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)

Hygon C86-4G CPU Support Added To The GCC 17 Compiler

([GNU] 29 April 09:14 AM EDT HYGON C86-4G)

Merged today to the GCC Git compiler codebase, which will be for GCC 17 rather than the imminent GCC 16.1 stable release, is adding support for the Chinese-manufactured Hygon C86-4G-M4 / C86-4G-M6 / C86-4G-M7 series x86_64 processors.


Libcamera 0.7.1 Released With Improved Software ISP

([Multimedia] 29 April 06:30 AM EDT libcamera 0.7.1)

Libcamera 0.7.1 released on Tuesday as the newest feature release for this open-source library for camera image signal processors (ISPs) that has grown of importance for the likes of Raspberry Pi and Chrome OS and modern desktop Linux distributions with modern laptop hardware like recent Intel Core (Ultra) laptops.


Wayland Developers Target June For Weston 16 Release

([Wayland] 29 April 06:17 AM EDT Weston 16)

Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor.


Devuan Developer Working On Reviving GTK2 With Modern Fixes

([Free Software] 29 April 06:05 AM EDT gtk2-ng)

A Devuan developer, the Linux distribution that provides a Debian-based operating system without dependence on systemd, is working on "gtk2-ng" for providing modern fixes and improvements to the old GTK2 toolkit.


AMD Introducing New Linux Driver For Their Halo Box: For Its RGB LED Light Bar

([AMD] 28 April 08:49 PM EDT AMD Halo Box)

AMD CEO Lisa Su back at CES 2026 showed off the Ryzen AI Halo box as a mini PC built around their excellent Strix Halo SoC. The Ryzen AI halo box is to serve as an AI development platform to compete with the likes of NVIDIA's DGX Spark and Dell GB10. This week is the first time I am seeing new Linux driver activity specifically referencing this exciting AMD "Halo Box" system.


Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus

([Valve] 28 April 08:22 PM EDT GameNetworkingSockets)

Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today.


IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390

([Virtualization] 28 April 12:54 PM EDT ARM64 On s390 / IBM Z)

At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on "dual architecture" hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).


Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance

([Operating Systems] 28 April 11:00 AM EDT 20 Comments)

The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It's a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at how Windows 11 Pro is competing against the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in creator/workstation workloads.


AMD's Lemonade SDK 10.3 Now 10x Smaller By Getting Rid Of Electron

([AMD] 28 April 10:35 AM EDT Lemonade 10.3)

Lemonade as the open-source local AI server backed by AMD and supported across AMD CPUs / GPUs / NPUs on Windows and Linux is out with a big update.


Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards

([Free Software] 28 April 09:35 AM EDT Sovereign Tech Standards)

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards.


GCC 16's Improved Error Messages, Experimental HTML Output

([GNU] 28 April 09:13 AM EDT GCC 16 Error Messages)

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year's open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages.


Fedora 44 Released For Living On The Leading-Edge Of Linux Innovations

([Fedora] 28 April 08:31 AM EDT Fedora Linux 44)

Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages.


Proton 11.0 Beta 2 Updates VKD3D-Proton

([Linux Gaming] 28 April 07:00 AM EDT Proton 11.0)

Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve's Steam Play is now out with a second beta release.


Ubuntu's "AI Kill Switch" Is Achieved By Removing Snaps, Initially Opt-In

([Ubuntu] 28 April 06:25 AM EDT Ubuntu AI)

Following yesterday's polarizing news of Canonical to begin shipping AI features in Ubuntu Linux over the course of the next year, Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical has now provided some clarifications around their AI plans.


AMDXDNA Driver Preps Hardware Scheduler Time Quantum For Ryzen AI Multi-User Fairness

([AMD] 28 April 06:06 AM EDT Hardware Scheduler Time Quantum)

The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is preparing a new feature called hardware scheduler time quantum for ensuring fairness between multiple users/contexts wanting to leverage this neural processing unit for AI workloads.


7-Zip 26.01 Now Allows Making Use Of Huge Pages On Linux For Faster Compression

([Free Software] 28 April 05:55 AM EDT 7-Zip 26.01)

7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives.


WayVNC 0.10 Released For Advancing This Leading VNC Server For Wayland

([Wayland] 28 April 05:43 AM EDT WayVNC 0.10)

WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library.


Red Hat's Stratis Storage 3.9 Released With Online Encryption/Decryption/Reencryption

([Linux Storage] 27 April 08:21 PM EDT Stratisd 3.9)

It's crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3.9 released today.


RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Memory Protection Using AMD Trusted Memory Zone

([Radeon] 27 April 03:33 PM EDT Vulkan protectedMemory)

The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs.


Valve Confirms Steam Controller Release Date, $99 Price

([Valve] 27 April 01:33 PM EDT Steam Controller)

Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD.


More

What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honored from generation to generation.

Cultivate Virtue in your self,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere.

Therefore look at the body as body;
Look at the family as family;
Look at the village as village;
Look at the nation as nation;
Look at the universe as universe.

How do I know the universe is like this?
By looking!