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)

The Former Lead For Apple Graphics Drivers On Linux Is Now Working At Intel

([Intel] 27 August 06:29 AM EDT Intel Graphics Drivers)

There's a follow-up to yesterday's surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She's now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers.



Latest NOVA Patches From NVIDIA Get The GSP Booting To RISC-V Active State

([NVIDIA] 27 August 06:15 AM EDT RISC-V GSP)

The NOVA open-source kernel graphics driver continues getting slowly built-up for the NVIDIA RTX 20 "Turing" and newer GPUs that sport the GPU System Processor (GSP) for easing the hardware initialization and management of modern NVIDIA GPUs within the mainline kernel. This Rust-written kernel driver now has patches pending for booting up the NVIDIA GSP to its RISC-V active state.



QEMU 10.1 Released With Intel TDX Improvements, Support For Compiling To WASM

([Virtualization] 27 August 06:03 AM EDT QEMU 10.1)

QEMU 10.1 was released overnight as the latest iteration of this open-source machine emulator that plays an important role in the Linux virtualization stack.



With Apple M1/M2 Graphics Driver Code Working, Alyssa Rosenzweig Stepping Away From Asahi Linux

([Apple] 26 August 08:30 PM EDT Alyssa Rosenzweig Leaving Asahi Linux)

As another very unfortunate setback for the Asahi Linux project moving forward after Hector Martin left the project as did Asahi Lina pausing work on open-source Apple driver development, Alyssa Rosenzweig announced today that she is stepping away from the project following the successes in bringing up Apple M1 and M2 graphics drivers for Linux.



A Number Of Fedora 43 Features/Changes Delayed To Fedora 44

([Fedora] 26 August 04:43 PM EDT Incomplete Changes)

A number of yet-to-be-completed changes/features have been delayed from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44 while permission is granted for a few features to still land late in the Fedora 43 cycle.



Rusticl vs. Intel Compute Runtime Performance For OpenCL On Battlemage

([Display Drivers] 26 August 12:00 PM EDT 18 Comments)

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks of Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver against AMD ROCm on Strix Halo. Those benchmarks caught many by surprise with how well that Rust-based open-source OpenCL driver was working on AMD GPUs for being a generic OpenCL implementation built atop Mesa's Gallium3D. For those curious about the potential of Rusticl on the Intel graphics side, here are some Battlemage benchmarks for Rusticl up against Intel's official Compute Runtime driver stack.



Framework Laptop 16 Upgrade Announced With Ryzen AI 300 Series, GeForce RTX 5070

([Hardware] 26 August 11:40 AM EDT Framework 16)

While the Framework 13 was upgraded earlier this year with a motherboard upgrade for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point", the larger Framework 16 has been stuck in the Zen 4 era. But today Framework announced a new upgrade path for this 16-inch modular laptop for the Ryzen AI 300 series as well as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 discrete graphics.



LLVM 21.1 Released With AMD GFX1250 Target, Improved RISC-V, New C/C++ Features

([LLVM] 26 August 10:28 AM EDT LLVM 21.1)

LLVM 21.1 is out today as the first stable version of the LLVM 21 compiler stack. This half-year stable release to the open-source LLVM compiler software brings new hardware support, new language features, and a lot of other enhancements throughout this massive and widely-used codebase.



Open-Source R300 Driver Adds New OpenGL Extensions For Two Decade Old Radeon GPUs

([Radeon] 26 August 09:08 AM EDT Radeon R300)

While the ATI Radeon 9000 / X300 / X500 / X600 series "R300" GPU support has long been unmaintained on the Microsoft Windows driver side, thanks to the open-source community the Linux driver support keeps going for the old ATI R300 GPUs with that driver also supporting the X700 / X800 "R400" and X1000 "R500" series graphics cards too. Two more OpenGL extensions are now wired up for the old R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa.



Mir 2.22 Released With Tackling NVIDIA Support, Initial Rust Scaffolding

([Ubuntu] 26 August 06:42 AM EDT Mir 2.22)

Mir 2.22 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical project providing libraries for building Wayland-based shells/compositors. Mir 2.22 brings some notable improvements around NVIDIA GPU/driver support as well as initial preparations for Rust programming language support.



AMD & IBM Team Up For Quantum-Centric Supercomputing

([AMD] 26 August 06:28 AM EDT AMD + IBM For Quantum Computing)

AMD and IBM announced a joint collaboration today around quantum-centric supercomputing. IBM's quantum computing expertise is to be paired with AMD's AI and HPC technology like their Instinct accelerators to help accelerate quantum-centric supercomputing.



Initrd Support Could Finally Be On Its Way To Being Removed From The Linux Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 26 August 06:21 AM EDT Initrd Death Watch?)

Linux's classic initial RAM disk "initrd" support might finally be on its way out of the Linux kernel depending upon feedback from stakeholders. Long live initramfs.



Greenboot Rust Rewrite Approved For Fedora 43

([Fedora] 26 August 06:00 AM EDT Greenboot In Rust)

Red Hat engineers have been rewriting Greenboot in the Rust programming language to replace the Bash-written version of this generic health check framework for systemd, bootc, and RPM-OSTree based Linux environments. That Rust rewrite of Greenboot is now cleared for appearing in the Fedora Linux 43 release.



GhostBSD Ships "Gershwin" Desktop Environment For A macOS Like Experience

([BSD] 25 August 08:54 PM EDT GhostBSD + Gershwin)

GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 was announced this evening as the newest incremental update to this FreeBSD 14 based operating system focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box desktop experience. Notable with this new GhostBSD release is now shipping a Gershwin community preview for this desktop environment focused on providing a Mac OS X like user experience, complete with GNUstep usage.



OpenZFS 2.3.4 Brings Linux 6.16 Kernel Compatibility, "zfs rewrite" Command

([Linux Storage] 25 August 08:30 PM EDT OpenZFS 2.3.4)

OpenZFS 2.4-rc1 was released a few days ago with faster encryption performance using AVX2 and other enhancements. For those just looking for bug fixes and expanded Linux kernel compatibility, OpenZFS 2.3.4 is out today as the newest stable point release.



Linux's Floppy Disk Driver Code Sees Some Cleanups In 2025

([Linux Kernel] 25 August 04:03 PM EDT Linux Floppy Driver)

On this 34th birthday since the Linux kernel was announced, coincidentally there's a new patch series out there for one of the oldest drivers: the floppy disk driver.



Linux 5.15 LTS To 6.17 Benchmarks: Four Years Of Kernel Improvement Net 37% Improvement On AMD EPYC

([Software] 25 August 10:06 AM EDT 26 Comments)

Stemming from a request by a Phoronix Premium reader wondering about some fresh historical kernel performance comparison numbers, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance of the LTS and latest stable Linux kernel versions going back to Linux 5.15 LTS in 2021. For testing an AMD EPYC Milan-X server was used for compatibility back through Linux 5.15 LTS with some rather impressive results for testing these major Linux kernel releases of the past four years.



Red Hat Releases TuneD 2.26 For Adaptively Tuning Linux Systems

([Hardware] 25 August 08:10 AM EDT Red Hat TuneD 2.26)

Red Hat's performance team is now shipping TuneD 2.26 as the latest feature release for this tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux systems to monitor and adaptively adjust the power/performance characteristics of different system components and more.



Meson 1.9 Released With New Rust Features, Adds Swift/C++ Interoperability

([Programming] 25 August 06:39 AM EDT Meson 1.9)

Meson 1.9 released this weekend as the newest feature update to this build system / build automation tool that works well across different software platforms. With Meson 1.9 there is enhanced Rust support, introducing Swift and C++ code interoperability, and other enhancements to this increasingly used alternative to the likes of CMake and Autotools.



Open Platform For Enterprise AI's GenAI Code Adds Guardrails, AMD EPYC Support

([Free Software] 25 August 06:30 AM EDT OPEA 1.4)

The Open Platform for Enterprise AI "OPEA" that is a sub-project of the Linux Foundation and backed by a wide variety of different organizations to provide open solutions for Generative AI announced today their newest GenAI code examples.



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The good die young -- because they see it's no use living if you've got
to be good.
-- John Barrymore