Over the past year there's been much work happening within the Linux kernel's sysctl code for clearing up ~64 bytes of bloat per array throughout the kernel by dropping the last sysctl "sentinel" entry at the end of each array. This also helps in reducing the build time of the kernel and is a nice improvement. With Linux 6.10, the sysctl sentinel clearing throughout different subsystems is set to happen.

For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis.

GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions.

Back when looking at the AMD Ryzen 7000 series budget server performance last year, DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs were used with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T Ryzen server given that's what was broadly available at the time. Since then there's been more ECC UDIMMs coming to market above DDR5-4800 speeds. Recently I bought a pair of Kingston Server Premier 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 ECC CL46 UDIMMs (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) and that's the focus of today's tests. For those curious if the faster ECC UDIMMs are worthwhile compared to the commonality of DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs, these benchmarks are for you.

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 stable, the AlmaLinux crew today announced AlmaLinux 9.4.

In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the "-O3" compiler optimization level rather than the "-O2" default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance.

The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier.

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November's FreeBSD 14.0 release.

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs.

Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015... Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine.

GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the "possibly last" GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it's looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday.

Intel's power management lead Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches recently for working out asymmetic CPU capacity on hybrid Core x86 systems.

Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

Mesa's Venus Vulkan driver has made cross-device functionality optional in order to enable QEMU support for this open-source driver for virtualized environments.

Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc7 kernel being released later today, some last minute pull requests for the week have enabled some new bits of hardware support where only new device IDs are necessary and thus safe to add at this late stage of Linux 6.9 development.

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.