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)

Latest Batch Of Rust Compiler Updates For GCC 15.1 Lands Support For... For Loops

([GNU] 25 March 10:32 AM EDT For-Loops)

Over the past week a lot of new Rust "gccrs" code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality.



Intel Engineer Posts Cache-Aware Load Balancing For Linux - May Be Very Useful For AMD

([Linux Kernel] 25 March 08:55 AM EDT Cache Aware Load Balancing)

An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing... Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors.



F2FS Sees Nice Set Of Enhancements For Linux 6.15

([Linux Storage] 25 March 08:36 AM EDT Flash Friendly File-System)

In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version.



GCC & LLVM Clang Merge Support For The NVIDIA Olympus Cores With The Vera CPU

([NVIDIA] 25 March 06:55 AM EDT NVIDIA Olympus For Vera CPUs)

The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA's Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell.



AMD INVLPGB Merged For Linux 6.15 To Provide Another Performance Advantage

([AMD] 25 March 06:37 AM EDT INVLPGB)

The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD's INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores.



Flowblade 2.20 Open-Source Video Editor Leveraging SDL2, Other Improvements

([Multimedia] 25 March 06:24 AM EDT Flowblade 2.20)

Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux.



GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu Deals With New Firmware Blobs From AMDXDNA & Other Drivers

([GNU] 25 March 05:59 AM EDT GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu)

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code.



GRUB Bootloader Received 73 Patches To Fix A Variety Of Recent Security Issues

([GNU] 24 March 08:26 PM EDT GRUB security woes)

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered.



GIMP 3.0.2 Released To Fix Early Bugs From GIMP 3.0

([Free Software] 24 March 04:56 PM EDT GIMP 3.0.2)

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2.



Bcachefs Aims For "Soft Frozen" On-Disk Format With Linux 6.15 Along With New Features

([Linux Storage] 24 March 03:16 PM EDT Bcachefs)

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve.



Btrfs Adding Fast/Realtime Zstd Compression & Other Performance Optimizations

([Linux Storage] 24 March 02:29 PM EDT Linux 6.15 Btrfs)

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15.



New FWCTL Subsystem Submitted For Linux 6.15

([Linux Kernel] 24 March 12:48 PM EDT fwctl)

Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl.



AMD Lands LLVM Flang Fortran Runtime Support For Compiling Directly On The GPU

([LLVM] 24 March 11:50 AM EDT Flang-RT Build On The GPU)

An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends.



Linux 6.14 Released With Working NTSYNC Driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support

([Linux Kernel] 24 March 10:22 AM EDT Linux 6.14)

There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases.



Intel's AVX10.2 Patches Merged For GCC 15 To Drop 256-bit Rounding & AVX10.2-256 Options

([Intel] 24 March 10:00 AM EDT Intel AVX10.2)

What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today those GNU Compiler Collection patches have been merged to prepare for AVX10.2 always having 512-bit support available.



Faster Intel/AMD Crypto Performance & Initial Intel APX Enablement Slated For Linux 6.15

([Linux Kernel] 24 March 08:56 AM EDT x86 FPU)

Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX).



Wayland Protocols 1.42 Updates Cursor Shape & Tablet Protocols

([Wayland] 24 March 06:46 AM EDT Wayland Protocols 1.42)

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors.



Linux 6.15 CRC Code Should See Big Speed-Ups For Intel/AMD AVX-512 CPUs

([Linux Kernel] 24 March 06:35 AM EDT VPCLMULQDQ)

While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors.



Libinput 1.28 Released With Three-Finger Drag

([Free Software] 24 March 06:23 AM EDT libinput 1.28)

Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads.



Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector Launches For $25 USD

([Raspberry Pi] 24 March 06:03 AM EDT Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector)

Raspberry Pi's brisk pace of new hardware and software the past few months continues today... The Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector was announced today at the $25 USD price point.



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I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.
-- Dylan Thomas, his last words