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)

Hyprland 0.47 Wayland Compositor Delivers Experimental HDR, GPU Hotplugging

([Wayland] 27 January 09:51 AM EST Hyprland 0.47)

Hyprland 0.47 is out to begin a new week with some exciting enhancements to this visuals-focused Wayland compositor.



GNOME Triple Buffering Now Works With Direct Scanout & VRR

([GNOME] 27 January 08:50 AM EST GNOME Triple Buffering)

It's still not looking like triple buffering will land for GNOME 48 with the feature freeze set for next weekend. But that Mutter dynamic triple buffering support has been improved upon and now at least is working for direct scan-out situations as well as variable rate refresh (VRR).



Laptop Improvements & More AMD Driver Features Merged For Linux 6.14

([Hardware] 27 January 06:58 AM EST x86 Platform Drivers)

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. As usual the x86 platform driver updates are predominantly to benefit the many different Intel/AMD laptops out there with various OEM vendor features/functionality. Plus within the platform-drivers-x86 space is a growing number of AMD SoC drivers for not only laptops but also desktops/servers.



NAMD Molecular Dynamics Performance Improves Well With NVIDIA Blackwell / RTX 5090

([NVIDIA] 27 January 06:46 AM EST NAMD Molecular Dynamics)

With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend.



Reduced SquashFS Memory Use With The Linux 6.14 Kernel, More NILFS2 Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 27 January 06:32 AM EST Linux 6.14 Non-MM)

In addition to all of the exciting "MM" changes for Linux 6.14 that were submitted by Andrew Morton's pull request, he also sent out the set of "non-MM" updates for the Linux 6.14 merge window.



Desktop Motherboards Continue Playing Catch-Up For Linux Monitoring Support

([Hardware] 27 January 06:20 AM EST Linux 6.14 HWMON)

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. As happens with most kernel releases, there are a number of already-launched desktop motherboards beginning to see working sensor monitoring support under Linux.



Microsoft Announces Open-Source DocumentDB NoSQL Database

([Microsoft] 26 January 08:41 PM EST Microsoft DocumentDB)

In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary.



Linux 6.14 To Switch From SHA1 To SHA512 For Module Signing By Default

([Linux Kernel] 26 January 08:27 PM EST SHA512 Module Signing)

While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security.



ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M Cooler For Ampere Altra 4U Servers/Workstations

([Cooling] 26 January 04:46 PM EST 17 Comments)

For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.



AMD Squeezes In More RDNA4 Changes For Linux 6.14 - Enables Cleaner Shader On GFX12

([Radeon] 26 January 10:25 AM EST More AMDGPU)

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release.



Linux Patches Allow Sharing PTEs Between Processes - Can Mean Significant RAM Savings

([Linux Kernel] 26 January 07:10 AM EST Sharing PTEs Between Processes)

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings.



New Sound Hardware Supported By The Linux 6.14 Kernel

([Multimedia] 26 January 06:40 AM EST Sound / Audio Drivers)

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware.



Mesa 25.0 Gets A New Vulkan Layer For Limiting The Amount Of Reported vRAM

([Mesa] 26 January 06:49 AM EST VK_LAYER_MESA_vram_report_limit)

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications.



Linux 6.14 Adds ROCEv2 Support For The Alibaba Cloud

([Linux Networking] 26 January 06:21 AM EST RDMA Changes)

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver.



Shotcut 25.01 Open-Source Video Editor Brings New Features

([Desktop] 25 January 08:49 PM EST Shotcut 25.01)

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025.



Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 Released With Battlemage Video Encode

([Intel] 25 January 03:27 PM EST Intel Media Driver 2024Q4)

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems.



ISD: A New Interactive Way For systemd Management

([systemd] 25 January 09:28 AM EST Interactive Systemd)

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd.



Much Faster Suspend & Resume For Some Systems With Linux 6.14

([Linux Kernel] 25 January 07:19 AM EST Linux 6.14 ACPI)

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel.



Intel THC, Wacom PCI Device & SteelSeries Arctis 9 Support Land In Linux 6.14

([Hardware] 25 January 07:01 AM EST Linux 6.14 HID)

All of the Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window.



SUSE's New "Agama 11" Installer Preps For SLES 16 Beta / openSUSE Leap 16

([SUSE] 25 January 06:46 AM EST New SUSE Installer)

The SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer is a modern web UI driven installer for the SUSE/openSUSE Linux distributions. It's modern, sports a cleaner UI and underlying architecture, and supports more features. The Agama 11 installer update was released this week in preparing for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta with this new installer as well as new openSUSE Leap 16 builds.



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I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov