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)

Linux Lands Fix For Its "Subtly Wrong" Page Fault Handling Code For The Past 5 Years

([Linux Kernel] 23 January 08:11 AM EST Page Fault Handling Mistake)

Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel.



Zlib-rs 0.6 Released With Improved AVX-512 Support

([Free Software] 23 January 06:21 AM EST zlib-rs 0.6)

Zlib-rs is the effort out of the Trifecta Tech Foundation to provide a Zlib compression implementation written in the Rust programming language that can serve as a C dynamic library and Rust crate. The intent here being that zlib-rs is potentially safer than the classic C-based implementation of Zlib.



KMSCON 9.3 Released With Mouse Support By Default, Other Improvements

([Free Software] 23 January 05:58 AM EST KMSCON 9.3)

KMSCON as a KMS/DRM-based virtual console emulator in user-space has been released. KMSCON is one of the leading solutions for potentially replacing the in-kernel Virtual Terminal (VT) implementation.



Vulkan 1.4.340 Released With Descriptor Heap & Other New Extensions

([Vulkan] 23 January 06:00 AM EST VK_EXT_descriptor_heap)

Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.



Servo 0.0.4 Browser Engine Released & Finally Supporting Multiple Windows

([Free Software] 23 January 05:40 AM EST Servo 0.0.4)

Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows.



AMD Lands Fresh Performance Improvements For RDNA4 In RadeonSI Driver

([Radeon] 22 January 08:21 PM EST GFX12 + RadeonSI Performance)

While slightly too late for making it into the Mesa 26.0 release that branched yesterday, merged now to Mesa Git for Q2's Mesa 26.1 release are some new RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver optimizations for the latest AMD Radeon RDNA4 graphics cards.



Linux GPU Driver Loophole Being Fixed For Unprivileged Users Being Able To Tap Unbounded Kernel Memory

([Linux Kernel] 22 January 03:25 PM EST System-Wide Out Of Memory)

An oversight in the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver common code could allow unprivileged users to trigger unbounded kernel memory consumption for a potential system-wide out-of-memory "OOM" situation.



Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" Linux Performance ~14% Faster Since Launch

([Processors] 22 January 12:00 PM EST 2 Comments)

As part of my end-of-year 2025 benchmarking I looked at how the Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids performance evolved in the year since launch and seeing some nice open-source/Linux optimizations during that time. On the other side of the table were also benchmarks of how AMD EPYC 8004 Sienna evolved in its two years, Ubuntu 24.04 vs. 26.04 development for AMD EPYC Turin, the AMD EPYC Milan-X in its four years since launch, and also a look at the performance evolution lower down the stack with the likes of sub-$500 laptop hardware. Out today is a fresh look at how the Intel Xeon 6780E Sierra Forest has evolved in its one and a half years since its launch.



AMD Announces Ryzen 7 9850X3D Pricing Of $499 USD

([AMD] 22 January 10:19 AM EST Ryzen 7 9850X3D)

Back at CES AMD announced the Ryen 7 9850X3D as a faster sibling to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Today they have announced the suggested price for this 3D V-Cache desktop processor and confirmation of its availability starting on 29 January.



Updated Intel Panther Lake IPU Firmware Published With New Features & Bug Fixes

([Intel] 22 January 09:54 AM EST Intel IPU7 Firmware)

Ahead of the first Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptops expected to hit retail channels next week, Intel has published updated IPU7 (IPU 7.5) firmware for the image processing unit used by the web cameras on the higher-end Panther Lake laptops.



Rust 1.93 Brings Improvement For Inline Assembly Handling

([Programming] 22 January 09:18 AM EST Rust 1.93)

Rust 1.93 is out today as the first feature release for this programming lanugage of 2026.



AMD AOMP 22.0-2 Released With Flang Fortran Improvements

([AMD] 22 January 08:15 AM EST AOMP AOMP 22.0-2)

Yesterday along with releasing ROCm 7.2 there was also the release of AOMP 22.0-2 as the newest version of their open-source downstream of LLVM/Clang/Flang that is focused on offering the best OpenMP/OpenACC offloading support to Instinct/Radeon hardware.



Prominent Intel Compiler Engineer Heads Off To AMD

([AMD] 22 January 06:12 AM EST Intel Compiler Expert Now At AMD)

James Brodman worked for the last 15 years at Intel on their ISPC SIMD compiler and then in more recent years on the Intel DPC++ compiler and SYCL support as part of Intel's oneAPI initiative. Rather interestingly, this compiler expert has now joined AMD.



ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years In Striving To Be An Open-Source Windows Implementation

([Operating Systems] 22 January 05:57 AM EST ReactOS 30 Years Old)

The ReactOS project is celebrating today that it marks 30 years since their first code commit in the ReactOS source tree. During the past 30 years now the project has seen more than 88k commits from more than 300 developers as it seeks to be a robust open-source Windows implementation. In their 30 year birthday blog post they also provide a look ahead at what they're working on.



Linux Finally Retiring HIPPI: The First Near-Gigabit Standard For Networking Supercomputers

([Linux Networking] 21 January 08:20 PM EST HIPPI)

While the Linux kernel has been seeing preparations from NVIDIA for 1.6 Tb/s networking in preparing for next-generation super-computing, the kernel has still retained support to now for the High Performance Parallel Interface. HIPPI was the standard for connecting supercomputers in the late 1980s and a portion of the 1990s with being the first networking standard for near-Gigabit connectivity at 800 Mb/s over distances up to 25 meters. But HIPPI looks like it will be retired from the mainline kernel with Linux 7.0.



AMD Sends Out Linux Patches For Next-Gen EPYC Features: GLBE, GLSBE & PLZA

([AMD] 21 January 05:48 PM EST GLBE, GLSBE, PLZA)

Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list this afternoon were a set of 19 patches in preparing for some new CPU features presumably to be found with AMD's next-generation EPYC "Venice" processors.



AMD ROCm 7.2 Now Released With More Radeon Graphics Cards Supported, ROCm Optiq Introduced

([AMD] 21 January 03:52 PM EST ROCm 7.2)

Back at CES earlier this month AMD talked up features of the ROCm 7.2 release. ROCm 7.2 though wasn't actually released then, at least not for Linux. That ROCm 7.2.0 release though was pushed out today as the latest improvement to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack and officially extending the support to more Radeon graphics cards.



Mesa 26.0-rc1 Released With RADV Improvements Leading The Way Along With Intel & NVK

([Mesa] 21 January 02:49 PM EST Mesa 26.0-rc1)

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 26.0-rc1 with the code for this quarter's Mesa feature release now branched and under a feature freeze leading up to the stable release in February.



PyTorch 2.10 Released With More Improvements For AMD ROCm & Intel GPUs

([AI] 21 January 12:49 PM EST PyTorch 2.10)

PyTorch 2.10 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used deep learning library. The new PyTorch release continues improving support for Intel GPUs as well as for the AMD ROCm compute stack along with still driving more enhancements for NVIDIA CUDA.



XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 Released With Reduced Motion Setting, Support For Linyaps Apps

([Desktop] 21 January 11:14 AM EST XDG Desktop Portal)

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 is now available for testing with the latest features for this portal frontend service to Flatpak.



More

The Humorix Oracle explains how to get a job at a major corporation:

1. Find an exploit in Microsoft IIS or another buggy Microsoft product to
which large corporations rarely apply security patches.
2. Create a virus or worm that takes advantage of this exploit and then
propogates itself by selecting IP numbers at random and then trying to
infect those machines.
3. Keep an eye on your own website's server logs. When your virus starts
propogating, your server will be hit with thousands of attacks from
other infected systems trying to spread the virus to your machine.
4. Make a list of the IP numbers of all of the infected machines.
5. Perform a reverse DNS lookup on these IP numbers.
6. Make a note of all of the Fortune 500 companies that appear on the list
of infected domains.
7. Send your resume to these companies and request an interview for a
system administrator position. These companies are hiring -- whether
they realize it or not.
8. Use your new salary to hire a good defense lawyer when the FBI comes
knocking.