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)

Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support

([Free Software] 10 January 09:50 AM EST Servo Dark Mode)

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.



VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 Brings A Few Fixes For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan

([Valve] 10 January 09:02 AM EST VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1)

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.



Ubuntu Considers Taking It Easier On Software Updates Over Weekends

([Ubuntu] 10 January 07:03 AM EST Less Weekend Updates)

Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.



12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix

([Intel] 10 January 06:40 AM EST Haswell Fix)

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.



Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games

([Mesa] 10 January 06:25 AM EST Faster Gaming Performance)

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.



COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates

([Desktop] 9 January 05:05 PM EST COSMIC Alpha 5)

Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.



AMD Secure TSC Support Might Finally Be Ready For Landing In The Linux Kernel

([AMD] 9 January 04:42 PM EST Secure TSC For SEV-SNP)

Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.



Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 Brings More Battlemage Optimizations

([Intel] 9 January 01:39 PM EST Intel Compute Runtime)

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations.



Google & Linux Foundation Launch "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" Fund

([Google] 9 January 12:23 PM EST Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers)

Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.



KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta Released With A Ton Of Improvements

([KDE] 9 January 11:05 AM EST KDE Plasma 6.3)

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.



Microsoft's Azure Linux Introduces New AMD Graphics Driver Options

([Microsoft] 9 January 10:28 AM EST Azure Linux + Latest AMDGPU)

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.



KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 Brings Power/Performance vs. Color Accuracy Preference

([KDE] 9 January 08:40 AM EST Plasma Wayland Protocols)

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.



LLVM Clang Lands Targeting Support For The SiFive P550 RISC-V Performance Core

([RISC-V] 9 January 06:51 AM EST -mcpu=sifive-p550)

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.



Intel PMT Telemetry Now Available For Battlemage Graphics Cards

([Intel] 9 January 07:00 AM EST Intel Platform Monitoring Technology)

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.



GNOME Mutter Merges Support For Wayland Timing & Queuing Protocols

([GNOME] 9 January 06:32 AM EST FIFO Commits)

After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols.



Mold 2.36 Linker Brings More Optimizations & Compatibility Improvements

([Programming] 9 January 06:21 AM EST Mold 2.36)

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.



Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Model Launches For $120 USD

([Raspberry Pi] 9 January 03:00 AM EST Raspberry Pi 5)

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.



Redox OS Ends 2024 On A High Note With Dynamic Linking Progress, ifconfig Port

([Operating Systems] 8 January 08:24 PM EST Redox OS)

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their December 2024 development recap. The developers involved did a great job ending out 2024 with a lot of exciting improvements for this scratch-based open-source operating system.



Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution

([Intel] 8 January 04:47 PM EST OpenMP To SPIR-V)

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V.



AMD Linux GPU Driver Preps OEM i2c Bus Support Used For RGB Control & More

([Radeon] 8 January 08:50 AM EST AMDGPU Linux Driver i2c Bus)

A set of patches posted this week for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is beginning to expose additional i2c buses that are used by some OEM/AIB partners for implementing RGB lighting controls and other extra functionality with Radeon graphics cards.



More

Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities,
requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a
clogged toilet. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as
annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get
into specific techniques, let's look at how plumbing works.
A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except
that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has
pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets.
So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at all like your
electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"