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)

Mutter Merges Wayland Toplevel Tag Protocol For GNOME 49

([GNOME] 29 April 08:45 AM EDT Toplevel Tag Protocol)

In addition to the recent merge to Mutter for improving fullscreen apps with direct scanout enhancements for GNOME 49, another early addition also landed today in Mutter: support for Wayland's toplevel tag protocol.



3dfx Voodoo 5 Graphics Driver Can Work On Open-Source React OS

([Operating Systems] 29 April 06:39 AM EDT Voodoo 5 + ReactOS)

For nostalgic open-source fans, React OS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications can now work with the 3dfx Voodoo 5 driver.



Intel Xe Driver Preps Additional Changes For Linux 6.16

([Intel] 29 April 06:14 AM EDT Linux 6.16 + Intel Xe)

On top of the Intel Xe driver changes already queued in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window, an additional set of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were mailed out yesterday.



Intel HID Preps For Panther Lake, Other Laptop Enhancements Squeeze Into Linux 6.15

([Hardware] 29 April 06:06 AM EDT Platform Drivers x86)

Another round of x86 platform driver updates was sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window. Besides some fixes, there is also new hardware support making it into this week's platform-drivers-x86 updates.



MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 Released To Advertise Vulkan 1.3 Support For Apple Devices

([Vulkan] 28 April 08:17 PM EDT MoltenVK 1.3)

MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 was released today as the first test release of this updated Apple iOS / macOS / tvOS / visionOS layer that implements the Vulkan API atop the Apple Metal drivers. With MoltenVK 1.3 there is Vulkan API 1.3 support finally in tow.



Meson 1.8 Build System Released - Wayland Module Declared Stable

([Programming] 28 April 04:36 PM EDT Meson 1.8)

Meson 1.8 was released this afternoon as the newest update to this popular, cross-platform and open-source build system / build automation tool.



A Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Hits Modern AMD CPUs

([Software] 28 April 03:53 PM EDT 42 Comments)

Separate from last week in uncovering a big performance regression on Linux 6.15 affecting workloads like Nginx and that regression getting fixed, I unfortunately discovered another heavy-hitting regression on Linux 6.15. This latest performance regression has been bisected and a possible fix is being thought through by the relevant party, but for the moment has yet to be fixed upstream and affects modern AMD processors.



Kdenlive 25.04 Video Editor Delivers New Features

([Multimedia] 28 April 02:47 PM EDT Kdenlive 25.04)

Kdenlive 25.04 is out today as the newest feature release to this KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear, open-source video editing application.



AMD Linux Network Driver Prepares For "Crater" Ethernet Device

([AMD] 28 April 11:25 AM EDT AMD Crater)

The AMD-XGBE Linux network driver has seen a set of patches published for it in enabling the "new" AMD Ethernet Device codenamed Crater.



Trinity Desktop R14.1.4 Continues With The KDE 3.5 Codebase

([Desktop] 28 April 10:15 AM EDT TDE R14.1.4)

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a long ago fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop released TDE R14.1.4 on Sunday as the newest maintenance release with various bug fixes and minor feature improvements.



Ubuntu 25.04 Advancing The Performance Of The System76 Thelio Astra With Ampere Altra

([Operating Systems] 28 April 08:20 AM EDT 24 Comments)

With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 this month I've looked at its performance on x86_64 laptops and desktop hardware to nice gains on server. That testing so far was focused on Intel and AMD systems given my abundance of x86_64 platforms. Last week I began testing Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 on the System76 Thelio Astra powered by Ampere Altra processors. For those considering the Ubuntu 25.04 upgrade and not minding that it's not a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 25.04 is also allowing for greater performance on ARM hardware.



Wayland Protocols 1.44 Released With Color-Representation

([Wayland] 28 April 06:10 AM EDT Wayland Protocols 1.44)

Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.



GNOME 49 Will Enjoy Better Performance With More Fullscreen Apps

([GNOME] 28 April 05:55 AM EDT Better Direct Scanout)

Another change to look forward to with GNOME 49 come September is better/faster direct scanout for more applications thanks to a change that was merged to the Mutter compositor this past week.



New Linux Patches Aim To Customize Out-Of-Memory Behavior Using BPF

([Linux Kernel] 28 April 05:46 AM EDT OOM + BPF)

A fresh take is being pursued around allowing the Linux kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) behavior to be customized using BPF programs.



Linux 6.15-rc4 Released With Performance Regression Fix, Corrected Bcachefs Case Folding

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 07:03 PM EDT Linux 6.15-rc4)

Linux 6.15-rc4 is now available after a rather eventful week and about one month to go until the stable Linux 6.15.



OpenBSD 7.7 Released With AMD SEV Guest Bits, Initial Radeon RX 9070 GPU Support

([BSD] 27 April 03:17 PM EDT OpenBSD 7.7)

Theo de Raadt announced today the release of OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release for this BSD operating system over the past two decades.



FFmpeg Merges Decoder For Samsung's APV - Advanced Professional Video Codec

([Multimedia] 27 April 12:42 PM EDT FFmpeg APV Decoder)

Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format.



Deferred THP Insertion Nearing The Linux Kernel To Help Avoid Memory Waste

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 08:47 AM EDT Transparent Huge Pages Defer Mode)

A patch currently residing within Andrew Morton's "MM" memory management branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is an addition by Red Hat for introducing deferred THP insertion to khugepaged. This deferred Transparent Huge Page (THP) insertion aims to help reduce memory waste on Linux with some workloads.



XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse Being Quirked For Linux Support

([Hardware] 27 April 06:32 AM EDT XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse)

The XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse boasts a 16K DPI sensor and retails for $65~80 USD but turns out it doesn't even work properly under Linux without a pending kernel patch.



The Linux Kernel's SHA-256 Code Being Improved Upon For Easier & Performant Use

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 06:20 AM EDT SHA256 Refactoring)

The SHA-256 code within the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem is in the process of being refactoring so that it's available via the crypto's library API and also opening it up to support architecture-optimized implementations.



More

If you put your supper dish to your ear you can hear the sounds of a
restaurant.
-- Snoopy