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)

Ubuntu Concept 25.04 ISOs Published For Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Laptops

([Ubuntu] 27 June 09:54 AM EDT Ubuntu Concept 25.04)

Similar to the Ubuntu 24.10 concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, Canonical has begun publishing new "concept" images of Ubuntu 25.04 ISOs optimized for use on the growing number of Qualcomm Snpadragon X Elite laptops. This week marks the release of the new ISOs for enhancing Ubuntu Linux on various ARM laptops.



Canonical Makes Multipass VM Manager Fully Open-Source

([Ubuntu] 27 June 09:05 AM EDT Multipass Open-Source)

Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source.



NVIDIA Blackwell Support Coming Together For NVK Vulkan In Mesa

([Nouveau] 27 June 06:43 AM EDT NVIDIA RTX 50)

Merged for the current Linux 6.16 cycle was initial NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support with the Nouveau open-source driver. NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support was tacked onto the existing Nouveau kernel driver rather than having to wait for the new "NOVA" driver and like prior generations continuing to leverage the GSP firmware. For going along with that Nouveau support, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver support for Blackwell continues being put together too.



Bcachefs Changes End Up Being Merged Into Linux 6.16, For 6.17: "We'll Be Parting Ways"

([Linux Storage] 27 June 06:27 AM EDT But Bcachefs will be dropped?)

Last week was a Bcachefs pull request consisting of fixes and a new "journal_rewind" feature to aide as a disaster recovery tool for the file-system. But with that code being submitted as part of the ongoing Linux 6.16 release candidates, it drew criticism from Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers. However, one week later and that discussion having subsided a few days ago, Linus Torvalds ended up merging all of the code. But there is a concerning warning for the future of Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel.



AMD Platinum Sponsor Of Debian's DebConf25 - Promoting ROCm

([Debian] 27 June 06:05 AM EDT AMD + Debian)

The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France.



VirtualBox 7.2 Beta 2 Preps Linux 6.16 Support, More Windows On ARM Enhancements

([Virtualization] 26 June 08:31 PM EDT VirtualBox 7.2 Beta 2)

In addition to releasing Oracle Linux 10 today, Oracle also released the second beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 cross-platform virtualization software.



Rust 1.88 Released With Improvements For Naked Functions, Chaining Let Statements

([Programming] 26 June 02:38 PM EDT Rust 1.88)

Last month saw the release of Rust 1.87 that celebrated ten years of the Rust programming language while out today is Rust 1.88 that continues iterating the language with new features.



Ubuntu Maker Canonical Generated Nearly $300M In Revenue Last Year

([Ubuntu] 26 June 02:47 PM EDT And More Than 1100 Employees)

A decade ago Canonical did around $81 million in revenue (2014) with a head count of around 337 at the company behind Ubuntu Linux while their Linux desktop efforts were still gaining a footing with OEMs/ODMs pre-loads, within enterprise desktop environments, and the lucrative server/cloud space. Canonical recently filed their 2024 annual report and they are now up to almost $300 million USD in revenue and a headcount of more than 1,100.



Mesa 25.2 RADV Driver Merges Support For AV1 Vulkan Video Encode

([Radeon] 26 June 01:01 PM EDT Vulkan Video + AV1 Encode)

Published last November as part of Vulkan 1.3.302 was the VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension for adding AV1 video encoding to the Vulkan Video API. Ahead of next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its AV1 encode support.



Mir 2.21 Released With Cursor Scaling & Mouse Keys Support

([Ubuntu] 26 June 11:18 AM EDT Mir 2.21)

Mir 2.21 is out today for this Ubuntu/Canonical project to serve as a set of libraries used to simplify the development of Wayland-based shells/environments.



Oracle Linux 10 Reaches GA, Available With Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.1

([Oracle] 26 June 10:39 AM EDT Oracle Linux 10)

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10.0) just over one month ago, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 10.0.



Firefox 141 Beta Lowering RAM Use On Linux But Still Benchmarking Behind Chrome

([Software] 26 June 08:41 AM EDT 48 Comments)

Following this week's release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month's Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I've been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.



Ubuntu 25.10 Snapshot 2 Released

([Ubuntu] 26 June 07:47 AM EDT Ubuntu 25.10)

Last month Canonical announced plans for releasing monthly Ubuntu Linux development snapshots and was followed by the Questing Snapshot 1 release in the road toward Ubuntu 25.10. Out today is the Questing Snapshot 2 release for incorporating the latest Ubuntu 25.10 development changes.



AMD CPUID Faulting Support Looks To Be Coming For Linux 6.17

([AMD] 26 June 06:30 AM EDT AMD CPUID Faulting)

As a follow-up to the article a few weeks ago about AMD enabling User CPUID Faulting support for Linux, that code looks like it's ready to go for being introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel.



Bochs DRM Panic Support, Panfrost Adds Mediatek MT8370 SoC For Linux 6.17

([Linux Kernel] 26 June 06:18 AM EDT Linux 6.17 DRM)

Maxime Ripard at Red Hat sent out the latest weekly pull of "drm-misc-next" changes to DRM-Next for queuing of these kernel graphics/display driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening up in about one month's time.



Blender 5.0 Introducing HDR Support On Linux With Vulkan + Wayland

([Free Software] 26 June 05:55 AM EDT Blender 5.0)

The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator.



NVIDIA Engineer Now Co-Maintainer Of "NOVA" Open-Source Rust GPU Driver

([Nouveau] 25 June 08:37 PM EDT NOVA-Core Co-Maintainer)

The NOVA-Core driver as the basis for a modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for the upstream Linux kernel and eventual successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau DRM driver has a new co-maintainer.



Proposal To Ship XLibre As X11 Server Packages On Fedora Linux Is Withdrawn

([Fedora] 25 June 02:33 PM EDT XLibre Proposal Withdrawn)

The controversial proposal to replace the upstream X.Org X11 server packages on Fedora Linux with XLibre is not going to happen... At least not for now. The change proposal has been withdrawn prior to being voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).



Mozilla Formally Discontinues Its DeepSpeech Project

([Mozilla] 25 June 02:15 PM EDT DeepSpeech)

One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project.



AVX-512's Enormous Advantage For AMD EPYC 4005 Series Performance

([Processors] 25 June 03:00 PM EDT 41 Comments)

The AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado"" processors launched by AMD in May for entry-level servers offer downright amazing value, performance, and power efficiency over the Intel Xeon 6300 / Xeon E-2400 series competition. Intel's top-of-stack Xeon 6300 (Xeon 6369P) / Xeon E processors fail to compete with even the mid-tier EPYC 4005 series processors in either performance, power, or cost effectiveness. Among the many advantages to these budget-friendly EPYC processors is having AVX-512 support with a full 512-bit data path compared to the Xeon 6300 series only having AVX2. For providing more insight into the AVX-512 performance impact with the AMD EPYC 4005 series, here are some enabled/disabled comparison benchmarks and how they are positioned relative to the Xeon 6369P server processor.



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Just weigh your own hurt against the hurt of all the others, and then
do what's best.
-- Lovers and Other Strangers