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)

Mesa 26.2 Released With NVK Mesh Shader Support, Many Other Vulkan Improvements

([Mesa] 5 August 06:13 PM EDT Mesa 26.2)

Mesa 26.2 stable is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers typically used on Linux systems.



USB4STREAM Adding Busy Poll Option For Lower Latency At The Cost Of Increased CPU Cycles

([Intel] 5 August 05:27 PM EDT USB4STREAM Low Latency)

One of the nifty new features of Linux 7.2 is USB4STREAM as an Intel-developed solution for quickly sending data between USB4 connected systems. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, a busy poll mode is being added to provide lower-latency data transfers at the expense of increased CPU activity.



Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With Flutter Directly Embedded

([Wayland] 5 August 12:10 PM EDT Denial Compositor)

The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities.



Cloudflare Announces Open-Source Cloudflare OS As AI "Operating System"

([AI] 5 August 09:16 AM EDT Cloudflare OS)

Cloudflare today announced the open-sourcing of Cloudflare OS as an "open platform for agents, apps, and work." Cloudflare OS is an AI "operating system" but not in the traditional OS sense.



Linux To Avoid Confusing Processor Firmware With Newer Intel CPUs Sporting DEC

([Intel] 5 August 08:39 AM EDT Dynamic Efficiency Control)

A patch for the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver is pending to avoid confusing the processor firmware on newer platforms like Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" where Dynamic Efficiency Control (DEC) is supported.



Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents

([Linux Kernel] 5 August 06:38 AM EDT Moxa Intellio Driver)

There continues to be a lot of cleaning up of the kernel source tree to deal with noise generated by AI / LLM coding agents sending in reports and patches for old drivers that are likely not actively used by anyone on modern upstream kernel builds. Rather than continuing to carry these old drivers around with the uptick in AI/LLM-generated noise, kernel maintainers are finding it better to just retire the old drivers.



AMD Preps HDMI FRL Fixes, New Knob For Disabling Older AMD GPU DCE Display Support

([Radeon] 5 August 06:20 AM EDT AMDGPU DC)

Overnight AMD engineers sent out their latest round of AMDGPU DC display code updates for their Linux driver. This week's round of display code updates include some additional fixes for their recently introduced HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support as part of the work toward their HDMI 2.1 implementation finally coming together for their open-source, upstream Linux driver.



FEX 2608 Released With More Fixes For Running x86_64 Binaries On ARM64

([Free Software] 5 August 06:08 AM EDT FEX 2608)

FEX 2608 is now available as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source emulator sponsored by Valve for running x86_64 binaries on ARM64, including Steam and Windows games with Steam Play (Proton).



AMD Posts Proposal & Linux Patches For eSPI Subsystem

([AMD] 4 August 08:33 PM EDT Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface)

AMD has posted patches proposing a new Linux subsystem for the Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI) standard that was in turn originally developed by Intel. With AMD now making use of eSPI, they are proposing a new subsystem for it within the Linux kernel, which includes a new driver for their hardware.



AMD openSIL & Coreboot Pull Requests For Phoenix AM5 Support

([Coreboot] 4 August 10:07 AM EDT AMD openSIL + Phoenix AM5)

Last week the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm released the first open-source firmware for a modern AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with their work to port AMD openSIL and Coreboot in their downstream Dasharo flavor to an MSI desktop ATX motherboard. Now that it's working out well, 3mdeb is working to upstream their AM5 platform support and Phoenix SoC support into upstream AMD openSIL as well as Coreboot.



NVIDIA Becomes A Premier Sponsor Of LVFS / Fwupd

([LVFS] 4 August 09:43 AM EDT NVIDIA + LVFS)

Now this is a pleasant and very unexpected surprise... NVIDIA has become the latest premier sponsor of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).



Linux Foundation Announces Tokenomics Foundation For "Economics & ROI Of AI Value"

([AI] 4 August 08:14 AM EDT Tokenomics Foundation)

Last month the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents as their latest AI play. That followed other "AI" initiatives from dealing with AI exploits to AI asset and data exchange. Today they have another AI foray being announced with the creation of the Tokenomics Foundation.



Linux's Staging Area To Now Reject LLM-Generated Patches, Except For Real Security Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 4 August 06:29 AM EDT No LLMs In Staging)

While Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman does use AI / LLMs himself to success in the Linux kernel, given the "onslaught" of kernel patches produced by large language models and the intent on the Linux kernel's staging area being an area for newcomers to get involved, moving forward he's now rejecting AI/LLM-generated staging patches. But there is one exception and that is for genuinely valid security fixes.



Wild Linker 0.10 Released With GDB Index Support, Mitigation For Btrfs Performance

([Programming] 4 August 06:14 AM EDT Wild Linker 0.10)

Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development.



Linux 7.3 To Fix MSI Claw M-Center Keys For Ryzen Z2 Extreme Powered Handheld

([Linux Gaming] 4 August 05:57 AM EDT MSI Claw M-Center Keys)

For those with a MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM handheld gaming system, the model powered by the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, an important addition is coming to the Linux 7.3 kernel so that the M-Center keys will be properly supported.



FFmpeg 9.0 Released With More Vulkan Acceleration, Animated WebP & More AMD AMF

([Multimedia] 3 August 08:49 PM EDT FFmpeg 9.0)

FFmpeg 9.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this widely used, open-source multimedia library.



Improved GPU Reset Recovery For AMD Kaveri, Hawaii & Other GFX7 GPUs With Linux 7.3

([Radeon] 3 August 08:36 PM EDT Soft Reset Recovery)

In addition to the AMDGPU feature pull request to DRM-Next last week that landed DRM format modifiers for old AMD GPUs and a variety of other improvements, a secondary set of AMDGPU feature work followed that last week in preparation for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window.



Linux 7.3 Looks Like It Will Upstream FailFS

([Linux Storage] 3 August 02:46 PM EDT FailFS)

Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS.



Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro

([Operating Systems] 3 August 10:42 AM EDT 21 Comments)

With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H.



zlib-rs 0.6.7 Released With LoongArch LSX Optimizations, Use-After-Free Fix

([Free Software] 3 August 09:19 AM EDT zlib-rs 0.6.7)

zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng.



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