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)

Curious Intel Linux Driver Maintainer Changes In Recent Days

([Intel] 9 February 10:33 AM EST Several Intel Linux Maintainer Changes)

This week besides the drama over Apple Silicon maintainership for the upstream Linux kernel, in recent days there has also been a number of rather subtle changes to the maintainership of several Intel Linux kernel drivers.


Intel ISPC 1.26 Compiler Delivers Improved ARM Support

([Intel] 9 February 08:00 AM EST Implicit SPMD Program Compiler)

Intel's ISPC project as the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as this C language variant for Single Program, Multiple Data programming on CPUs and GPUs is out with a new release.


Linux FineIBT-BHI Updated For Toughening Up FineIBT Kernel Defenses

([Linux Security] 9 February 06:29 AM EST Linux FineIBT-BHI)

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has updated his set of patches implementing FineIBT-BHI mitigations for toughening up the FineIBT kernel protections previously introduced. This FineIBT-BHI code depends upon newly-merged code for the LLVM Clang compiler as part of the compiler defenses.


New Apple Silicon Co-Maintainer Steps Up For The Linux Kernel

([Apple] 9 February 06:39 AM EST Apple Silicon Co-Maintainer)

This week was the dramatic decision by Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin to step down as upstream kernel maintainer for the Apple Silicon (ARM) code following friction with other kernel developers over Rust affairs within the kernel. He still intends to contribute code to Asahi Linux's downstream kernel and Linus Torvalds has already merged the patch dropping him as an upstream maintainer. Now a new co-maintainer has volunteered to help oversee the Apple Silicon code for the mainline kernel.


Wine-Staging 10.1 Delivers 361 Patches Atop Upstream Wine

([WINE] 9 February 06:17 AM EST Wine-Staging 10.1)

Following the release of Wine 10.1 on Friday for kicking off the new bi-weekly development releases after last month's Wine 10.0 stable release, Wine-Staging 10.1 is out today to get things moving once again for this experimental flavor of Wine.


SysVinit 3.14 Released: Overcomes Three Decade Limitation Of Inittab Line Length

([Free Software] 8 February 12:33 PM EST SysVinit 3.14)

For those continuing to make use of SysVinit as the aging init system that in the Linux world has been largely replaced by systemd, SysVinit 3.14 is out today and overcomes a long-standing limitation around the length of lines within the inittab files.


Clang Thread Safety Checks Begin Uncovering Bugs In The Linux Kernel

([LLVM] 8 February 11:02 AM EST Linux Kernel -Wthread-safety)

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were two competing solutions for new LLVM Clang capability / thread safety analysis to the Linux kernel. Two developers had separately been working on implementations for the Linux kernel to make use of Clang's "-Wthread-safety" functionality. Ultimately the upstream kernel will likely settle upon the superior or unified solution while already making use of these new checks is uncovering Linux kernel bugs.


GNU G-Golf v0.8 Released For Writing GTK Apps In Guile/Scheme

([GNU] 8 February 07:00 AM EST GNU G-Golf 0.8)

Years in the making, GNU G-Golf 0.8 was released on Friday as a significant release for this GNU project. No, it's not a golfing simulator or anything like that, but rather a Guile Object Library for GNOME so that you can develop GTK applications from the Guile/Scheme programming language.


FEX 2502 Delivers Fix For Steam, Multi-Block Improvements For Better Performance

([Linux Gaming] 8 February 06:40 AM EST FEX 2502)

FEX 2502 is out today as the newest monthly feature release to this user-space emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux including the likes of Wine/Proton and Steam for being able to enjoy modern games on AArch64 Linux systems.


FreeBSD 13.5 Beta Begins Preparing For The Last Of The FreeBSD 13 Series

([BSD] 8 February 06:06 AM EST FreeBSD 13.5)

The FreeBSD 13.5 release dance has begun for closing out the FreeBSD 13 series.


KDE Plasma 6.3 Receives Final Polishing Prior To Release Next Week

([KDE] 8 February 06:16 AM EST Plasma 6.3)

The KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop has received a lot of last minute polishing and fixes ahead of its planned release next week. Plasma 6.3 is scheduled for its stable debut next Tuesday on 11 February.


Wine 10.1 Released With Many Changes: Fixes For Battle.net, Continued Bluetooth Driver

([WINE] 7 February 06:57 PM EST Wine 10.1)

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 as the newest annual stable release of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine 10.1 is out today. Wine 10.1 kicks off the bi-weekly development release cycle trek that will culminate with the release of Wine 11.0 next year.


GNOME's LocalSearch Metadata Extractor Ditches GStreamer For FFmpeg

([GNOME] 7 February 04:43 PM EST LocalSearch + FFmpeg)

While the GNOME project has long been closely tied to the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME's LocalSearch has decided to abandon its GStreamer use in favor of using FFmpeg/libav directly.


IO_uring Zero-Copy Receive Support Ready For Linux 6.15 Networking

([Linux Networking] 7 February 01:57 PM EST IO_uring Receive Zero-Copy)

It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring.


Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer

([Radeon] 7 February 11:28 AM EST AMD RDNA4 Improvements)

Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity.


GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5

([Software] 7 February 10:13 AM EST 6 Comments)

With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.


Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer

([Apple] 7 February 08:32 AM EST Asahi Linux)

Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.


Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs

([Linux Storage] 7 February 06:33 AM EST Bcachefs)

With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs.


Serpent OS Working Toward Second Alpha, More Immutable OS Features

([Operating Systems] 7 February 06:42 AM EST Serpent OS)

Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.


NVIDIA Publishes RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTXNTC" Beta

([NVIDIA] 7 February 06:22 AM EST NVIDIA RTXNTC)

NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit.


More

The Magician of the Ivory Tower brought his latest invention for the
master programmer to examine. The magician wheeled a large black box into the
master's office while the master waited in silence.
"This is an integrated, distributed, general-purpose workstation,"
began the magician, "ergonomically designed with a proprietary operating
system, sixth generation languages, and multiple state of the art user
interfaces. It took my assistants several hundred man years to construct.
Is it not amazing?"
The master raised his eyebrows slightly. "It is indeed amazing," he
said.
"Corporate Headquarters has commanded," continued the magician, "that
everyone use this workstation as a platform for new programs. Do you agree
to this?"
"Certainly," replied the master, "I will have it transported to the
data center immediately!" And the magician returned to his tower, well
pleased.
Several days later, a novice wandered into the office of the master
programmer and said, "I cannot find the listing for my new program. Do
you know where it might be?"
"Yes," replied the master, "the listings are stacked on the platform
in the data center."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"