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Linux Patch Queued To Report Outdated Intel CPU Microcode As A Vulnerability

([Intel] 21 April 04:55 PM EDT Old Microcode As Security Vulnerability)

Last year a patch was raised for the Linux kernel that would report outdated CPU microcode versions as a security vulnerability. With Intel routinely issuing new CPU microcode updates for security vulnerabilities and addressing other functional issues, the Linux kernel would begin warning users when recognizing that outdated CPU microcode is deployed for a given processor. That patch has now been queued into a tip/tip.git branch and thus looking like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle.



AMD ROCm 6.4 Adds SPIR-V Linking Support To HIP

([AMD] 21 April 03:58 PM EDT SPIR-V Linking With HIP)

With the recently released AMD ROCm 6.4 release for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware there are yet more indications around AMD's growing software ecosystem expansion. With ROCm 6.4 are additions to the HIP API for allowing linking of SPIR-V code objects, which is the intermediate representation used by Vulkan as well as with OpenCL and other Khronos APIs.



GCC Patch Revived For -mtune=generic Showing Nice Benefits On Intel & AMD CPUs

([GNU] 21 April 01:26 PM EDT GCC Performance)

A 2021 era patch for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been revived and discussed in recent days around simplifying the memcpy and memset inlining strategies when compiling code with the "-mtune=generic" option. The patch takes the approach during that generic tuning to try to avoid branches. In doing so, some nice performance benefits are observed in some benchmarks.



Ubuntu 25.04 vs. Windows 11 CPU Performance For The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360

([Operating Systems] 21 April 08:16 AM EDT 67 Comments)

Earlier this month was a look at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 using a Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 "Strix Point" SoC within a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. That was an interesting benchmark battle and providing a fresh look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack relative to Radeon Software on Windows. For those curious about the current Zen 5(C) performance, today's article are all of the CPU benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 performance under the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 and Windows 11 as pre-loaded by Lenovo.



Intel Posts Newest Code For Cache Aware Scheduling On Linux

([Intel] 21 April 06:31 AM EDT Cache Aware Load Balancing)

Intel engineers have recently been working on the notion of cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for benefiting the likes of Intel and AMD processors sporting multiple caches. Posted today was the newest iteration of these patches that are still seeking to get more feedback and testing around this potential useful addition to the Linux kernel.



FamFS Ported To FUSE For Fabric-Attached Memory File-System

([Linux Storage] 21 April 06:12 AM EDT FamFS)

One year ago we covered Micron working on FamFS as a new file-system for fabric-attached memory with an emphasis on Compute Express Link (CXL) devices. That started off as a conventional kernel driver while now the newest patches posted this weekend are morphing it into a user-space driver via FUSE.



RISC-V getrandom vDSO Ready Ahead Of Linux 6.16 With Exciting Performance

([RISC-V] 21 April 05:59 AM EDT getrandom vDSO For RISC-V)

Merged last year in Linux 6.11 was getrandom() support in the vDSO for x86/x86_64 and then in Linux 6.12 was extended to LoongArch and ARM64. With the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle, this support for faster while still secure RNG for user-space is set to come to RISC-V.



Wine 10.6 Released With New Command Processor Lexer, 27 Bug Fixes

([WINE] 21 April 12:00 AM EDT Wine 10.6)

After missing its bi-weekly development release regiment this past Friday, Wine 10.6 was tagged on Sunday as the newest routine update to this open-source software that enables Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other platforms.



Linux 6.15-rc3 Released With GCC 15 Build Fixes, Intel Bartlett Lake & Zen 5 Check

([Linux Kernel] 20 April 05:05 PM EDT Linux 6.15)

Easter doesn't get in the way of Linus Torvalds' weekly kernel release regiment: Linux 6.15-rc3 is now available for testing the latest kernel fixes ahead of the stable Linux 6.15 kernel release coming around the end of May.



NVIDIA Engineer Posts New NOVA Driver Patches - Still Far From Doing Anything Useful

([NVIDIA] 20 April 08:51 AM EDT 16 New Patches)

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork.



Sway 1.11-rc1 Released With Many New Features & New Wayland Protocols

([Wayland] 20 April 08:02 AM EDT Sway 1.11-rc1)

Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library.



FreeType Fixes Inefficient Code Causing 10x Startup Time Hit When Loading Arial TTF Font

([Desktop] 20 April 06:33 AM EDT FreeType Performance Free)

The FreeType library for rendering text onto bitmaps that is widely used by a variety of applications has landed a set of three patches today providing an important performance improvement to address a significant inefficiency within the existing FreeType codebase.



Linux 6.13 Series Ends With The Linux 6.13.12 Release

([Linux Kernel] 20 April 06:19 AM EDT Linux 6.13 Over)

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a few new Linux kernel stable point releases today for Easter and also capping off the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle in the process.



OpenVPN DCO Driver Queued In Net-Next Ahead Of Linux 6.16

([Linux Networking] 20 April 06:00 AM EDT OpenVPN Data Channel Offload)

The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel.



HFS/HFS+ File-System Driver Support For Linux May End Up Being Maintained

([Linux Storage] 19 April 08:48 PM EDT Apple HFS File-System)

Just a few days ago there was talk of potentially removing the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the Linux kernel considering they had been orphaned for a decade and beginning to cause a maintenance burden. After briefly being marked for deprecation, it now looks like the drivers may be maintained with new maintainers alleging to step-up to the role.



Intel Simplifies Its Firmware License For The Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH"

([Intel] 19 April 03:22 PM EDT Intel ISH)

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH" allows for offloading sensor polling and other tasks to a low-power co-processor to help reduce overall system power consumption for extending battery life with tablets, embedded devices, and 2-in1 laptops.



FFmpeg AV1 Vulkan Encoder Patch Posted

([Multimedia] 19 April 11:33 AM EDT av1_vulkan encoder)

While the FFmpeg multimedia library merged Vulkan Video encode support last year, it was initially limited to H.264 and H.265 formats. With a new patch posted for review this week, AV1 encode support using the Vulkan Video API is now underway.



GCC 16 Adding Support For GNU/Hurd On RISC-V Targets

([GNU] 19 April 06:47 AM EDT riscv*-*-gnu* targets)

GNU/Hurd has long struggled with hardware support and is still working on its x86_64 support while having a host of various hardware limitations but it also appears they are eager to explore Hurd on RISC-V platforms.



Google Engineers Exploring Distributed ThinLTO Builds Of The Linux Kernel

([Google] 19 April 06:28 AM EDT Distributed ThinLTO)

Engineers from Google are proposing that distributed ThinLTO build support be introduced for LLVM/Clang when compiling the Linux kernel. The distributed ThinLTO mode for link-time optimizations can lead to quicker build times than the current in-process ThinLTO mode while also being more convenient and work with kernel live-patching solutions.



KDE Preps More Wayland Improvements, Addresses Another Possible KWin Crash

([KDE] 19 April 06:11 AM EDT KDE Fixes This Week)

KDE developers continue to be very busy working toward the Plasma 6.4 desktop release and making other enhancements throughout this open-source desktop.



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I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.
-- Dylan Thomas, his last words