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)

Linux 6.15 To Bring More Improvements To DRM Panic "Screen of Death"

([Linux Kernel] 12 February 06:52 AM EST Black Screen of Death)

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers.



Open-Source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan Driver Matures To Default AArch64 Mesa Driver List

([Mesa] 12 February 06:30 AM EST TURNIP By Default)

The open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver within Mesa known as "TURNIP" has now matured enough that it's going to be built by default when compiling Mesa for ARM64/AArch64 hardware.



Intel C1 Demotion Knob Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Help Newer Xeon CPUs

([Intel] 12 February 06:35 AM EST Intel C1 Demotion Knob)

A patch has been proposed for the Linux kernel to add a C1 demotion knob via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/c1_demotion for more control over lower power state handling for recent Xeon Scalable processors. This C1 demotion knob can help with the performance of some workloads for Intel Xeon servers but at the cost of increased power consumption.



Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 Prepares For Panther Lake

([Intel] 12 February 06:21 AM EST Intel Thermal Daemon)

Intel on Tuesday released Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 as their newest feature release of this open-source daemon to help monitor and control the CPU/SoC temperature within laptops and other modern Intel hardware.



Python 3.14 Alpha 5 Released With New Tail-Call Interpreter

([Programming] 11 February 04:53 PM EST Python 3.14 Alpha 5)

Python 3.14 Alpha 5 is out today as the latest of many development releases in stepping toward the Python 3.14 stable release in October.



Healthy Competition With GCC 15 vs. LLVM Clang 20 Performance On AMD Zen 5

([Software] 11 February 01:03 PM EST 10 Comments)

In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.



Intel CPU Microcode Updated For Five New Security Issues

([Intel] 11 February 12:15 PM EST Intel CPU Microcode)

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved.



GNOME 48 Now Allows Grouping Notifications By App

([GNOME] 11 February 10:18 AM EST Notifications Grouped By App)

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis.



Ubuntu 25.04's GNOME Web Browser Will Be Able To Play More Web Videos By Default

([Ubuntu] 11 February 09:54 AM EST Bad Plugins)

Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change.



Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Lands OpenCL C Support In Mesa 25.1

([Mesa] 11 February 08:46 AM EST Panfrost OpenCL)

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack.



FLAC 1.5 Finally Delivers Multi-Threaded Encoding

([Multimedia] 11 February 08:36 AM EST FLAC 1.5)

FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec.



KDE Plasma 6.3 Released With Improved Fractional Scaling & Other Enhancements

([KDE] 11 February 06:44 AM EST KDE Plasma 6.3)

Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop.



AMD AOMP 20.0-2 Compiler Adds The "flang-new" Fortran Compiler Option

([AMD] 11 February 06:24 AM EST AMD AOMP 20.0-2)

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware.



BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS Starts 2025 Off Introducing An AMD CPU Temperature Driver

([Operating Systems] 11 February 06:13 AM EST Haiku Changes For January 2025)

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month.



Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP

([systemd] 10 February 08:43 PM EST systemd)

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process.



Firefox ForkServer Getting Ready To Enhance Linux Browser Performance

([Mozilla] 10 February 03:11 PM EST Firefox ForkServer)

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win.



Intel's Newest Open-Source Project Is "Polite Guard"

([Intel] 10 February 12:40 PM EST Intel Polite Guard)

Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard.



Apple Touch Bar Backlight & Keyboard Mode Drivers Slated For Linux 6.15

([Apple] 10 February 12:18 PM EST Apple Touch Bar Drivers For Linux)

For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.



GIMP 3.0 RC3 Released For A Final Round Of Testing

([Free Software] 10 February 10:51 AM EST GIMP 3.0 RC3)

GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.



Python 3.14 Lands A New Interpreter With 3~30% Faster Python Code

([Programming] 10 February 09:02 AM EST Python 3.14 New Interpeter)

Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).



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Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer