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 oneDNN 3.7 Begins Tuning For Xe3 Graphics, Adds More Granite Rapids Optimizations

([Intel] 19 February 06:11 AM EST oneDNN 3.7)

Intel software engineers on Tuesday released oneDNN 3.7 as the newest version of this oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library that is in turn used by software like ONNX, MATLAB, PaddlePaddle, Apache MXNet, and others as part of the building blocks for deep learning software.



Sovereign Tech Agency Investing €515k Into The Eclipse Foundation

([Free Software] 19 February 05:57 AM EST Sovereign Tech)

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (née Sovereign Tech Fund) announced they have begun investing into the Eclipse Foundation and the work they are doing on open-source integrated development environment (IDE) software.



Latest AVX-512 Optimization For FFmpeg Shows Wild Improvement On AMD Ryzen

([Multimedia] 18 February 08:28 PM EST FFmpeg AVX-512)

Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path... Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code.



NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080/5090 Performance With Neat Video 6 On Linux

([Software] 18 February 03:17 PM EST 2 Comments)

Last week NeatLab released Neat Video 6 as the newest version of their video engine to reduce noise and enhance video quality that can be used with the likes of DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and Premiere Pro software. Neat Video 6 features a faster render engine, optimized CPU + GPU performance, enhanced memory management, and other improvements. Neat Video 6 continues to support Linux natively when it comes to DaVinci Resolve usage as well as various OFX hosts like Natron / Flame / Mistika / Fusion Studio / Nuke. As they also updated their NeatBench benchmark, I was curious to see how the performance of Neat Video 6 is for the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs.



Linus Torvalds Would Reportedly Merge Rust Kernel Code Over Maintainer Objections

([Linux Kernel] 18 February 02:53 PM EST Torvalds Override)

The drama surrounding Rust code within the Linux kernel continues... Christoph Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers and several other areas of the kernel has been an outspoken critic of Rust code or secondary programming languages within the Linux kernel kernel. Hellwig has been critical of Rust code for the Linux kernel and its long-term maintainability. Today he's out with another mailing list post where he notes that Linus Torvalds mentioned in private he would override maintainer vetoes on Rust code within the kernel.



Wasmer 6.0 Wires Up Support For Multiple Heterogeneous Backends

([Programming] 18 February 02:05 PM EST Wasmer 6.0 Alpha)

For those interested in WebAssembly for the "run anywhere" prospects and container-like secure execution, Wasmer remains one of the leading WASM runtime options. Wasmer 6.0 Alpha 1 is out today as the latest to further along this quest.



KDE Plasma 6.3.1 Released With A Few Dozen Fixes For The Week

([KDE] 18 February 09:45 AM EST KDE Plasma 6.3.1)

For those that typically wait for the first point release before moving to a new software version, KDE Plasma 6.3.1 is out today with a few dozen fixes for the week since the Plasma 6.3 debut.



Ubuntu Linux LTS Releases May Offer Additional Intel Graphics Driver Updates

([Ubuntu] 18 February 07:38 AM EST HWE Stack Additions)

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking at including more Intel graphics driver packages as part of the hardware enablement "HWE" stacks shipped as part of Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) point releases. This would provide more comprehensive coverage of newer Intel driver components with future Ubuntu LTS point releases to benefit both the integrated and discrete graphics.



AMD Continues Preparing openSIL Concept For Phoenix & Turin Processors

([AMD] 18 February 06:49 AM EST AMD openSIL)

One of the AMD software projects we are very bullish on for the future is openSIL for opening up more of the CPU silicon initialization code for what will eventually replace AGESA across all client and server processors that is aiming for production readiness with Zen 6. In turn, AMD openSIL should allow easier/better Coreboot support. One of the development milestone release targets did slip but they remain working on preparing AMD openSIL releases for Phoenix client and Turin server hardware.



openSUSE Spin Achieves 100% Bit-Identical Packages For Reproducible Builds

([SUSE] 18 February 06:30 AM EST Reproducible Builds openSUSE)

There is an openSUSE project called Reproducible-openSUSE "RBOS" working on a proof-of-concept for constructing openSUSE in a bit-identical manner as part of the broad Reproducible Builds effort to be able to reproduce builds bit-for-bit against what is being compiled by the distribution vendor or other software distribution. The openSUSE RBOS has achieved 100% bit-identical packages as a major milestone.



PostgreSQL Lands Self-Join Elimination Optimization

([Programming] 18 February 06:21 AM EST Self-Join Elimination)

More than seven years in the making, merged yesterday for PostgreSQL is a self-join elimination "SJE" feature as a performance optimization for some queries.



SDL & MPV Media Player Land Support For Wayland Color Management / HDR

([Wayland] 17 February 08:52 PM EST MPV Media Player + SDL Library)

Following the upstream Wayland Protocols repository landing the Wayland color management protocol for enabling HDR support and this morning's release of Wayland Protocols 1.41, the SDL library and MPV media player are the first two clients supporting this now-official protocol.



Progress Continues On Unofficial Firefox GTK4 Port, Code Now Available On GitHub

([Mozilla] 17 February 06:37 PM EST Firefox GTK4 Port)

For all of those that were intrigued over the independent code porting the Firefox web browser to the GTK4 toolkit, there has been a bit more progress and all of the code is also now obtainable via GitHub for this unofficial port.



CodeWeavers Hiring More Developers To Work On Wine & Valve's Proton

([WINE] 17 February 02:59 PM EST CodeWeavers Jobs)

The friends at CodeWeavers have relayed work that they are looking to hire multiple Wine developers to join their paid team working on upstream Wine as well as their CrossOver products, Valve's Proton downstream for Steam Play, and related Wine-based tech.



ISD 0.5 Released For Interactive systemd Management

([systemd] 17 February 03:09 PM EST ISD 0.5)

A few weeks ago I wrote about ISD as a new open-source project for interactively managing systemd that aims to be more user intuitive especially for those that aren't veteran Linux server administrators. ISD has continued evolving and out today is ISD v0.5 with the latest enhancements for better managing systemd.



NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Through GeForce RTX 5080/5090 GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 17 February 09:18 AM EST 69 Comments)

Complementing the recent Linux GPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 looking at both the Linux / Steam Play gaming performance as well as GPU compute and other areas, in today's testing is a wide multi-generation look seeing how the NVIDIA GeForce performance has evolved going back to the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell GPUs up through the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards.



Intel PyTorch Extension 2.6 Brings More Xeon 6 Optimizations

([Intel] 17 February 08:47 AM EST Intel PyTorch Extension)

Intel software engineers overnight released the newest version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch. The v2.6 release brings new optimizations for current-generation Xeon 6 processors as well as new large language model (LLM) performance optimizations.



RADV Lands Initial DCC Support For AMD GFX12 / RDNA4 GPUs

([Radeon] 17 February 08:53 AM EST RDNA4 DCC)

Last month when the state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver for RDNA4 GPUs was outlined, it was noted that cooperative matrix support was missing along with DCC support and Vulkan Video for these upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 GPUs. Vulkan cooperative matrix support ended up being merged earlier this month while hitting Mesa Git today is the DCC support that is important for RDNA4 performance.



KVM-Powered MatterV 0.7 Can Run Unmodified VMware VMs

([Virtualization] 17 February 06:31 AM EST MatterV 0.7)

MatterV 0.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source virtual machine management platform built atop KVM. MatterV aims to make it easy to manage VMs across different environments while with today's v0.7 release adds the ability to run unmodified VMware virtual machines atop KVM.



Limine 9.0 Bootloader Drops EXT4 File-System Support

([Free Software] 17 February 06:06 AM EST Limine 9.0)

Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities.



More

VMS must die!