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)

Uniwill Laptop Driver Proposed For Linux To Enable Additional Features

([Hardware] 16 June 06:24 AM EDT Uniwill Linux Laptop Driver)

For those with a laptop from Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer Uniwill, two new drivers are being proposed to enhance the mainline Linux kernel support for Uniwill laptops by enabling additional functionality to work under Linux.



Intel Performance Counters Support Merged To Mesa For Panther Lake

([Intel] 16 June 05:52 AM EDT Intel PTL OA)

The Intel Observation Architecture "OA" performance counters support has been upstreamed to Mesa for upcoming Xe3 Panther Lake integrated graphics.



Linux 6.16-rc2 Released With An Initial Batch Of Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 15 June 05:04 PM EDT Linux 6.16)

Following the release of Linux 6.16-rc1 last Sunday that capped off the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linux 6.16-rc2 is now available with an initial week's worth of bug/regression fixes. Linux 6.16 development continues in aiming toward a stable release around the end of July.



Linux 6.17 Looks Like It Could Go Ahead And Make SMP Support Unconditional

([Linux Kernel] 15 June 09:09 AM EDT Linux 6.17)

Back in May a big patch series was published for reworking the Linux kernel to make the SMP support unconditional. Right now those that happen to be running Linux in a uniprocessor (1 CPU core) configuration can build with "CONFIG_SMP" disabled but the proposed patches would make symmetric multi-processing support always present. Those patches took a step forward this week and could be merged for the Linux 6.17 cycle later in the summer.



The Latest X.Org Server Activity Are A Lot Of Code Reverts

([X.Org] 15 June 06:59 AM EDT xserver reverts)

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code.



16-bit Medium Precision Improvements Merged For AMD Radeon Mesa Code

([Mesa] 15 June 06:34 AM EDT RadeonSI mediump)

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver.



Graphics Driver Changes Begin Queuing Ahead Of Linux 6.17

([Linux Kernel] 15 June 06:38 AM EDT Linux 6.17 DRM Kernel Drivers)

While the Linux 6.16 merge window just passed one week ago, already there are new feature changes beginning to queue for the Linux 6.17 kernel later in the summer.



Linux 6.16 Lands Proper Power Management Fix For Code That Caused Power Regression

([Hardware] 14 June 03:34 PM EDT All Good Now)

Linux 6.15 mistakenly shipped with a nasty power regression for some systems, such as those relying on the "nosmt" option to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading / Hyper Threading. That idle power regression was fixed for Linux 6.15.2 and Linux 6.16 Git by reverting the troubled patch that introduced the regression. Now merged ahead of Linux 6.16-rc2 is a proper fix for that problematic patch so it could be re-merged without the power fallout.



Linux Kernel API Specification Framework Proposed To Help Stabilize User-Space Interfaces

([Linux Kernel] 14 June 10:07 AM EDT Linux Kernel API Specification Framework)

Sasha Levin just sent out an initial "request for comments" patch series for the Linux kernel in aiming to establish a Kernel API Specification Framework.



SDL Merges Wayland Pointer Warp Support To Help Native Wayland Gaming

([Wayland] 14 June 09:28 AM EDT SDL + Wayland + Pointer Warp)

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland.



GNOME's Busy Week With Disabling X11 Session By Default, Greater systemd Dependence

([GNOME] 14 June 09:07 AM EDT GNOME Wayland + systemd Focus)

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue and there being a number of recent controversial changes to the desktop platform.



Haiku OS Restores EXT4 Compatibility, RISC-V Once Again Booting

([Operating Systems] 14 June 08:55 AM EDT Haiku OS)

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS published their latest monthly report to outline progress made over the past month.



KDE Plasma 6.5 To Introduce Wayland Picture-In-Picture Support

([KDE] 14 June 06:08 AM EDT Wayland PIP)

While KDE Plasma 6.4 is set for release next week, there are already exciting feature improvements brewing for Plasma 6.5.



Wine 10.10 Brings Updated Mono, 38 Bug Fixes

([WINE] 13 June 07:18 PM EDT Wine 10.10)

Wine 10.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.



Bcachefs Is Now Able To Auto-Fix A Few More Fsck Errors

([Linux Storage] 13 June 05:00 PM EDT Bcachefs Fixes For Linux 6.16)

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle, including the ability to auto-fix more file-system check "fsck" errors.



Intel Begins Preparing Linux For Next-Gen DSA 3.0 Accelerators

([Intel] 13 June 02:08 PM EDT Intel DSA 3.0 Accelerators)

In addition to Intel recently upstreaming Linux support for new QAT "Gen 6" hardware as their next-generation QuickAssist Technology IP, Intel today began posting Linux kernel driver patches for a new version of their Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA). It looks like upcoming Xeon processors will be rolling out a lot of new accelerator IP.



LibreOffice 25.8 Beta Released For Testing

([LibreOffice] 13 June 12:47 PM EDT LibreOffice 25.8)

LibreOffice 25.8 beta is now available for this popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice 25.8 has been baking many improvements for this popular Microsoft Office alternative and leading office suite option for the Linux desktop.



Vulkan 1.4.318 Released With A New Valve Extension

([Vulkan] 13 June 11:57 AM EDT Vulkan 1.4.318)

Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions.



Google Cloud C4D Performance Benchmarks At The Top-End Show 39% Generational Improvement With EPYC Turin

([Processors] 13 June 12:00 PM EDT Add A Comment)

Back in April at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of the new C4D family of VMs powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Back on launch day I looked at the C3D vs. C4D performance at some of the smaller, more common VM sizes. In today's article is a look at the top-end performance of the C4D family with 384 vCPUs. For those wondering about the compute potential of the c4d-standard-384, here are some benchmarks of this 192-core / 384-thread EPYC Turin configuration compared to the prior C3D AMD EPYC Genoa based instance that topped out at 360 vCPUs.



Wayland Protocols 1.45 Brings Background Effects, Pointer Warp & Session Management

([Wayland] 13 June 11:42 AM EDT Wayland Protocols 1.45)

Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out.



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He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid
ornamental armour. It was gilt by association.
-- Terry Pratchett, "Night Watch"