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)

Linux 6.14 CXL Updates Make Preparations Around Type 2 Support & CXL 3.1

([Hardware] 30 January 04:00 AM EST Compute Express Link)

The Compute Express Link (CXL) updates have been sent out and merged for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel.



Wine Merge Request Opened For NTSYNC In-Process Synchronization With Linux 6.14+

([WINE] 29 January 08:32 PM EST NTSYNC Support For Wine)

Now that the full-functioning NTSYNC driver is ready for Linux 6.14 for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives on Linux, the merge request has been opened for upstream Wine to land the NTSYNC integration on its side for in-process synchronization.



AMD GPU Operator Announced For Automated Driver Installation & Kubernetes Support

([AMD] 29 January 08:21 PM EST AMD GPU Operator + Device Metrics Export)

AMD today announced two new software projects to better enhance their software support for Instinct accelerators / graphics deployments within the data center: AMD GPU Operator and AMD Metrics Exporter.



Open-Source RADV Radeon Driver Support For RDNA4: "Should Be Good Enough"

([Radeon] 29 January 03:29 PM EST Mesa 25.0 + RADV + RDNA4)

Lead RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has provided some insight into the support expectations for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 "RDNA4" graphics cards.



X.Org / FreeDesktop.org Encounters New Cloud Crisis: Needs New Infrastructure Very Soon

([X.Org] 29 January 01:07 PM EST FreeDesktop.org Downtime?)

About five years ago X.Org / FreeDesktop.org was experiencing a cloud hosting crisis with their cloud costs running out of control after losing free credits for Google Cloud and the continuous integration (CI) testing driving up expenses. They ended up switching public cloud providers over to Equinix. Equinix ended up sponsoring the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org with their cloud/hosting needs but now on short notice that is coming to an end.



PyTorch 2.6 Delivers FP16 Support For x86 CPUs, Better Intel GPU Experience

([Programming] 29 January 12:49 PM EST PyTorch 2.6)

PyTorch 2.6 is out today as the newest feature release to this widely-used machine learning library.



Ubuntu Developers Moving From IRC To Matrix For Real-Time Communication

([Ubuntu] 29 January 10:34 AM EST Matrix Chat)

Following a discussion on the Ubuntu development mailing list, Ubuntu developers have decided to adopt Matrix for their official real-time communication channels while deprecating IRC chat.



NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Linux GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 29 January 09:00 AM EST 44 Comments)

Last week was the review embargo lift on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card while today the review embargo lifts on the GeForce RTX 5080, both of which graphics cards are officially available in the retail channel tomorrow (30 January). Due to waiting on the official NVIDIA R570 Linux driver release that is recommended for the RTX 50 series Linux gaming, today's tests at Phoronix are looking at the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU compute performance.



GNU C Library 2.41 Released With New C23 Features, Intel / AMD / Arm CPU Optimizations

([GNU] 29 January 08:43 AM EST Glibc 2.41)

As expected, GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 is now available as the newest half-year feature release to this important C library for Linux systems and other environments.



Bytedance Praises eBPF - Notes 10% Improvement In Network Throughput

([Linux Networking] 29 January 08:30 AM EST eBPF)

Bytedance is praising eBPF as the in-kernel virtual machine for dynamic programs to help speed-up network packet processing, greater tracing and profiling abilities, and a wide-range of other purposes for these dynamic in-kernel programs. By tapping eBPF, Bytedance is reporting a 10% improvement to their networking throughput.



Mesa 25.0 Sees New Driver Code To Further Enhance RadeonSI + ACO

([Radeon] 29 January 06:54 AM EST RadeonSI + ACO)

AMD Mesa driver guru Marek Olšák has landed a new set of 48 patches into Mesa 25.0-devel Git for refactoring various AMD-related driver code to work on improving the ACO compiler support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.



Ubuntu's Snapdragon X1 Elite Laptop Support Enables Experimental Hardware Video Decode

([Ubuntu] 29 January 06:28 AM EST Ubuntu Linux + Snapdragon X1)

Canonical has been maintaining experimental/testing ISOs of Ubuntu Linux for Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops. New ISOs for testing were recently published and allow enabling more features/functionality for these ARM laptops under Ubuntu.



Linux 6.14 NFS Adds Direct I/O With LOCALIO, Attribute Delegation Support

([Linux Storage] 29 January 06:12 AM EST Network File-System)

The Network File System (NFS) client and server changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window.



LLVM 20 Feature Development Wraps Up With AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AVX10.2 & AMD GFX950

([LLVM] 29 January 05:54 AM EST LLVM 20 Branched)

The LLVM 20 compiler stack saw its code branched from the mainline Git codebase last night as release preparations begin for what will be LLVM 20.1 as the inaugural stable release.



Linux 6.14 With Rust: "We Are Almost At The 'Write A Real Driver In Rust' Stage Now"

([Linux Kernel] 28 January 07:26 PM EST Linux 6.14 Rust)

Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent out the pull request of all the driver core updates for Linux 6.14, which ends up being a big deal for those interested in the prospects of Rust drivers for the Linux kernel.



AMD ROCm 6.3.2 Supports Microsoft Azure Linux 3.0, HIP Improvements & Better Docs

([AMD] 28 January 04:05 PM EST ROCm 6.3.2)

Following last month's release of ROCm 6.3.1, ROCm 6.3.2 was just tagged today from its various open-source repositories and binaries beginning to come down the pipeline. ROCm 6.3.2 is another point release but brings a decent set of refinements for this AMD graphics compute stack.



Apple CPUs Affected By New SLAP & FLOP Side-Channel Attacks

([Apple] 28 January 02:00 PM EST Apple SLAP + FLOP)

Apple is the latest CPU vendor being affected by side-channel attacks. All Mac laptops since 2022, all Mac desktops since 2023, and all iPhones / iPad Pro / iPad Air / iPad Mini models since 2021 are affected by these new SLAP and FLOP attacks.



System76's New Linux Mini PC Pairs Intel Meteor Lake + Dual 2.5G Ethernet + Coreboot

([Hardware] 28 January 11:06 AM EST System76 Meerkat 2025)

System76 this morning announced the 2025 version of their Meerkat mini Linux PC. This new mini PC designed for Linux pairs an Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoC with dual 2.5G Ethernet and booting using Coreboot for a intriguing combination whether it's for a lightweight Linux desktop PC or a small office/home server.



Raspberry Pi 5 16GB Running Well For Larger Workloads, More Multi-Tasking

([Computers] 28 January 10:46 AM EST 40 Comments)

Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it's been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.



Thunderbolt 3 AltMode Driver & Other USB Improvements For Linux 6.14

([Hardware] 28 January 10:13 AM EST USB + Thunderbolt)

In addition to sending out the char/misc pull request that completed work on the NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman yesterday also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt pull request for Linux 6.14. The USB/Thunderbolt updates include new hardware support, Chrome OS improvements, and other changes.



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Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something
to be avoided than harped upon.
Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being
reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might
just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something
about helping to postpone this reunion.
-- Douglas Adams