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 6.14-rc4 Released: The Right Kind Of "Boring"

([Linux Kernel] 23 February 04:49 PM EST Linux 6.14)

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14-rc4 kernel a short time ago as this half-way point to Linux 6.14 stable that should be out before the end of March.


GNU Emacs 30.1 Released With Android Support, Emacs Lisp Native Compiler By Default

([GNU] 23 February 01:15 PM EST Emacs 30.1)

GNU Emacs 30.1 is out today as the newest version of this extensible text editor.


Valve Snuck The Lenovo Legion Go S Controller Support Into The Linux Kernel

([Valve] 23 February 08:53 AM EST Lenovo Legion Go S Controller)

Valve is supporting Lenovo with the Legion Go S gaming handheld running their Arch Linux based SteamOS. Beyond the fanfare at CES, Valve has been collaborating with Lenovo on engineering resources for ensuring the Legion Go S is running well with SteamOS and in turn the mainline Linux kernel. It turns out from a recent sneaky patch, Valve quietly added support to the Linux kernel for what ended up being the Lenovo Legion Go S controller/input handling.


AMD Preparing New GPU Support For Their Kernel Graphics Driver In Linux 6.15

([Radeon] 23 February 06:51 AM EST AMDGPU New Hardware)

AMD has sent out their initial pull request of "new stuff" for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of feature additions they want to make for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel. Most notable from this week's submission to DRM-Next is preparing a lot of new GPU hardware support.


OneXPlayer Linux Driver Catching Up To The Windows Monitoring Driver

([Linux Gaming] 23 February 06:36 AM EST OneXPlayer)

OneXPlayer produces a line of handheld gaming consoles powered by AMD or Intel SoCs. These devices ship with Windows out-of-the-box but given they are x86_64 software have worked alright with Linux and there's been a OneXPlayer Linux driver for supporting sensor readings and other device-specific information from these handhelds. In a big patch series this weekend, that OneXPlayer Linux driver is catching up to its official Windows counterpart.


SVT-AV1 3.0 Released With Faster CPU-Based AV1 Encoding

([Multimedia] 23 February 04:00 AM EST SVT-AV1 3.0)

SVT-AV1 as the open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder that was started by Intel software engineers and now led by the Alliance for Open Media is out this week with the big SVT-AV1 3.0 release. Here's some details on SVT-AV1 3.0 as well as some initial performance benchmarks for this speedy AV1 encoder, especially on modern Intel and AMD processors.


Mesa's Venus Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4 Support

([Mesa] 23 February 03:00 AM EST Vulkan 1.4 For Venus)

The Mesa Venus driver code for use with VirtIO-GPU for exposing accelerated Vulkan API support within virtualized environments (VMs) now is advertising Vulkan 1.4 API support.


Wine Staging 10.2 Adds Support For AF_UNIX Sockets

([WINE] 22 February 08:18 PM EST Wine Staging 10.2)

Following Friday's release of Wine 10.2, Wine Staging 10.2 is out for testing as this more experimental/leading-edge version of Wine that is shipping with 300+ extra patches for testing.


Microsoft Makes More Of Their DirectX Compiler Code Open-Source

([Microsoft] 22 February 12:37 PM EST DirectXShaderCompiler)

Back in 2017 was the initial open-source DirectX Shader Compiler milestone and since then Microsoft has continued iterating on it with better Linux support, new features, and ironing out other gaps in this "DirectXShaderCompiler" project. On Friday they released the newest version of this DirectX Shader Compiler that features another newly open-sourced component.


Asahi Linux's Honeykrisp Vulkan Driver Gains Sparse Support In Mesa 25.1

([Mesa] 22 February 09:14 AM EST Asahi Mesa Sync)

Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a fresh sync of the Asahi Linux AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan driver changes of the work that was being carried by the Asahi Linux development tree and now upstreamed to Mesa proper.


FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 Drops KDE Packages From DVD ISOs

([BSD] 22 February 06:49 AM EST FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3)

FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 is out this weekend in being the newest weekly development version leading towards next month's stable release to cap off the FreeBSD 13 series.


SystemV Filesystem Being Removed From The Linux Kernel

([Linux Storage] 22 February 06:57 AM EST Dropping SysV Filesystem)

The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken.


Niri 25.02 & Labwc 0.8.3 Wayland Compositors Released

([Wayland] 22 February 06:41 AM EST Niri + Labwc Releases)

The Niri and Labwc Wayland compositor projects are both out with new releases this weekend to further their efforts.


KDE Plasma 6.4 Preps Improvement To Help KWin Reduce Frame Drops

([KDE] 22 February 06:28 AM EST Plasma Changes)

In addition to this week's release of Plasma 6.3.1, KDE developers have been busy preparing more bug fixes for what will become Plasma 6.3.2 next month. Additionally, more feature code for Plasma 6.4 continues to bake.


Ubuntu 25.04 Working To Better Cope With BitLocker-Enabled Windows, Other Improvements

([Ubuntu] 22 February 12:00 AM EST Ubuntu 25.04)

Jean Baptiste Lallement was recently appointed at Canonical as the new Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop. Jean Baptiste Lallement has a decade and a half history at Canonical working on Ubuntu QA, Ubuntu Phone / Unity, and other projects while now he is leading the charge on further enhancing the Ubuntu desktop initiatives. As somewhat of a mid-point for the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle, he published a Discourse post on Friday to outline some of the recent and ongoing improvements for the Ubuntu desktop.


Firefox 137 To Support HEVC/H.265 Video Playback On Linux With VA-API

([Mozilla] 21 February 08:33 PM EST VA-API HEVC)

Anticipated for the April release of the Mozilla Firefox 137 web browser is finally supporting HEVC (H.265) video playback in an accelerated manner using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).


Wine 10.2 Upgrades VKD3D, Supports Setting Thread Priorities

([WINE] 21 February 07:25 PM EST Wine 10.2)

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 one month ago, Wine 10.2 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release that will culminate with the Wine 11.0 stable release in early 2026.


System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 6 Desktop Environment

([Desktop] 21 February 01:34 PM EST COSMIC Alpha 6)

System76 engineers remain quite busy working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS operating system as well as other Linux distributions moving forward.


Linux's FineIBT Protections "Critically Flawed" Until Intel CPUs Appear With FRED

([Linux Security] 21 February 11:28 AM EST FineIBT Broken)

FineIBT is a Linux kernel initiative led by Intel engineers that aimed to combine the best of Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity. FineIBT was merged in 2022 for the Linux 6.2 kernel as an alternative control flow integrity implementation. Some FineIBT weaknesses were previously addressed but now the implementation has been determined to be "critically flawed" at least until next-generation Intel processors appear with FRED.


Benchmarks: Excellent Power Efficiency With 5th Gen AMD EPYC Using amd-pstate & Power Profiles

([Processors] 21 February 03:00 PM EST 1 Comment)

The AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched last year offer excellent performance and power efficiency out-of-the-box. For those wanting to pursue maximum power efficiency and running in the most optimal configuration for performance-per-Watt, AMD EPYC BIOS tunables as well as recent Linux kernel driver improvements can help in driving even greater efficiency. Today's article is a look at the impact of the AMD P-State driver usage and options with recent kernel versions as well as the Power Profile Selection BIOS option for the impact on 5th Gen EPYC performance and power efficiency.


More

Abstract:
This study examined the incidence of neckwear tightness among a group
of 94 white-collar working men and the effect of a tight business-shirt collar
and tie on the visual performance of 22 male subjects. Of the white-collar
men measured, 67% were found to be wearing neckwear that was tighter than
their neck circumference. The visual discrimination of the 22 subjects was
evaluated using a critical flicker frequency (CFF) test. Results of the CFF
test indicated that tight neckwear significantly decreased the visual
performance of the subjects and that visual performance did not improve
immediately when tight neckwear was removed.
-- Langan, L. M. and Watkins, S. M. "Pressure of Menswear on the
Neck in Relation to Visual Performance." Human Factors 29,
#1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 67-71.