The FreeBSD project this morning published their quarterly status report that outlines all of the interesting OS improvements and other changes made during Q4'2024.

Entering beta last year was the Fish Shell 4.0 release that migrated its codebase from C++ to Rust. Out today is the first stable 4.0 release for the Rust-ed version of the popular Fish Shell.

Merged today for Mesa 25.1 is introducing a new previously AMD-internal library to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver dubbed GMLIB. This GMLIB code is being used by RadeonSI in conjunction with Radeon GPUs having the Video Processing Engine (VPE) hardware to deal with HDR video on Linux.

Mike Blumenkrantz as the lead developer of Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation and working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics team has been spending much time recently optimizing for OpenCL with the Rusticl Gallium3D driver.

Over the past few months there's been an in-progress patch series by Arnd Bergmann for cleaning up the x86 32-bit kernel support for running on x86_64 CPUs. After the third iteration of the patches were posted this week, these x86 32-bit CPU clean-ups were shuffled into the tip/tip.git "x86/cpu" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window.

Git maintainer Junio C Hamano announced Git 2.49-rc0 today as an early preview release for the next version of this widely-used, distributed version control system.

Last week I published an article looking at the power efficiency of 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" using the modern AMD P-State driver and the Power Profile options. The AMD P-State driver being used by default now for the EPYC 9005 series processors on Linux 6.12+ and paired with Power Profile option tuning can deliver a nice boost to server energy efficiency with only modest impact to the performance. Today's article are some complementary numbers I carried out recently on a Supermicro server looking at more of the Power Profile Selection options.

More RadeonSI Gallium3D changes worth mentioning have landed today in Mesa 25.1 Git for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

Following the various Intel graphics driver feature updates sent out earlier this week in building up the new kernel graphics/display driver features for Linux 6.15, another prominent pull request was sent out yesterday with additional material.

FineIBT-BHI as a means of tougher kernel defenses for fending off Branch History Injection (BHI) looks like it will be ready for upstreaming in next month's Linux 6.15 merge window.

Adding to the flurry of open-source work recently around the merged Wayland color management protocol for supporting HDR, the Mesa Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) code has added support for this protocol.

A "request for comments" patch series sent out on Monday is working on Spectre mitigations for BPF programs using speculation barriers.

Earlier today Framework Computer held a virtual and in-person event to announce their 2nd gen offerings in the form of a mini-ITX desktop powered by the new Ryzen AI Max SoCs, a 2-in-1 convertible laptop with the Framework Laptop 12, and Ryzen AI 300 series SoC/motherboard options for the Framework Laptop 13.

Following the recent Rust drama within the Linux kernel that came out in part because Christoph Hellwig expressed objections to Rust bindings for the DMA mapping helpers that he is a maintainer of, Hellwig has now stepped down as one of the DMA mapping helper maintainers.

Eight new security issues have now been made public around the X.Org Server codebase that also impact XWayland.

For those wondering how the latest AMD Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" desktop processors are battling it out on Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with the latest software updates as well as the newest system BIOS updates for a fresh, all-new look at these Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs on Linux.

Zlib-rs as a Rust programming language implementation of the Zlib file format for better safety is now beginning to outperform the C implementations of the widely-used Zlib.

Complementing yesterday's initial set of Intel graphics driver feature patches planned for Linux 6.15, a drm-xe-next pull request was also submitted to DRM-Next containing a lot of new feature code for the modern Xe kernel Direct Rendering Manager driver. There's a few fun features on the Xe side for Linux 6.15.

As an exciting late addition to the GNOME 48 codebase ahead of its stable release in mid-March, the Wayland color management "wp_color_management_v1" protocol support has been merged!

The MythTV open-source project is now 22 years old for being this PVR/DVR software for TVs and home theaters. While PVRs/DVRs aren't nearly as popular as they were in the pre Internet streaming era, MythTV continues forging ahead and MythTV 35 is now available as the newest annual feature release to the project.