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)

Linux 6.15 Looks Like It May Try Again With EXECMEM_ROX Support

([Linux Kernel] 4 February 06:43 AM EST EXECMEM_ROX)

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel.



Debian 13 Will Aim To Include GNOME 48, Debian/Ubuntu Begin Packaging GNOME Papers

([Debian] 4 February 06:31 AM EST Debian 13 + GNOME 48)

For those wondering whether Debian 13 would see the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop packages given the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" development freezes, it looks like this updated GNOME release will be squeezed in.



Igalia's Optimizations Juicing More Graphics Performance Out Of The Raspberry Pi

([Raspberry Pi] 4 February 06:12 AM EST Raspberry Pi 4/5)

Igalia engineers José María Casanova Crespo and Maíra Canal presented at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels around the efforts by this open-source consulting firm to further enhance the 3D performance out of the Raspberry Pi single board computers.



Serpent OS Development Slowing Down Amid Lack Of Funding

([Operating Systems] 3 February 08:40 PM EST Serpent OS Funding Low)

Serpent OS is the original Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame and has been pursuing its own package management system and new innovations in the Linux distribution landscape. While there has been recent success and new development builds coming out, feature development on Serpent OS is expected to slowdown now due to a lack of project funding.



FreeBSD On Laptops Effort Gets Proof-Of-Concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi Working

([BSD] 3 February 05:02 PM EST FreeBSD On Laptops)

In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation funding work on s0ix sleep state support as part of their initiative to improve FreeBSD's support for modern laptops, they have also been funding work on a number of other objectives, including better WiFi driver coverage. A milestone now being achieved for 2025 is getting a proof-of-concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi driver support working for this BSD operating system.



GEICO Insurance Company Developing TuxTape - A New Linux Kernel Livepatching Solution

([Linux Kernel] 3 February 04:06 PM EST GEICO TuxTape)

Red Hat's Kpatch, Oracle's Ksplice, and SUSE's kGraft are the most well known solutions currently for Linux kernel live-patching primarily for applying security patches to running Linux servers. It wasn't on my bingo card for insurance giant GEICO working baking their own Linux kernel live-patching solution, but they announced it this weekend and it will soon be open-source.



Cloud Hypervisor 44 Released With New Performance Improvements

([Virtualization] 3 February 02:43 PM EST Cloud Hypervisor 44.0)

Cloud Hypervisor 44 is now available as the newest version of this security and cloud minded Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that operates atop Linux's KVM and the Microsoft MSHV Hypervisor.



Three New Intel Battlemage Device IDs Added To Open-Source Linux Driver

([Intel] 3 February 01:20 PM EST More Intel Battlemage GPUs?)

Three more PCI device IDs were added today to the Intel open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver code for Battlemage that could be for future higher-end products or along the lines of Data Center GPU Flex Series or other products.



Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting

([Operating Systems] 3 February 01:00 PM EST Alpine Linx)

Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position.



Faux Bus Proposed For The Linux Kernel To Better Deal With Simple Devices

([Linux Kernel] 3 February 11:20 AM EST Faux Bus)

Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is proposing "Faux Bus" as a new "fake" bus solution for simple devices.



Firefox 135 Published With Safeguards To Prevent Overwhelming The Back History

([Mozilla] 3 February 10:32 AM EST Firefox 135)

Mozilla Firefox 135 release binaries are now available for those wanting to grab the latest browser release right away.



Red Hat Hiring To Continue Advancing The Linux Desktop In 2025

([Fedora] 3 February 10:00 AM EST Fedora 2025 Plans)

Christian Schaller as Red Hat's Director of Software Engineering outlined in a blog post today some of the areas they will be focusing on this year with Fedora Workstation development. Additionally, they will be hiring at least two more Linux desktop engineers this year at Red Hat.



FreeBSD Working On S0ix Sleep State Support For Newer Laptops

([BSD] 3 February 08:45 AM EST FreeBSD Improvement)

FreeBSD is working on S0ix standby power state support for better handling modern Intel and AMD laptops running this popular BSD operating system.



Fwupd 2.0.5 Brings Support For More ELAN Fingerprint Readers & Fixes

([LVFS] 3 February 08:33 AM EST Fwupd 2.0.5)

Fwupd 2.0.5 is out today as the newest update to this open-source solution for system and peripheral/device firmware updating under Linux.



Sound Open Firmware 2.12 Adds NXP iMX95 Support, Zephyr RTOS For AMD ACP 6.0

([Multimedia] 3 February 06:50 AM EST Sound Open Firmware 2.12)

Sound Open Firmware 2.12 is now available to succeed the SOF 2.11 release from last September. Sound Open Firmware as a reminder is an open-source audio DSP firmware solution and related SDK/tooling. SOF started out as an open-source Intel project and has successfully evolved into an excellent multi-vendor initiative and platform agnostic.



Red Hat Releases Tuned 2.25 Daemon For Linux Adaptive Performance Tuning & Monitoring

([Red Hat] 3 February 06:26 AM EST TuneD 2.25)

Red Hat engineers have released Tuned 2.25 as the newest version of their alternative to power-profiles-daemon and similar for adaptive performance tuning and monitoring. Tuned ships with various profiles and different capabilities for tuning Linux systems from laptops on battery life up through HPC servers and enterprise storage.



Intel NPU Driver 1.13 Released For Core Ultra Linux Systems

([Intel] 3 February 06:36 AM EST Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.13)

Intel on Friday released an updated user-space driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found with Core Ultra SoCs. This user-space driver code works with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver for opening up the Intel NPU for helping speed-up AI workloads on Linux.



Turbostat Preps For Intel Clearwater Forest & Panther Lake

([Intel] 3 February 06:20 AM EST Turbostat)

Yesterday just prior to the Linux 6.14-rc1 release were some last minute changes to the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree.



Linux 6.14-rc1 Released With NTSYNC Completed, AMDXDNA Driver & Other Enhancements

([Linux Kernel] 2 February 07:29 PM EST Linux 6.14)

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc1 to cap off the Linux 6.14 merge window.



Arch Linux Powered CachyOS Updated With Propeller-Optimized Kernel

([Operating Systems] 2 February 12:12 PM EST CachyOS February 2025)

The CachyOS Linux distribution that is built atop the rolling-release Arch Linux distribution and has developed a following with enthusiasts and gamers is out with its newest monthly update.



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"I'll bet you $5 USD (and these days, that's about a gadzillion Euros) that
this explains it."

- Linus