Around 8% Of Debian Source Packages Are Building Against Rust Libraries

([Debian] 21 July 06:18 AM EDT Rust On Debian)

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large.

HarfBuzz 11.3 Delivers Significant Performance Improvements

([Free Software] 21 July 06:00 AM EDT HarfBuzz 11.3)

HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others.

Firefox 141 Release Brings Lower RAM Usage On Linux

([Mozilla] 21 July 05:55 AM EDT Firefox 141)

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser.

Linux 6.16-rc7 Released: "I Think We're In Good Shape"

([Linux Kernel] 20 July 06:51 PM EDT Linux 6.16)

The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now available for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week.

Linux 6.16-rc7 Bringing Fix For Possible Bogus/Miscalculated Load Averages

([Linux Kernel] 20 July 03:10 PM EDT sched/urgent)

Among the fixes merged today ahead of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 6.16-rc7 test kernel release is a lone patch on the "sched/urgent" side to fix possible bogus load average values. Reported system load averages within the kernel's scheduler code could potentially be off going back to May of 2021.

NVIDIA Bringing CUDA To RISC-V

([NVIDIA] 20 July 09:29 AM EDT NVIDIA CUDA + RISC-V)

NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors.

Linux Kernel Patches Speed-Up CRC32 Performance For CPUs With "Good" AVX-512

([Linux Kernel] 20 July 07:05 AM EDT crc32c + AVX-512 VPCLMULQDQ)

Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC32 checksum performance.

Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support But Still Bound By Slow Hardware

([Debian] 20 July 06:50 AM EDT Debian 13 + RISC-V)

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.

SFrame Support Beginning To Materialize For LLVM/Clang

([LLVM] 20 July 06:24 AM EDT SFrame + LLVM)

SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream.

Radeon Vulkan Driver's Emulated Ray-Tracing Scores A ~40% Improvement For Quake II RTX

([Radeon] 19 July 08:49 PM EDT RADV Emulated RT)

In addition to Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" making some nice performance improvements for modern AMD GPUs with hardware ray-tracing, the emulated ray-tracing code path in RADV for primarily older GPUs has seen some improvements merged this weekend. In fact, so significant that from one merge request is around 40% faster performance for the Quake II RTX game with the emulated RT handling.

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" Planning For Release On August 9

([Debian] 19 July 11:48 AM EDT Debian 13 Release Date)

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.

Rust-Written NOVA Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Being Further Built Out In Linux 6.17

([Nouveau] 19 July 09:49 AM EDT NOVA Changes For Linux 6.17)

For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version.

Open-Source & Rust-Written Burn MATMUL Kernels Can Compete With NVIDIA's CUDA/cuBLAS

([Programming] 19 July 06:40 AM EDT Burn)

The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end.

Wayland Color Management For HDR Under Review For Chrome/Chromium

([Google] 19 July 06:21 AM EDT Wayland Color Management)

The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser.

KDE Plasma 6.5 Brings Rounded Bottom Corners For Windows By Default

([KDE] 19 July 05:57 AM EDT Plasma 6.5)

KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows.

Arch Linux AUR Packages For Firefox & Other Browsers Removed For Containing Malware

([Arch Linux] 19 July 12:00 AM EDT Malicious AUR Packages)

While the Arch Linux AUR repository can be popular for fetching some packages not found in Arch Linux proper, it's important to keep in mind that AUR stands for the Arch User Repository. These user packages aren't always the best and rarely can be done with malicious intent as shown this week with an advisory over several malicious browser packages being briefly pedaled through AUR.

Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux

([Intel] 18 July 06:01 PM EDT Clear Linux)

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

Bcachefs Lands More Fixes Ahead Of Linux 6.16-rc7

([Linux Storage] 18 July 04:44 PM EDT Bcachefs Fixes For Linux 6.16-rc7)

As we await to see what Linus Torvalds will end up doing about the Bcachefs file-system come Linux 6.17, for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle he continues to honor the Bcachefs pull requests containing fixes.

Ubuntu 25.10 Raspberry Pi Images Will Be Much Leaner

([Raspberry Pi] 18 July 01:15 PM EDT Ubuntu 25.10 Raspberry Pi)

The Ubuntu 25.10 images geared for the Raspberry Pi will be much more lean than current Ubuntu Linux releases for the Raspberry Pi thanks to changes merged this week.

AMD Announces ROCm-LS, hipCIM As Port Of NVIDIA's cuCIM

([AMD] 18 July 12:00 PM EDT ROCm-LS)

Back in May was the announcement by AMD of ROCm-DS as a new toolkit geared for real-world data science problems with various helpers to accelerate data processing on Instinct accelerators. AMD today is complementing ROCm-DS by announcing ROCm-LS and hipCIM.