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)

GNOME 48 Desktop Introducing An Official Audio Player: Decibels

([GNOME] 14 January 12:19 PM EST GNOME Decibels Audio Player)

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.



GCC Developers Consider Deprecating ARM64 ILP32 Support

([Arm] 14 January 11:01 AM EST ARM64 ILP32)

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.



Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support Still Poses A Challenge For Linux Laptops

([Intel] 14 January 10:11 AM EST Intel IPU6 Web Cameras)

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.



Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Lands More Performance Optimizations Ahead Of The B570

([Intel] 14 January 06:55 AM EST Intel ANV Performance Tuning)

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.



Haiku OS Gets The Iceweasel Web Browser Up & Running

([Operating Systems] 14 January 06:36 AM EST Haiku + Iceweasel)

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running.



JUring: Experimental IO_uring For Java With Big Performance Gains

([Linux Storage] 14 January 06:23 AM EST JUring)

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing.



Intel's Open Image Denoise Begins Preparing For Panther Lake Xe3 Graphics

([Intel] 14 January 06:09 AM EST Open Image Denoise 2.3.2)

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update.



OpenZFS 2.3 Released With RAIDZ Expansion, Fast Dedup, Direct I/O & Other Great Improvements

([Linux Storage] 13 January 08:42 PM EST OpenZFS 2.3)

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features.



Fedora 42 Cleared To Ship WSL Images For Easy Windows Subsystem For Linux Use

([Fedora] 13 January 08:25 PM EST Fedora 42 WSL)

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment.



Intel Battlemage Showing Off Nice OpenCL Gains With Newest Open-Source Compute Stack

([Display Drivers] 13 January 02:52 PM EST 32 Comments)

Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.



Oracle OLED Wants To Help Improve The Debugability Of The Linux Kernel

([Oracle] 13 January 01:25 PM EST Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics)

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.



GNOME Shell 48 Alpha Introduces Screen Time / Health Breaks, Mutter 48 Alpha Out Too

([GNOME] 13 January 11:50 AM EST GNOME 48 Alpha)

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.



DXVK 2.5.3 Brings More Fixes For Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 On Vulkan

([Linux Gaming] 13 January 10:54 AM EST DXVK 2.5.3)

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.



Linux Attack Vector Controls Updated To More Easily Controlling CPU Security Mitigations

([Linux Security] 13 January 10:16 AM EST CPU Attack Vector Controls)

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.



A Microsoft-Contributed Change To Linux 6.13 Is Causing A Last Minute Ruckus

([Linux Kernel] 13 January 08:40 AM EST EXECMEM_ROX)

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.



Alibaba Engineers Work To Address Suspend/Resume Bugs With The AMD Graphics Driver

([Radeon] 13 January 07:00 AM EST Suspend and Resume)

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.



Intel Gigabit Ethernet Driver To Speed-Up With AF_XDP Zero-Copy For Linux 6.14

([Linux Networking] 13 January 06:36 AM EST Intel IGB + AF_XDP Zero-Copy)

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.



AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Linux Patches Reworked In 4th Spin

([AMD] 13 January 06:20 AM EST INVLPGB)

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.



Hyprland Wayland Compositor Lands HDR / Color Management Support

([Wayland] 13 January 06:05 AM EST Hyprland Goes HDR)

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.



GCC 15 Compiler Enters Its Final Stage Of Development

([GNU] 13 January 05:51 AM EST GCC 15)

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.



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The man who has never been flogged has never been taught.
-- Menander