Google Now Using AutoFDO To Enhance Android's Linux Kernel Performance

([Google] 14 March 06:57 AM EDT AutoFDO The Android Linux Kernel)

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android.

Mesa's LLVMpipe Now Exposes Mesh Shader Support

([Mesa] 14 March 06:33 AM EDT LLVMpipe + EXT_mesh_shader)

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver.

KDE Plasma 6.6.3 Fixing Direct Scan-Out When Using Fractional Scaling

([KDE] 14 March 06:38 AM EDT Plasma This Week)

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

GNOME OS Switches To KMSCON Enabled By Default

([GNOME] 14 March 06:20 AM EDT GNOME OS + KMSCON)

GNOME OS as the Linux-based distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default.

debauit Announced As Debian Source Package Auditor

([Debian] 13 March 05:48 PM EDT debaudit)

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages.

NVIDIA 595.44.03 Linux Driver Released With VK_KHR_device_address_commands

([NVIDIA] 13 March 02:42 PM EDT NVIDIA 595.44.03)

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems.

Panther Lake Tuning For The Intel Idle Driver In Linux 7.1

([Intel] 13 March 01:25 PM EDT C-State Tables)

While the Linux support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake is largely in good shape as shown in my numerous articles over the past month and a half, there are occasional missing remnants landing in the kernel. As the latest example, or the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel, the unified Panther Lake C-States table is being added for the Intel Idle driver.

Linux Kernel API Specification Framework Advances Past RFC Stage

([Linux Kernel] 13 March 12:18 PM EDT Kernel API Specification Framework)

After going through five rounds of review under a Request For Comments (RFC) flag, today the latest round of Kernel API Specification Framework patches were sent out with the RFC flag removed.

Linux 6.12 Through Linux 7.0 File-System Benchmarks For EXT4 + XFS

([Software] 13 March 10:00 AM EDT 20 Comments)

Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

Intel Xe Driver In Linux 7.1 Preps For Intel Nova Lake P, Introduces VM_BIND DECOMPRESS

([Intel] 13 March 09:08 AM EDT Intel Xe)

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.346 Released With Notable VK_KHR_device_address_commands

([Vulkan] 13 March 08:23 AM EDT VK_KHR_device_address_commands)

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands.

FreeRDP 3.24 Released With Security Fixes & Improved X11 Client Support

([Desktop] 13 March 08:12 AM EDT FreeRDP 3.24)

FreeRDP as this open-source and cross-platform Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is out with FreeRDP 3.24 to ship new security fixes as well as other improvements.

Linux 7.0 AMDGPU Fixing Idle Power Issue For RDNA4 GPUs After Compute Workloads

([Radeon] 13 March 06:29 AM EDT Fix On The Way)

A fix is on the way to the Linux 7.0 kernel today for addressing an idle power issue with AMD RDNA4 GPUs reporting high power consumption and full utilization even after being "idle" following compute workloads like Llama.cpp.

Intel NPU Driver 1.30 Released For Linux

([Intel] 13 March 06:01 AM EDT Intel NPU Driver)

For going along with the Intel IVPU kernel accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel is the Intel NPU driver support in user-space. Released yesterday was the Intel NPU Driver 1.30 milestone for advancing the Intel NPU user-space support on Linux with this open-source support for Core Ultra SoCs.

GNOME Infrastructure Now Battling Bots & AI Scrapers Using Fastly

([GNOME] 13 March 05:48 AM EDT GNOME GitLab + Fastly)

GNOME's GitLab infrastructure has already been using Anubis for a while to help fend off bots and AI scraper traffic from wreacking havoc on their server resources and also their hosting budget. GNOME recently began redirecting some GitLab traffic to their GitHub repositories as another step in dealing with bots/scrapers. Now they have taken an added step of using the commercial, closed-source Fastly in their battle with bots.

Intel Updates LLM-Scaler-vLLM With Support For More Qwen3/3.5 Models

([Intel] 13 March 05:38 AM EDT LLM-Scaler vLLM 0.14.0-b8.1)

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage.

TrueNAS Connect Announced For Offering Enterprise Features Without The Hardware

([Operating Systems] 12 March 08:40 PM EDT TrueNAS Connect)

Last year TrueNAS unified their SCALE and CORE offerings as part of solidifying their enterprise storage efforts around Linux from their prior FreeBSD base. This year the developers at iXsystems have another change in store with announcing TrueNAS Connect as a new bridge for accessing TrueNAS enterprise storage features without having to invest in their hardware.