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 7.1 Adding DRM Dedicated CRTC Background Color Property

([Linux Kernel] 20 March 06:11 AM EDT CRTC Background Color)

Sent out today was the latest weekly round of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window that is set to happen in mid-to-late April.



Steam Linux Beta Prepares For 64-bit, Can Be Run Inside Steam Runtime Container

([Valve] 20 March 05:56 AM EDT Steam Linux Beta)

An interesting new Steam client beta dropped overnight from Valve with some exciting low-level enhancements.



Microsoft's DXGKRNL Driver Updated For Linux - Many Changes After Four Years

([Microsoft] 19 March 05:21 PM EDT DirectX Kernel Driver)

Well, here's an unexpected surprise... A new version of the Linux kernel patches for DXGKRNL were posted today for that DirectX kernel driver that began a few years ago for supporting Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) use-cases. This comes four years to the month after the prior version was posted and without much excitement for getting it into the mainline Linux kernel.



Thunderbird Looks To Finalize Its Exchange Support, Refresh The Calendar UI

([Mozilla] 19 March 03:42 PM EDT Thunderbird Mail Client)

Thunderbird announced today the availability of their public roadmaps where they are making it easier for end-users to comprehend what they are currently working on for this mail client not only for the desktop builds but also their Android and iOS versions too.



AMD Preps More GFX12.1 Enablement For Linux 7.1, Initial VCN 5.0.2 & JPEG 5.0.2 IP

([AMD] 19 March 03:25 PM EDT AMD GFX12.1)

AMD today sent out another batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window.



Wayland 1.25 Released With Color Management Now Fully Documented

([Wayland] 19 March 12:20 PM EDT Wayland 1.25)

Simon Ser just released Wayland 1.25.



Blender 5.1 Delivers Some Nice Gains For CPU Rendering Performance On Linux

([Software] 19 March 12:05 PM EDT Add A Comment)

With this week's release of Blender 5.1 I have begun benchmarking it on different CPUs and GPUs. In this article is an initial look at the positive impact Blender 5.1 is having on CPU-based rendering performance on Linux.



GNUnet 0.27 Released For Those With "Some Reasonable Pain Tolerance"

([GNU] 19 March 11:29 AM EDT GNUnet 0.27)

Version 0.27 of GNUnet is now available for this free software framework for constructing decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. But it comes with some big caveats before use.



Mozilla Releases Llamafile 0.10 To Enhance Their AI Offering For Easy-To-Use LLMs

([AI] 19 March 08:21 AM EDT Llamafile)

The last release of Llamafile was back in May and it's led me recently to wonder if Mozilla was slowly abandoning this AI project like they had done in the past to DeepSpeech and other software projects. Fortunately, that's not the case and out today is Llamafile 0.10 with some big updates.



OpenGL Lands New Extension To Benefit Wine

([Mesa] 19 March 08:05 AM EDT MESA_map_buffer_client_pointer)

The OpenGL API is still seeing new extensions introduced in 2026. Merged today to the OpenGL Registry is a new extension intended to help Wine usage for 32-bit Windows games/apps on 64-bit Linux systems.



Opera GX Web Browser Released For Linux

([Proprietary Software] 19 March 06:22 AM EDT Opera GX + Linux)

It's been a while since most of you probably thought about the Opera web browser, but these days they have been catering their "Opera GX" web browser to gamers. Today they have finally delivered this Opera GX gaming-focused browser for Linux users.



Linux 7.1 Should See Working HDMI Support For The Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V Board

([Hardware] 19 March 06:13 AM EDT TH1520 HDMI)

Drew Fustini sent out DeviceTree patches this past weekend for enabling the HDMI display controller on the T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC. Additionally, there's a patch for lighting up the HDMI display support on the LicheePi 4A RISC-V board.



Canonical Collecting Wish List Ideas For Improving Mir

([Ubuntu] 19 March 06:04 AM EDT How To Improve Mir)

With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS quickly approaching release next week, Canonical is beginning more of their road-mapping for Ubuntu 26.10 and beyond. To help in plotting future work, Canonical is interested in feedback for features or improvements that developers/users would like to see around their Mir project.



Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux's Swap Design

([Linux Kernel] 19 March 06:19 AM EDT Virtual Swap Space)

The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage.



AMD Prototyping AMDGPU SVM Atop DRM_GPUSVM Framework

([AMD] 18 March 04:24 PM EDT AMDGPU + DRM_GPUSVM)

AMD engineers are experimenting with a proof-of-concept implementation of a Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) implementation atop the DRM_GPUSVM framework.



Intel Ends Work On Open-Source kAFL-Fuzzer For Fuzzing VMs

([Intel] 18 March 04:03 PM EDT kAFL-Fuzzer Archived)

An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended.



GNOME 50 Released With Many Fantastic Improvements

([GNOME] 18 March 12:16 PM EDT GNOME 50)

GNOME 50 is out today, on-schedule and just in time for being the default desktop of the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.



Fedora Asahi Remix 43 Released For Apple Silicon Macs

([Fedora] 18 March 11:48 AM EDT Fedora Asahi Remix 43)

While Fedora 43 was released at the end of October and there is just one month to go now until the release of Fedora 44, Fedora Asahi Remix 43 debuted today as this spin of Fedora Linux for Apple Silicon Macs.



Btrfs Performance From Linux 6.12 To Linux 7.0 Shows Regressions

([Software] 18 March 11:00 AM EDT 62 Comments)

Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.



Ubuntu's Snap Affected By Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

([Ubuntu] 18 March 10:44 AM EDT Ubuntu Snapd)

Last week it was security issues with AppArmor to worry about on Ubuntu Linux while this week a "high" rated vulnerability for Ubuntu's Snap daemon has been revealed.



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