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)

Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta Along With COSMIC Desktop Beta In Late September

([Operating Systems] 5 September 08:30 PM EDT Pop OS 24.04 + COSMIC Beta)

The long-awaited beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 Linux distribution and the closely-aligned COSMIC desktop environment will be happening in late September.


New x86 Hardware Support & Device Quirks Merged Ahead Of Linux 6.17-rc5

([Linux Kernel] 5 September 06:18 PM EDT x86 Platform Drivers)

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc5 release on Sunday were a few notable x86 platform driver changes. This includes some new hardware support and device quirks.


A First Look At Ubuntu 25.10 Performance On AMD Strix Halo / Framework Desktop

([Operating Systems] 5 September 11:00 AM EDT 5 Comments)

It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.


Wine 10.15 To Feature Initial Support For Using NTSYNC On Linux

([WINE] 5 September 10:20 AM EDT Wine 10.15 + NTSYNC)

With Wine 10.15 expected to be released next Friday there will be initial support for using the NTSYNC driver found within the Linux kernel.


Raspberry Pi Launches A 1TB SSD For $70 USD

([Raspberry Pi] 5 September 10:06 AM EDT Raspberry Pi SSD)

The newest hardware offering from Raspberry Pi announced today is... a 1TB SSD.


Firefox Ending 32-bit Linux Support Next Year

([Mozilla] 5 September 09:24 AM EDT 32-bit Linux)

Mozilla announced today that they will be ending 32-bit Linux support for the Firefox web browser in 2026.


Xiaomi Redmibook Laptops To See Better Support With Linux 6.18

([Hardware] 5 September 08:44 AM EDT Xiaomi Redmibook Keyboard Driver)

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops.


Four Months Have Passed Since The Last AMDVLK Driver Release

([Radeon] 5 September 07:00 AM EDT AMDVLK Bye-Bye)

Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake.


RISC-V Zalasr Support Now Under Review For The Linux Kernel

([RISC-V] 5 September 05:35 AM EDT RISC-V Zalasr)

Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors.


Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Finally Exposes VK_EXT_shader_object

([Intel] 5 September 06:21 AM EDT Intel + VK_EXT_shader_object)

As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension.


Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 Released For Security Vulnerability Exploit Detection

([Linux Kernel] 5 September 06:29 AM EDT Linux Kernel Runtime Guard)

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel.


NVIDIA's Open-Source Nova Driver Now Explicitly Requires 64-bit Support

([NVIDIA] 5 September 06:04 AM EDT Nova Requires 64-bit)

As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree, sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch.


GCC 16 Increasing Its Default LTO Partition Count Due To Today's High Core Count CPUs

([GNU] 4 September 02:44 PM EDT Link Time Optimizations)

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled.


Intel Xe Graphics Driver Preps More SR-IOV Code For Linux 6.18

([Intel] 4 September 01:35 PM EDT Intel Xe + Linux 6.18)

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too.


Linux 6.17 With EXT4 Showing Some Nice Performance Improvements

([Software] 4 September 10:00 AM EDT 40 Comments)

With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.


HIP-RT Update For Blender 5.0 To Deliver Improved Ray-Tracing On RDNA4 GPUs

([Radeon] 4 September 09:38 AM EDT Blender 5.0 HIP-RT)

AMD engineers have submitted a HIP-RT update for Blender developers ahead of the big Blender 5.0 release to enhance the RDNA4 ray-tracing performance.


NVIDIA Posts Initial Linux Patches For Extended GPU Memory "EGM" Virtualization

([NVIDIA] 4 September 09:10 AM EDT NVIDIA EGM Virtualization)

NVIDIA engineer Ankit Agrawal today posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series working on Linux virtualization support for Extended GPU Memory (EGM).


Ubuntu 25.10 Proceeding With Its Rust Coreutils Transition

([Ubuntu] 4 September 08:11 AM EDT Rust Coreutils)

Following sudo-rs becoming the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 as of a few days ago, Canonical is also proceeding with its transition of using the Rust version of Coreutils for this next Ubuntu Linux release.


Miracle-WM 0.7 Brings Mouse/Keyboard Configuration, Enhances Sway IPC Compatibility

([Wayland] 4 September 06:44 AM EDT Miracle-WM 0.7)

Miracle-WM is the Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir project with a focus on tiling and inspired by Sway/i3. Miracle-WM 0.7 is now available for advancing this Mir-powered Wayland experience with additional functionality now in place.


Fedora 44 Change Proposal Aims To Ensure A Nice Wine/Proton + NTSYNC Experience

([Fedora] 4 September 06:34 AM EDT Fedora With NTSYNC)

A change proposal filed for next year's Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel's NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives.


More

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with
Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just
to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't
be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending
to be so outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't
understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was
renowned for being quite clever and quite clearly was so -- but not all the
time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be
puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be
genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"