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)

KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements

([KDE] 16 June 05:48 AM EDT Plasma 6.7)

Today's the day! KDE developers have just released Plasma 6.7 as the newest version of this leading open-source desktop environment.



FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements

([BSD] 15 June 08:56 PM EDT FreeBSD 15.1)

After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system.



Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code

([Linux Storage] 15 June 09:02 PM EDT IOmap)

In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage.



Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners

([Ubuntu] 15 June 05:22 PM EDT Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0)

The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July.



Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations

([Intel] 15 June 04:15 PM EDT Intel Performance Skills)

The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux.



FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery

([BSD] 15 June 03:08 PM EDT FreeBSD + AI)

The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI.



GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend

([GNU] 15 June 02:51 PM EDT GCC + WebAssembly)

Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC.



Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR

([Arch Linux] 15 June 12:43 PM EDT Arch Linux AUR)

After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware, the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages.



Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI

([Mozilla] 15 June 11:15 AM EDT Firefox 152)

The Firefox 152.0 release binaries are now available ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling. With Firefox 152 there is now the JPEG-XL support code being compiled by default for the release albeit still disabled at run-time by default behind a preference for now.



Reading /proc/filesystems Is Surprisingly Done Very Often & Now As Much As 444% Faster

([Linux Storage] 15 June 10:33 AM EDT /proc/filesystems)

Reading /proc/filesystems for obtaining a list of file-systems supported by the running kernel is done frequently on Linux. Namely due to being read by the SELinux library (libselinux), reading of /proc/filesystems is done more often than one would typically expect and now the Linux 7.2 kernel is optimizing for it to yield much better performance.



Framework Computer Making Progress On Coreboot For Their Modern Intel-Powered Laptops

([Coreboot] 15 June 09:05 AM EDT Framework Computer + Coreboot)

While we have seen Coreboot work-in-progress support for older Ryzen-powered Framework Laptops, it seems there is a recent uptick in development around supporting Coreboot on Framework Computer's modern Intel-powered wares.



Cache Aware Scheduling Merged For Linux 7.2 For Boosting Modern Intel & AMD CPUs

([Linux Kernel] 15 June 08:31 AM EDT Cache Aware Scheduling)

The scheduler updates were merged this morning for the Linux 7.2 kernel and it's exciting. Cache Aware Scheduling has finally been merged! This is a win for especially modern Intel and AMD processors with multiple last level caches (LLCs).



Linux 7.2 Introducing The Rust Zerocopy Library To Eliminate More "Unsafe" Code

([Linux Kernel] 15 June 07:03 AM EDT Linux 7.2 Rust)

Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel.



Linux 7.2 To Better Communicate File-System Casefolding For Helping Windows NFS & More

([Linux Storage] 15 June 06:24 AM EDT Linux 7.2 Casefolding)

Newly-merged code for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel will now expose the case-folding (case insensitive) behavior of local file-systems so that Linux file servers and others can properly report the actual behavior rather than guessing if case-folding is actually used/supported.



GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal

([GNU] 15 June 05:55 AM EDT GNU Linux-libre 7.1)

Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom.



Linux 7.2 To Raise LLVM/Clang Compiler Requirement, Add Support For Distributed ThinLTO

([Linux Kernel] 14 June 08:33 PM EDT Linux 7.2 Kbuild)

Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today's Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates.



Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics

([Linux Kernel] 14 June 11:09 AM EDT Linux 7.1)

Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it's coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans.



Revised AVX-512 xor_gen() Implementation For Linux RAID Yielding More Performance Gains

([Linux Storage] 14 June 06:22 AM EDT AVX-512 xor_gen)

A few days back I wrote about Google's Eric Biggers spearheading an AVX-512 implementation of xor_gen() as the Linux kernel function used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5/RAID6. That initial implementation was yielding up to 41% better performance while a new implementation has now been posted for scoring some additional victories.



Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack

([Arch Linux] 14 June 06:32 AM EDT Arch Linux AUR Malware)

Just a day after Arch Linux developers believed they got their malware AUR incident under control with 1,500+ packages affected by malware, another round of of AUR malware is now being discovered. This latest round is more sophisticated as with code obfuscation to better conceal the intent.



pkgcli As PackageKit's Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface

([Free Software] 14 June 06:09 AM EDT pkgcli)

Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer.



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She ran the gamut of emotions from 'A' to 'B'.
-- Dorothy Parker, on a Kate Hepburn performance