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)

AMD Announces Open-Source "Schola" Library For Reinforcement Learning

([AMD] 5 February 11:57 AM EST AMD Schola)

AMD announced today the release of Schola 1.0 as an open-source reinforcement learning library that is being made available under an MIT license and as part of their GPUOpen software collection for helping game developers.



Linux 6.14 Features Include The AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver, NTSYNC, Uncached Buffered I/O & Much More

([Software] 5 February 01:00 PM EST 3 Comments)

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window wrapped up this past weekend with the release of Linux 6.14-rc1, here is a recap of all the great new features, hardware enablement, and other improvements to find with this kernel.



AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Patches For Linux Updated, Intel RAR Eyed Next

([AMD] 5 February 10:29 AM EST AMD INVLPGB)

One of the set of patches for the Linux kernel that we have been looking forward to but that wasn't wrapped up in time for the recent Linux v6.14 merge window was the work enabling use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction on Zen 3 CPUs and newer for broadcast TLB invalidation. This can lead to a nice performance bump in some workloads while the eighth iteration of those patches were posted overnight.



Linux Foundation Announces The SEAPATH 1.0 Hypervisor

([Virtualization] 5 February 10:05 AM EST SEAPATH Hypervisor)

The Linux Foundation by way of their LF Energy initiative announced today the release of SEAPATH 1.0, a security-hardened real-time hypervisor.



Red Hat Developing "F-UKI" As Their Newest Open-Source Project

([Red Hat] 5 February 08:55 AM EST Red Hat F-UKI)

Red Hat engineer Anirban Sinha presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend in Brussels on F-UKI, a new project being worked on at Red Hat as part of the confidential computing push for loading guest firmware within a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) for confidential VMs.



New Linux Patches Yield Up To 3.3x Faster AES-CTR Performance On AMD Zen 5 CPUs

([AMD] 5 February 06:52 AM EST AES Crypto Performance)

Google engineer Eric Biggers is known for some of his great crypto performance optimization patches to benefit the Linux kernel and his most recent patch series is yielding some very tantalizing results for AMD Zen 5 processors whether it be the Ryzen 9000 series, Ryzen AI 300 series, or EPYC 9005 server processors.



cURL 8.12 Released With Its Rust Hyper Backend Removed

([Free Software] 5 February 06:36 AM EST cURL 8.12)

Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its "Hyper" Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code. The cURL 8.12 release is out today with Hyper stripped out.



GNOME Mutter 48 Beta Released With HDR Bits, Gdctl Utility

([GNOME] 5 February 06:22 AM EST GNOME 48 Beta)

The GNOME Mutter 48 compositor beta is now available for testing as part of this week's GNOME 48 beta milestone.



Microsoft Lands Direct3D 12 Video Encode Improvements For HEVC In Mesa 25.1

([Mesa] 4 February 08:54 PM EST D3D12 Video Encode)

While having missed the mark last week for making it into this quarter's Mesa 25.0 release, merged for Q2's Mesa 25.1 release by Microsoft engineers are some enhancements to the Direct3D 12 video encode capabilities.



GRUB Continues Working Toward Its Next Release In 2025

([GNU] 4 February 04:54 PM EST GRUB Bootloader)

As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.



An Early Performance Regression Hitting Highly Threaded Workloads On Linux 6.14-rc1

([Software] 4 February 03:20 PM EST 14 Comments)

With Linux 6.14-rc1 released I have begun trying out the new development kernel on a few systems locally. At least for high core count hardware tested thus far, Linux 6.14 at the moment during this early testing phase is sporting some performance regressions within some multi-threaded workloads.



Firefox 136 Beta Finally Enables Hardware Video Decoding For AMD GPUs On Linux By Default

([Mozilla] 4 February 02:04 PM EST Firefox 136)

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux.



FFmpeg Adds AMD AMF Decoder, FSR-Based Upscaling

([Radeon] 4 February 12:55 PM EST FFmpeg + AMF + FSR)

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg.



Optimizing The Linux Kernel With PGO Can Yield ~3% Benefit For HPC Workloads

([Programming] 4 February 12:37 PM EST High Performance Computing)

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled.



Redox OS Makes Progress On Dynamic Linking, New Ports

([Operating Systems] 4 February 11:49 AM EST Redox OS)

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with a new status report to highlight the progress their developers made over the course of January.



FFmpeg Lands Video Encoding/Decoding Improvements For NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs

([Multimedia] 4 February 10:27 AM EST FFmpeg + NVIDIA Blackwell)

Merged this week to FFmpeg Git for this widely-used open-source multimedia library are a number of NVIDIA video encoding "NVENC" improvements for benefiting the new GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics processors.



Ubuntu Infrastructure Woe Continues Making It A Hassle To Run The Latest Upstream Kernel

([Ubuntu] 4 February 08:42 AM EST No Mainline Kernel PPA)

The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for years has been a great feature for Ubuntu users to be able to easily fetch and run the newest upstream kernel whether it's the latest stable kernel version, one of the weekly release candidates, or even the very leading-edge daily Git kernel builds. Sadly for months now this service has been out of order.



Linux 6.15 Looks Like It May Try Again With EXECMEM_ROX Support

([Linux Kernel] 4 February 06:43 AM EST EXECMEM_ROX)

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel.



Debian 13 Will Aim To Include GNOME 48, Debian/Ubuntu Begin Packaging GNOME Papers

([Debian] 4 February 06:31 AM EST Debian 13 + GNOME 48)

For those wondering whether Debian 13 would see the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop packages given the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" development freezes, it looks like this updated GNOME release will be squeezed in.



Igalia's Optimizations Juicing More Graphics Performance Out Of The Raspberry Pi

([Raspberry Pi] 4 February 06:12 AM EST Raspberry Pi 4/5)

Igalia engineers José María Casanova Crespo and Maíra Canal presented at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels around the efforts by this open-source consulting firm to further enhance the 3D performance out of the Raspberry Pi single board computers.



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If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make
something out of you.
-- Muhammad Ali