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)

Fedora Workstation 43 Beta Is Running Well On AMD Strix Halo / Framework Desktop

([Operating Systems] 16 September 05:00 AM EDT 5 Comments)

Fedora 43 Beta is releasing today as we work toward the official release in either late October or early November. I have been testing out the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta candidate to great success on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" powered Framework Desktop. Here are some benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 42 compared to the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta.



Intel USBIO USB IO Expander Drivers Expected To Be Merged For Linux 6.18

([Intel] 16 September 03:00 AM EDT Intel USBIO USB IO-Expander)

Queued up in the past few days to the USB subsystem's "usb-next" Git branch are the Intel USBIO drivers for Linux 6.18. These drivers are needed to support the web cameras on various newer Intel laptop models.



Linux Patches Posted For Enabling The Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC

([RISC-V] 16 September 12:00 AM EDT Linux + Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC)

Patches were posted this past weekend for enabling the mainline Linux kernel to run on the Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC of A0 silicon on the Blackhole P100 and P150 PCIe accelerator cards.



Godot 4.5 Open-Source Game Engine Released With A Multitude Of Improvements

([Linux Gaming] 15 September 06:24 PM EDT Godot 4.5)

Godot 4.5 is out today as the latest update to this leading open-source and cross platform game engine.



AMD ABMC Expected To Go Upstream For Linux 6.18

([AMD] 15 September 05:00 PM EDT AMD ABMC)

After being in the works for the past two years and going through 18+ rounds of code review, AMD ABMC looks poised to be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel.



AOMedia To Release AV2 Video Codec At Year's End

([Multimedia] 15 September 03:40 PM EDT AV2)

The Alliance for Open Media announced today that they will be launching the next-generation AV2 video codec at the end of 2025.



AMD Officially Confirms The End Of The AMDVLK Driver

([Radeon] 15 September 03:28 PM EDT AMDVLK Discontinued)

To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.



libxml2 Maintainer Stepping Down - "More Or Less Unmaintained For Now"

([GNOME] 15 September 12:38 PM EDT libxml2)

The maintainer of the libxml2 project announced he is stepping down from this widely-used open-source library without any replacement maintainer yet determined.



Canonical Announces Plans To Support NVIDIA CUDA, Easy Installation On Ubuntu

([Ubuntu] 15 September 10:45 AM EDT Ubuntu + CUDA)

Canonical announced today that they will formally support the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and also make it available via the Ubuntu repositories.



The Performance Cost To Ubuntu WSL2 On Windows 11 25H2

([Operating Systems] 15 September 10:50 AM EDT 43 Comments)

It's been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.



Casilda 1.0 Released As Wayland Compositor Widget For GTK4

([Wayland] 15 September 09:58 AM EDT Casilda 1.0)

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit.



Jonathan Riddell Leaving KDE Development After 25 Years

([KDE] 15 September 08:26 AM EDT Jonathan Riddell Departs)

Prominent KDE developer Jonathan Riddell who was formerly involved with Kubuntu and then KDE Neon, served for a while on KDE Plasma release management, and other significant contributions over the years announced he's stepping away from the KDE world.



Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings

([Ubuntu] 15 September 08:00 AM EDT Rust Coreutils)

Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.



ASRock AI Quickset WSL Aims To Make It Easier Running ROCm + AI Linux Apps On Windows

([Free Software] 15 September 06:20 AM EDT AI QuickSet WSL)

Back in late 2023 ASRock announced AI QuickSet to make it easier to get up and running with AI workloads on their hardware under Windows or Linux. Today they announced their second incarnation of that as "AI QuickSet WSL" as making it quicker and easier to setup AMD ROCm under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and streamlining the deployment of various AI Linux software packages under WSL.



AMD Continues Enhancing AMDGPU/AMDKFD Drivers For Checkpoint/Restore

([AMD] 15 September 05:56 AM EDT AMDGPU CRIU)

CRIU is for Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace to be able to freeze a running container or app, preserve its state to disk, and later restore said running workload. A few years ago we saw AMD working on being able to checkpoint/restore running ROCm workloads. As seemingly the first work in a while on the matter by the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers, there are some new CRIU elements coming for Linux 6.18.



Linux 6.18 To Allow Rust And C Code To Use The Same Memory Model

([Linux Kernel] 15 September 05:40 AM EDT Rust Atomic Updates)

The latest tranche of Rust code ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is now ready to go and has been queued into a TIP branch ahead of the merge window.



"Rustmaker" Merged For LibreOffice 26.2 Development As Latest Rust Integration

([LibreOffice] 15 September 03:00 AM EDT Rust Code Maker)

For fans of open-source projects embracing the Rust programming language, merged for the LibreOffice 26.2 development code for this open-source office suite is "Rustmaker" as a Rust code maker for UNO integration with this open-source office suite.



FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 2 Released With Builds Now Being Properly Reproducible

([BSD] 15 September 12:00 AM EDT Reproducible Builds)

The second alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 is now available for testing ahead of its planned official release in December.



Linux 6.17-rc6 Released With VMSCAPE Mitigation, FLYDIGI APEX 5 Support & Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 14 September 07:15 PM EDT Linux 6.17-rc6)

The newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 is now available as we work toward the stable kernel release around the end of September.



Intel Loses One Of Its USB4 / Thunderbolt Linux Driver Maintainers

([Intel] 14 September 06:43 AM EDT USB4/Thunderbolt)

It's unfortunate the number of significant Linux engineering losses at Intel this year. Beyond the staffing reductions throughout the company, seeing the loss of Linux engineering talent and many of their open-source contributors outside of kernel space too has been especially hard hitting to see. Intel for years has been very well regarded for their prolific open-source contributions and typically leading early hardware enablement within the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, and related components. There's another hit to the Intel Linux team with one of their USB4/Thunderbolt maintainers departing the company.



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O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for Thou knowest we will
never change our minds.