It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader.

It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.

Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection.

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.

With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation.

While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds.

On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel's open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality.

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."

With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we're beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just "RHEL clones". It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that's been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels.

There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities.

System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year.

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging FFmpeg is out with its newest release.

Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications.

LXQt 2.0 is now available for this lightweight desktop environment that has now been ported to the Qt 6.6+ toolkit. Additionally, much of the LXQt components are ready to be used under Wayland compositors.

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved RPM 4.20 to land for the Fedora 41 cycle that will debut in H2'2024. RPM 4.20 is a significant update for this widely-used packaging format.

Queued as part of the ARM64 patches in the various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is a script for being able to build Flat Image Trees (FITs). A Flat Image Tree is the compiled Linux kernel paired with the associated DeviceTree content that is compressed and easily then distributed and executed by capable bootloaders.

Merged on Tuesday into GNOME Mutter is NVIDIA secondary GPU copy acceleration support that allows for much better performance of hybrid laptops featuring integrated graphics paired with a discrete NVIDIA GPU.

As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May.