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)

TigerVNC 1.16 Released With "w0vncserver" For Sharing Wayland Desktop Sessions

([Wayland] 27 January 10:16 AM EST w0vncserver)

TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is "w0vncserver" as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops.



Zlib-rs Declares A Stable & Complete API For This Rust-Based Zlib Implementation

([Programming] 27 January 09:30 AM EST Stable + Complete API)

Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete.



Xfwl4 Being Developed As New Wayland Compositor For Xfce

([Desktop] 27 January 08:17 AM EST Xfwl4)

Xfce developers are using their donations from the community to fund a longtime core developer to create Xfwl4, an entirely new Wayland compositor for Xfce.



Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing Merged To Mesa 26.1 For X11 & Wayland

([Vulkan] 27 January 08:08 AM EST Mesa)

The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland.



New Intel Linux Code For DG2 Graphics Can Improve Performance As Much As "A Whopping 260%"

([Intel] 27 January 06:24 AM EST Intel Mesa Improvements)

A set of 18 patches were merged overnight to Mesa 26.1 for working around graphics corruption on Meteor Lake and DG2/Alchemist class graphics hardware. Not only are some graphics corruption issues worked around but for that hardware there is as much as "a whopping 260%" performance improvement observed for some graphics workloads.



ThinkPads On Linux Appear Nearly Ready For Improved Trackpoint Doubletap Handling

([Hardware] 27 January 06:10 AM EST TrackPoint Doubletap)

Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it's looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel.



Picolibc Picks Up RISC-V Improvements, Hexagon Support & Better POSIX Compliance

([Programming] 27 January 05:30 AM EST Picolibc)

Keith Packard published Picolibc 1.8.11 on Monday as the newest release for his C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Picolibc continues tacking on new CPU architecture support and other features for this project that started out as a conglomeration of the Newlib and AVR Libc C library codebases.



Updated Linux Patches For Managing Out-Of-Memory Behavior Via BPF

([Linux Kernel] 27 January 05:43 AM EST OOM + BPF)

Being worked on since last year by Google engineer Roman Gushchin was the latest attempt for the Linux kernel to support managing the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs. It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on that front but published overnight is the latest iteration of those patches.



AMD Radeon Linux Driver Introduces Low-Latency Video Decode Option

([Mesa] 26 January 08:23 PM EST RadeonSI Low-Latency Decode)

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release is introducing a new low-latency video decode mode. This lower-latency video decoding comes with a trade-off of increased GPU power consumption.



Valve's Proton 10.0-4 Released With More Windows Games Now Running On Linux

([Valve] 26 January 06:59 PM EST Proton 10.0-4)

Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-4 as their newest update to this downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.



AMD Squeezing Out More More ROCm/HIP Performance With New Device-Side PGO

([AMD] 26 January 03:03 PM EST Profile Guided Optimizations)

Compiler profile guided optimization (PGO) techniques have paid off well for increasing CPU performance via application/workload-specific profiles fed back to the compiler to make more informed decisions. AMD compiler engineers have been working on crafting device-side PGO for their AMDGPU LLVM back-end for allowing ROCm/HIP workloads to achieve greater GPU performance. An initial merge request is now open for upstream LLVM.



Firefox Nightly Enables Split-View Mode Option By Default

([Mozilla] 26 January 02:18 PM EST Firefox Split View)

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have now enabled the Split View mode by default to easily view two web pages at once within a single window.



Godot 4.6 Ships Many Improvements For This Leading Open-Source Game Engine

([Linux Gaming] 26 January 12:32 PM EST Godot 4.6)

Godot 4.6 is officially out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.



Intel Panther Lake / Arc B390 Linux Benchmarks Still Coming

([Intel] 26 January 12:23 PM EST Not Yet...)

Ahead of tomorrow's official availability of new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptops, the review embargo lifted on Panther Lake and its much anticipated Arc B390 graphics. There have been several Windows 11 reviews of Panther Lake out today, but what about Linux?



Revisiting The Linux 6.19 Performance With Some New Wins & Losses

([Software] 26 January 10:24 AM EST 2 Comments)

Back at the start of the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle I ran benchmarks showing some scheduler performance regressions with the new kernel. Fortunately, two weeks out from the Linux 6.19 stable release, merged this weekend was disabling the scheduler's NEXT_BUDDY feature due to performance regressions. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the latest Linux 6.19 Git state with/without NEXT_BUDDY and comparing it to Linux 6.18 stable for reference.



Patch Proposed To Allow Toggling Linux Kernel VT Support At Boot Time

([Linux Kernel] 26 January 09:07 AM EST VT_ENABLE)

A patch causing a healthy technical debate today on the Linux kernel mailing list would allow the kernel virtual terminal "VT" support to be enabled/disabled at boot time rather than being limited to the current CONFIG_VT build-time option.



Initial AMD GFX13 Target Merged To LLVM 23 Git - Presumably RDNA5

([AMD] 26 January 08:23 AM EST AMD GFX13)

Added to the LLVM 23 Git codebase minutes ago is a pull request adding the initial AMDGPU GFX13 target for their next-generation graphics core IP. AMD GFX13 is presumably for RDNA5.



AMDGPU Patches Updated For HDMI Gaming Features On Linux With Radeon Graphics

([Radeon] 26 January 06:20 AM EST HDMI Gaming Features)

A patch series posted last week for the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver implements HDMI Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" and other gaming features for HDMI displays. With the HDMI Forum blocking HDMI 2.1 open-source support, these HDMI gaming features for the AMDGPU driver were developed via trial-and-error and the limited public knowledge available. A second iteration of these patches are now available for testing.



LG Gram Style 14 Laptop To See Working Speaker Support With Linux 7.0

([Hardware] 26 January 05:52 AM EST LG Gram Style 14)

For the Intel-powered LG Gram Style 14 laptop one of the Linux support caveats is the internal speakers not working properly under Linux, but with a patch expected for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it will finally fix the laptop speaker support for one of the laptop models in this series.



ASRock Rack PAUL PCIe IPMI Card Sees DT Patches For The Mainline Linux Kernel

([Hardware] 26 January 05:38 AM EST ASRock Rack PAUL)

ASRock Rack's PAUL is a low-profile PCIe IPMI card built around the widely-used ASPEED AST2500 controller for providing IPMI/BMC capabilities for any platform. New patches provide mainline Linux kernel support for ASRock Rack PAUL with the necessary Device Tree bits.



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Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)