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)

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 Improves Handling Of Desktop Apps, Other Fixes

([Ubuntu] 9 May 06:45 AM EDT Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3)

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution.



NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17 Fixes Support For GB10 Powered Systems

([NVIDIA] 9 May 06:19 AM EDT NVIDIA VA-API Driver)

The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that's motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA's packaged Linux driver.



Linux Enables Auto Counter Reload "ACR" For Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids

([Intel] 9 May 06:12 AM EDT Auto Counter Reload)

Merged as part of the perf subsystem fixes overnight is enabling Auto Counter Reload (ACR) functionality for upcoming Intel Xeon Diamond Rapids processors. This ACR enabling for Diamond Rapids "DMR" is happening in time for Linux 7.1-rc3 on Sunday while the work is also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernels.



KDE Plasma 6.7 To Support ICC Profiles In HDR Mode, Direct Scan-Out Improvement

([KDE] 8 May 08:53 PM EDT KDE Plasma 6.7)

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing additional Plasma 6.7 desktop features ahead of the stable release due out in mid-June.



FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2 Brings Updated Zstd, Bug Fixes

([BSD] 8 May 08:22 PM EDT FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2)

FreeBSD 15.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in June. Out today is FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2.



HP Z6 G5 A Continues Working Out Well For Linux-Friendly, High-End Workstation

([Computers] 8 May 10:35 AM EDT 6 Comments)

In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I've been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to convenient LVFS/Fwupd support and delivers stellar performance with the Zen 5 Threadripper and NVIDIA Blackwell combination.



NVIDIA Releases CUDA-Oxide 0.1 For Experimental Rust-To-CUDA Compiler

([NVIDIA] 8 May 10:17 AM EDT CUDA-Oxide 0.1)

A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs.



DM-INLINECRYPT Expected For Linux 7.2 To Leverage Inline Encryption

([Linux Storage] 8 May 09:11 AM EDT dm-inlinecrypt)

Queued for merging as part of the DeviceMapper changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is the new dm-inlinecrypt target for leveraging inline block device encryption.



Qt Creator 20 Beta Expands AI Integration

([Qt] 8 May 08:02 AM EDT Qt Creator 20)

The Qt Group released the Qt Creator 20 Beta today for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE). In building off the trends of recent releases of Qt Creator and development tools at large, AI integration continues to be a big area of focus.



OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta's Content-Aware Compression Software

([Free Software] 8 May 06:26 AM EDT OpenZL 0.2)

Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there's finally a new OpenZL software release available.



AMD's Local, Open-Source AI Can Now Easily Interact With Your Gmail

([AMD] 8 May 06:12 AM EDT AMD GAIA + Gmail)

AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account.



Linux Erroneously Thinks Intel Bartlett Lake CPUs Run At 7GHz

([Intel] 8 May 06:01 AM EDT Intel P-State Issue)

With Intel's recently-launched Bartlett Lake P-core-only processors intended for the embedded market, there is a rather surprising oversight under Linux: the Intel P-State driver reporting a 7.0+ GHz clock speed. While many would yearn for a 7GHz CPU, the Core 9 273PE where this issue was discovered in reality can only boost up to 5.7GHz for its maximum turbo frequency.



Dirty Frag Vulnerability Made Public Early: Root Privilege On All Distributions

([Linux Security] 7 May 08:08 PM EDT Dirty Frag)

One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this "Dirty Frag" vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated.



AMD K5 CPUs The Latest To Be Retired With Linux's Aging & Stagnate Hardware Support

([AMD] 7 May 05:44 PM EDT AMD K5 CPUs)

Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors.



Linux 7.2 To Support Realtek RTL8159 10GbE USB Ethernet

([Linux Networking] 7 May 12:03 PM EDT Realtek RTL8159)

The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek's out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.



AMD RadeonSI Code Reorganized To Support Multimedia-Only Driver Builds

([Radeon] 7 May 11:21 AM EDT Video Acceleration Only Drivers)

Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver.



Flattened Image Tree 1.0 Specification For Embedded Linux Systems

([Standards] 7 May 10:26 AM EDT Flat Image Tree 1.0)

The Flattened Image Tree "FIT" 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file.



AMD Instinct MI350P: PCIe Add-In Card For High Performance Open-Source AI/Compute

([Graphics Cards] 7 May 09:00 AM EDT 11 Comments)

While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series.



KDE Plasma 6.7 To Provide A Much Better Experience For CPU-Based Rendering

([KDE] 7 May 06:29 AM EDT Better Shared Memory Buffer Experience)

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.



New GCC Back-End Proposed For WebAssembly

([GNU] 7 May 06:17 AM EDT GCC WASM WebAssembly)

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.



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