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)

VKD3D 1.12 Released With Support For Directly Outputting SPIR-V & D3D Shader Assembly

([WINE] 29 May 08:23 PM EDT VKD3D 1.12)

While VKD3D-Proton that is bundled with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) is the most common source for mapping Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API for Windows games on Linux, Wine's VKD3D upstream continues to be developed. Out today is VKD3D 1.12 as the newest feature release for this open-source D3D12-on-Vulkan implementation.


XZ 5.6.2 Released With The Frightening Backdoor Removed

([Free Software] 29 May 04:14 PM EDT XZ 5.6.2)

It was two months ago today that an urgent security alert was issued over XZ being hit by malicious code that turned out to be a backdoor within liblzma added by a bad actor that worked his way into XZ co-maintainership. Longtime XZ developer Lasse Collin is back at the helm and has been auditing the prior XZ commits and today released XZ 5.6.2 with the backdoor completely removed.


Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora's Mirrors

([Fedora] 29 May 03:49 PM EDT 5 Million More Systems)

A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.


Framework Announces Intel Core Ultra Powered Laptop With 2.8k Display

([Hardware] 29 May 01:54 PM EDT Framework 13 + Core Ultra)

Framework is out today with some exciting announcements from lowering the price of the existing Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 series SoC to announcing a new Framework Laptop 13 powered by Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) and having a new 2.8K display option for this modular/upgradeable laptop shipping this summer.


Arm Announces The Cortex-X925 & Cortex-A725

([Arm] 29 May 12:00 PM EDT Armv9 CPU Portfolio Expansion)

Arm today announced the latest products in the Armv9 CPU portfolio: the Cortex-X925 as their "ultimate performance" processor and the Cortex-A725 as their processor option for sustained performance.


Linux 6.10 Features Include TPM Bus Encryption, More AMD Zen 5 & A Prison Letter Merge Request

([Software] 29 May 12:15 PM EDT 6 Comments)

Now that the Linux 6.10 merge window has wrapped up, here's a look at all of the exciting features/changes coming to this summer 2024 kernel. Linux 6.10 brings a lot as usual for the latest/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms, never-ending work on file-systems, a new memory sealing "mseal" system call, TPM bus encryption, and dozens of other exciting changes and new hardware support.


QuestDB 8.0 Brings Up To 50% Performance Improvement, ZFS Data Compression

([Programming] 29 May 10:39 AM EDT QuestDB 8.0)

QuestDB 8.0 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source time-series database. QuestDB continues to cater to high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries so it can handle use-cases from financial data to IoT sensors. With today's QuestDB 8.0 release, it's even faster.


KDE Launches "Opt Green" Initiative For Sustainable Software & Hardware

([KDE] 29 May 08:58 AM EDT Opt Green)

KDE's Eco group announced today "Opt Green" as a new initiative for sustainable software.


Canonical Developing "Flamenco" For Enhancing .NET Developer Experience On Ubuntu

([Ubuntu] 29 May 07:06 AM EDT Flamenco)

One of the newest open-source projects in-development by Ubuntu maker Canonical is a new C# written program called Flamenco.


Valve's AMD Shader Compiler "ACO" Makes More Preparations For Radeon RDNA4

([Mesa] 29 May 06:41 AM EDT ACO + GFX12/RDNA4)

The AMD shader compiler "ACO" alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has seen another batch of changes merged in preparations for next-generation Radeon RDNA4 GPUs.


Flowblade 2.16 Open-Source Video Editor Released

([Multimedia] 29 May 06:15 AM EDT Flowblade 2.16)

Flowblade 2.16 is out today as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editor.


Intel's Sub-NUMA Clustering Support Linux Patches Spun A 19th Time

([Intel] 29 May 06:22 AM EDT SNC + RDT)

The past year there's been a big Linux kernel patch series in the work by Intel to improve Sub-NUMA Clustering "SNC" support so it behaves well with Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel hardware. Hopefully that work will soon be ready for mainlining in the Linux kernel while this week brought the 19th revision to those patches.


Intel Makes One Line Tweak To GCC To Fix A "Random Performance Penalty"

([GNU] 29 May 06:30 AM EDT Intel Loop Alignment)

Coming up on my radar today is a commit made to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adjusting the loop alignment with Intel's generic tuning path. In turn this should address "some random performance penalty in benchmarks" with coping better around cache lines.


SVT-AV1 2.1 Released With Yet More Performance Improvements

([Multimedia] 28 May 08:34 PM EDT SVT-AV1 2.1)

SVT-AV1 that started out as an open-source AV1 video encoder at Intel and more recently an an Alliance of Open Media project quietly released SVT-AV1 v2.1 last week. With this new SVT-AV1 release are yet more performance optimizations and tuning.


Xe2 Ray-Tracing & More Intel Lunar Lake Enabling Land In Mesa 24.2

([Mesa] 28 May 04:34 PM EDT Lunar Lake + Mesa)

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be quite busy preparing their Xe kernel driver and Mesa user-space ANV Vulkan / Iris Gallium3D driver for upcoming Lunar Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.2-devel is more Lunar Lake platform enablement work plus early support for ray-tracing with the integrated Xe2 graphics. However, more work is still needed before this Lunar Lake / Xe2 support will be ready for end-users on the Linux desktop.


Microsoft Starts Preparing Its Open-Source DirectX Shader Compiler For "HLSL 202x"

([Microsoft] 28 May 02:33 PM EDT HLSL 202x)

Microsoft's open-source DirectX Shader Compiler that is open-source and derived from the LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure is out with a significant new release as it begins preparing for "HLSL 202x" as a big leap for the High-Level Shader Language.


Chrome 127 Should Provide PipeWire Camera Capture Support

([Google] 28 May 02:18 PM EDT Chrome / Chromium 127)

The Google Chrome/Chromium 127 web browser release should finally provide support for PipeWire camera capturing support!


Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 32GB Memory Kit

([Memory] 28 May 02:05 PM EDT 9 Comments)

Crucial last week announced the launch of their newest Crucial DDR5 Pro Memory: Overclocking (OC) Edition in white heatspreader form. Crucial recently sent over a pair of these 2 x 16GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 UDIMM memory kits that we've been putting through the paces with Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X systems. These new Crucial Pro DIMMs have been working out very well and align with the great quality we've long enjoyed from Crucial/Micron.


Linux cpupower Tool Fix Coming For AMD Zen 5 CPUs

([AMD] 28 May 12:26 PM EDT cpupower + AMD Zen 5)

Sent out today as a fix for the Linux kernel's in-tree "cpupower" utility is properly handling P-State frequency reporting for upcoming AMD Zen 5 processors.


AlmaLinux 8.10 Released With Support Re-Enabled For Some Older Hardware

([Operating Systems] 28 May 10:06 AM EDT AlmaLinux 8.10)

For those continuing to rely on the Enterprise Linux 8 series, AlmaLinux 8.10 has made its stable debut this morning as the newest version of this community-oriented operating system derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10.


More

On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins.
From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader.
"...stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient
upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing
at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures.
And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better
proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof..."
The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring
the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults
are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow
deaths.
-- David Brin, Startide Rising