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)

Updated Dasharo Firmware Pulls In Raptor Lake Instability Fix, Other Enhancements

([Hardware] 10 December 10:00 AM EST Dasharo)

For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.



NVIDIA Releases EGL-Wayland 1.1.17

([NVIDIA] 10 December 05:53 AM EST EGL-Wayland 1.1.17)

NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.



IBM Deprecating Linux Drivers For CXL Coherent Accelerators & CAPI Flash

([Hardware] 10 December 06:18 AM EST Deprecating)

IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.



Optimizing Linux MD Bitmap Code Yields 89% Throughput Boost For Quad SSDs

([Linux Storage] 10 December 06:39 AM EST +89.4%)

A promising patch for the Linux kernel is optimizing the locking contention and scattered address space for the MD bitmap code to improve both the storage throughput and latency.



Servo Browser Engine Landed More Performance Optimizations In November

([Free Software] 10 December 05:57 AM EST Servo Engine)

The Servo browser engine project is out with their latest monthly status update to outline improvements made to this Rust-based open-source engine.



NTSYNC Linux Patches Revived To Help Boost Steam Play Gaming Performance

([Linux Gaming] 9 December 03:15 PM EST NTSYNC v6)

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.



GNU Shepherd 1.0 Service Manager Released As "Solid Tool" Alternative To systemd

([Free Software] 9 December 01:42 PM EST GNU Shepherd 1.0)

GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.



NVIDIA R565 vs. Linux 6.13 + Mesa 25.0 Git AMD / Intel Graphics For Linux Gaming

([Linux Gaming] 9 December 12:12 PM EST 42 Comments)

It's been a few months since running any fresh Linux graphics driver comparison benchmarks. But given the imminent availability of the first Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards, I have been carrying out some fresh Linux GPU driver testing. Given the recently-stabilized NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series and then also the newest upstream code in Linux 6.13 Git and Mesa 25.0-devel for the AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics hardware on their open-source drivers, here is a fresh look at where Intel / AMD / NVIDIA mid-range graphics stand today on Ubuntu Linux with the leading-edge drivers.



Rust-Based, Memory-Safe PNG Decoders "Vastly Outperform" C-Based PNG Libraries

([Programming] 9 December 09:05 AM EST Rust-Based PNG Decoders Performance)

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.



The 2024 LLVM Developers’ Meeting Videos Now Online

([LLVM] 9 December 08:36 AM EST 2024 LLVM Developers Meeting)

For those wishing to kick off the new week with some interesting technical videos and are into compiler tech, the video recordings from the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting are now online.



ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS Seeing Linux Sensors Support

([AMD] 9 December 06:48 AM EST ASUS X670E PLUS)

For those with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS as a ~$230 USD AM5 motherboard for Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors, this desktop motherboard is seeing support tacked onto the asus-ec-sensors hardware monitoring driver so you can enjoy working sensor readings under Linux.



Glibc 2.41 Adds C23's sinpi / cospi / tanpi Functions

([GNU] 9 December 06:36 AM EST GNU C Library 2.41)

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.



openSUSE Touts Improved Multi-GPU Switching Support

([SUSE] 9 December 06:19 AM EST switcherooctl)

The openSUSE project shared today that there is enhanced multi-GPU switching support to enjoy now with openSUSE Linux.



Raspberry Pi 500 Launches Along With Raspberry Pi Monitor

([Raspberry Pi] 9 December 05:51 AM EST Raspberry Pi 500)

Launched four years ago was the Raspberry Pi 400 as the Raspberry Pi 4 adapted for a keyboard form factor. Launching today is the Raspberry Pi 500 for upgrading that keyboard computer using the Raspberry Pi 5 internals. An official Raspberry Pi Monitor was also released.



Linux 6.13-rc2 Released With An Initial Batch Of Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 05:16 PM EST Linux 6.13-rc2)

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.13-rc2 with an initial serving of bug/regression fixes following last week's Linux 6.13-rc1 release that capped off the feature-packed Linux 6.13 merge window.



Linux EFI Zboot Abandoning "Compression Library Museum", Focusing On Gzip & Zstd

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 09:50 AM EST EFI Zboot)

The Linux kernel EFI Zboot code for carrying the Linux kernel image for EFI systems in compressed form is doing away with its "compression library museum" of offering Gzip, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, XZ, and Zstd compression options to instead just focus on Gzip and Zstd compression support.



Ubuntu flash-kernel Package Looks To Drop Support For Old ARM Hardware

([Ubuntu] 8 December 06:51 AM EST flash-kernel)

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.



Linux 6.13-rc2 To Workaround Buggy Intel Lunar Lake Leading To Responsiveness Issues

([Linux Kernel] 8 December 07:00 AM EST Broken MONITOR)

Sent out this morning were the "x86/urgent" updates ahead of Linux 6.13-rc2 due out later today. There are x86 fixes for both Intel and AMD processors this week. Most notable though is fixing some buggy Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" behavior that could lead to responsiveness/delay issues due to the MONITOR implementation being buggy/broken.



Manjaro 24.2 Released With GNOME 47 Updates, Powered By Linux 6.12 LTS

([Operating Systems] 8 December 06:05 AM EST Manjaro 24.2)

Manjaro 24.2 "Yonada" is out today as the newest version of this popular desktop focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.



Mold 2.35 Released With Big Endian ARM64 Support

([Programming] 8 December 05:41 AM EST Big Endian ARM64)

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.



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If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system.
-- Linus Torvalds