Linux Performance Has Evolved For SiFive RISC-V Over The Last Four Years

([Operating Systems] 3 March 01:18 PM EST 9 Comments)

SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.


AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation "INVLPGB" Support Appears Ready For The Linux Kernel

([AMD] 3 March 10:00 AM EST AMD INVLPGB)

Back in December Linux kernel patches were posted by a Meta engineer for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found with Zen 3 and newer processors. The Linux kernel would use INVLPGB for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. After these patches went through 14 rounds of review since December, it looks like this AMD broadcast TLB invalidation support is now ready for the mainline Linux kernel!


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Something better...

13 (sympathetic): Oh, What happened? Did your parents lose a bet with God?
14 (complimentary): You must love the little birdies to give them this to
perch on.
15 (scientific): Say, does that thing there influence the tides?
16 (obscure): Oh, I'd hate to see the grindstone.
17 (inquiry): When you stop to smell the flowers, are they afraid?
18 (french): Say, the pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you
leave.
19 (pornographic): Finally, a man who can satisfy two women at once.
20 (religious): The Lord giveth and He just kept on giving, didn't He.
21 (disgusting): Say, who mows your nose hair?
22 (paranoid): Keep that guy away from my cocaine!
23 (aromatic): It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and smell the
coffee ... in Brazil.
24 (appreciative): Oooo, how original. Most people just have their teeth
capped.
25 (dirty): Your name wouldn't be Dick, would it?
-- Steve Martin, "Roxanne"