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)

Intel SR-IOV Support Ready For Panther Lake Graphics But Some Current Platforms Left Behind

([Intel] 9 July 08:58 AM EDT SR-IOV Virtualization)

Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state.



PowerVR Vulkan Driver Enhancements Merged Ahead Of Mesa 25.2

([Mesa] 9 July 06:57 AM EDT PowerVR Vulkan)

The Mesa 25.2 code is expected to be branched next week to kick off the release process for this quarter's iteration of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. As such, there's going to be a mad dash over the next week to land lingering features and other improvements for Mesa 25.2. Making it into Mesa Git today was a big set of 42 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver.



Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 Brings Many Security Fixes

([Microsoft] 9 July 06:32 AM EDT Azure Linux 3.0)

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 on Tuesday as the newest monthly update to this in-house Linux distribution used throughout the company and by external parties.



Google Developing Skia "Graphite" For Faster Chrome: Multi-Threaded + Modern Graphics APIs

([Google] 9 July 06:40 AM EDT Skia Graphite)

Google yesterday lifted the lid on their work around Skia "Graphite" as a new rasterization back-end designed for modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and supporting multi-threading by default. Skia Graphite aims to deliver much better performance within the Chrome/Chromium web browser.



PHP 8.5 Alpha 1 Released With New Features

([Programming] 9 July 06:21 AM EDT PHP 8.5)

The first alpha release of PHP 8.5 was issued last week in kicking off the release cycle in working toward the official PHP 8.5.0 release later in the year.



Amarok 3.3 Released With The Music Player Ported To Qt6 / KDE Frameworks 6

([KDE] 8 July 06:56 PM EDT Amarok 3.3)

Just over one year after the Amarok 3.0 release after a six year hiatus that brought it to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Amarok 3.3 is out today as the first version taking it to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6.



GlobalFoundries Acquiring MIPS

([Hardware] 8 July 01:52 PM EDT GlobalFoundries + MIPS)

Here's an unexpected company match... GlobalFoundries announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS. Yes, the company formerly part of Wave Computing and before that Imagination and Silicon Graphics during its long history. MIPS in recent years hasn't been focused on its namesake CPU architecture but rather RISC-V core designs.



Framework 12 Platform Tuning For Better Performance Or Power Efficiency

([Computers] 8 July 12:10 PM EDT 3 Comments)

Last month the Framework Laptop 12 began shipping as an upgrade-friendly, convertible 2-in-1 laptop that is friendly with Linux as we've come to expect out of Framework Computer devices. The launch-day Linux testing at Phoronix of the Framework 12 was done out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux with the defaults on it and the other comparison laptops tested. But as we've shown with recent Intel and AMD laptops, ACPI Platform Profile adjustments can make a significant impact on bettering the performance or extending battery life with more power efficient operation. For those wondering about the impact of the platform profiles on Framework Laptop 12, here are some power and performance benchmarks.



Linux Patched For Transient Scheduler Attacks "TSA" Impacting AMD CPUs

([AMD] 8 July 12:19 PM EDT Transient Scheduler Attacks)

Made public minutes ago is Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) as a new class of class of speculative side channel attacks affecting AMD processors.



IBM Announces Power11 With "99.9999%" Uptime, 55% Better Core Performance Than Power9

([Hardware] 8 July 10:42 AM EDT IBM Power11)

Following all of the Linux and broader open-source software enablement around Power11 the past three or so years, IBM today formally announced their new Power11 hardware.



AMD Hardware Feedback Driver Destined For Linux 6.17 To Benefit Heterogeneous CPUs

([AMD] 8 July 10:23 AM EDT AMD Hardware Feedback Driver)

The AMD Hardware Feedback Driver has been queued up via a TIP branch for expected merging during the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. This new open-source AMD driver is designed to help make the kernel's scheduler make better decisions around task placement for heterogeneous processor designs with a mix of the "classic" and "dense" cores.



Fan Control Firmware Updated For Intel Battlemage Graphics Cards On Linux

([Intel] 8 July 09:03 AM EDT Fan Control Firmware)

In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts.



Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Drops GTK+ Option In Favor Of Its "YTK" Fork

([Free Software] 8 July 06:40 AM EDT Ardour GTK To YTK)

The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon "YTK" as its own localized fork of this toolkit.



AMD Merges New RDNA 3.5 iGPU Firmware Files Ahead Of Next Product Launch

([Radeon] 8 July 06:19 AM EDT GFX 11.5.3)

Interestingly a batch of new AMD GPU firmware files were upstreamed to linux-firmware.git yesterday in preparing for the next AMD product launch of hardware featuring RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.



FEX 2507 Brings New Optimizations & Gets Some Ubisoft Games Running

([Linux Gaming] 8 July 05:57 AM EDT FEX 2507 Emulator)

FEX 2507 is now available for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 games and applications atop 64-bit ARM Linux devices whether they be AArch64 servers or ARM64 single board computers and other devices.



OBS Studio 31.1 Released With Explicit Sync For PipeWire Screen Capture

([Multimedia] 7 July 08:18 PM EDT OBS Studio 31.1)

OBS Studio 31.1 is now available for those using this cross-platform free software for screencasting and other screen recording purposes. OBS Studio 31.1 is another great step forward for this open-source software that has a devoted following and user-base across Windows, macOS, and Linux.



U-Boot 2025.07 Brings New Code For Apple M1/M2 & Raspberry Pi, exFAT Support

([Free Software] 7 July 06:36 PM EDT U-Boot 2025.07)

U-Boot 2025.07 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source boot loader that is widely-used among embedded devices across different CPU architectures.



Thunderbird 140 Mail Client Debuts As Newest ESR Release

([Mozilla] 7 July 04:22 PM EDT Thunderbird 140)

The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook.



AMD openSIL PoC Still Being Worked On For Phoenix SoCs, Turin Code Published

([AMD] 7 July 11:00 AM EDT AMD openSIL)

One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule. Meanwhile their EPYC 9005 "Turin" proof-of-concept code was recently published.



Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers Expected To Debut In Linux 6.17

([Linux Gaming] 7 July 10:04 AM EDT Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers)

Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed.



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Too clever is dumb.
-- Ogden Nash