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)

SDL3 Preview Release Aims To Help Test The New SDL 3.0 API

([Linux Gaming] 24 March 11:22 AM EDT SDL3 Preview Release)

Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API.



KVM Virtualization With Linux 6.9 Brings More Optimizations For Intel & AMD

([Virtualization] 24 March 11:00 AM EDT KVM)

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes for Linux 6.9 continue to enhance the capabilities of the open-source Linux virtualization software stack.



Linux 6.9 Improves Speakup - Its In-Kernel Speech Synthesizer

([Multimedia] 24 March 10:10 AM EDT /dev/synthu)

The speakup driver that's long existed within the Linux kernel is a speech synthesizer that can interface with various synthesizer hardware and from user-space software can interface with /dev/synth for submitting data to the synthesizer. With Linux 6.9 the speakup driver is seeing two useful improvements.



Linux 6.9 Delivers More Improvements To The SLUB Allocator

([Linux Kernel] 24 March 09:51 AM EDT SLAB)

Linux 6.8 dropped the SLAB allocator after its deprecation in v6.5 and now just leaving SLUB for all allocation duties. For Linux 6.9 there is continued cleaning from that SLAB removal as well as making more SLUB improvements.



Rust-Written Coreutils 0.0.25 With Improved GNU Compatibility

([Programming] 24 March 10:25 AM EDT uutils 0.0.25)

Out this weekend is a new version of uutils' Coreutils 0.0.25 as the Rust-written drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils for common utilities found on Linux platforms and other systems.



Linux 6.9 Sees Further Security Hardening

([Linux Security] 24 March 06:58 AM EDT Linux 6.9)

With security concerns at all-time highs in the industry, Linux 6.9 is seeing yet more work to beef up its security hardening with various additional safety checks and other compile-time defenses for ensuring security best practices.



IO_uring With Linux 6.9 Gains Truncate Support, Per-Ring NAPI

([Linux Storage] 24 March 06:43 AM EDT IO_uring)

The IO_uring changes were merged early during the nearly-over Linux 6.9 merge window. This round brought yet a few more features to this wonderful and innovative kernel feature.



Linux 6.9 Sees Invasive & Significant Changes To Workqueues

([Linux Kernel] 23 March 04:30 PM EDT Workqueues)

Workqueues are commonly used within the Linux kernel for asynchronous process execution contexts. With Linux 6.9 the workqueue (WQ) code has seen "significant and invasive" changes.



DIRT 5 Now Runs On Intel Arc Graphics Under Linux With Driver Workaround

([Intel] 23 March 04:05 PM EDT DIRT 5)

The DIRT 5 racing game was one of the titles that hadn't worked on Intel graphics under Linux due to the sparse memory support for the ANV Vulkan driver. But with sparse support now enabled, the game was crashing at launch. But now a workaround is in place to allow Intel's Mesa 24.1 Vulkan driver to work with DIRT 5.



AMD FRU Memory Poison Manager Makes It In For Linux 6.9

([Hardware] 23 March 04:12 PM EDT Linux 6.9 EDAC)

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes.



Linux 6.9 Expands Hardware Monitoring Support For More AIO CPU Coolers

([Hardware] 23 March 03:05 PM EDT All In One Liquid Coolers)

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls.



Rust Bindings Posted For KMS Drivers, VKMS Ported To Rust

([Linux Kernel] 23 March 06:57 AM EDT RVKMS)

So far when it comes to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) display drivers for Linux, there are Rust efforts underway for the Apple Silicon kernel graphics driver with the Asahi Linux project as well as the new Nova effort for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver from Red Hat. Also now out from Red Hat is posting the Rust bindings for KMS to review plus porting the existing Virtual KMS driver over to Rust as the "RVKMS" driver.



KDE Sees A Number Of Regression Fixes & Some Crash Fixes This Week

([KDE] 23 March 06:41 AM EDT KDE Bug Fixing)

KDE developers continue to be quite busy fixing a variety of regressions -- including some crashes -- with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop stack. Plasma 6.0.3 will ship next week with yet more fixes while some feature work toward Plasma 6.1 is also underway.



Wine 9.5 Released With More Feature Work, 27 Bug Fixes

([WINE] 22 March 07:39 PM EDT Wine 9.5)

Wine 9.5 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux.



Microsoft Enables DNS Tunneling By Default For WSL - More Reliable Networking

([Microsoft] 22 March 02:00 PM EDT WSL DNS Tunneling)

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements.



Linux 6.9 Adds New RISC-V Vector-Accelerated Crypto Routines

([RISC-V] 22 March 12:53 PM EDT Linux 6.9)

The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel ahead of the v6.9-rc1 release this Sunday.



GCC Compiler Adds Support For Device Offloading With AMD RDNA3 APUs (GFX1103)

([AMD] 22 March 11:16 AM EDT AMD RDNA3 APUs)

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics.



LoongArch Enables More Kernel Functionality With Linux 6.9

([Linux Kernel] 22 March 10:30 AM EDT LoongArch)

Loongson continues enabling more kernel functionality for their LoongArch processor port for the upstream Linux kernel. With Linux 6.9 they sent out today a set of patches enabling more features for this Chinese CPU architecture.



LibreOffice Enables Multi-Threaded 3D Rendering

([LibreOffice] 22 March 10:12 AM EDT Multi-Threaded 3D Rendering)

The latest LibreOffice drawing code has enabled support for making use of multi-threaded 3D rendering.



NVK Driver Adds Vendor ID Workaround For Games Expecting NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

([Mesa] 22 March 09:35 AM EDT Mesa NVK)

Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use.



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The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.