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)

KDE Ends November With More KWin Fixes & Other Polishing Ahead Of Plasma 6.3

([KDE] 30 November 05:22 AM EST Plasma Polishing)

KDE developers have wrapped up a busy November with many fixes and other refinements landing this last week of the month.


Clang AutoFDO & Propeller Optimization Support Sent In For Linux 6.13: 5~10% More Performance

([Linux Kernel] 30 November 12:00 AM EST Clang AutoFDO)

Making for an even more exciting Black Friday is the Kbuild pull request submitted today for the near-over Linux 6.13 merge window... And it includes Clang Auto Feedback Directed Optimization (AutoFDO) support for kernel builds as well as Clang's Propeller.


LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha 1 Open-Source Office Suite Released

([LibreOffice] 29 November 12:33 PM EST LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha)

For those with some extra time over the US holiday weekend, LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha 1 has been published as the newest feature version of this open-source, cross-platform office suite that is a great alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office.


AMD BIOS Tuning Guide Impact For Boosting AI/ML Performance On EPYC 9005 Series

([Software] 29 November 10:36 AM EST 6 Comments)

Following the release last month of the EPYC 9005 series processors, AMD published a BIOS and Workload Tuning Guide of straight-forward settings recommendations for those running new EPYC Turin servers to optimize the performance of different workloads like databases and Java to HPC and AI/ML software. Recently I started running some benchmarks to look at the impact of AMD's recommended BIOS tuning and beginning this comparison by looking at the performance (and power) impact across a range of AI / machine learning workloads on a 5th Gen AMD EPYC server.


Improved USB4 Debugging Support With Linux 6.13

([Hardware] 29 November 09:36 AM EST USB4 Debugging)

Along with the staging changes, Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes for the nearly-over Linux 6.13 merge window.


FFmpeg Git Continues Landing A Number Of Vulkan Video Enhancements

([Multimedia] 29 November 06:34 AM EST FFmpeg + Vulkan Video)

A number of Vulkan Video enhancements landed this week in FFmpeg Git thanks to open-source developer Lynne that has been advancing the Vulkan Video encode/decode capabilities in this widely-used multimedia library.


Linux 6.13 Staging Clears Out 107k Lines Of Code From Old & Unmaintained Drivers

([Linux Kernel] 29 November 06:43 AM EST Linux 6.13 Staging)

Greg Kroah-Hartman is out today with all of the pull requests for Linux 6.13 of the areas of the kernel he oversees. Most notable with the updates on the staging side are clearing out several drivers seeing no real code activity and no apparent users of the mainline Linux kernel... As such the staging pull lightens the kernel by around 107k lines of code.


UBports' Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 Atop Ubuntu 20.04 Released

([Ubuntu] 29 November 05:54 AM EST Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 Focal)

The UBports community today released Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 as the latest version of the smartphone/tablet Linux platform currently running off an Ubuntu 20.04 base.


Phoronix Black Friday Reminders

([Phoronix] 29 November 05:10 PM EST 2024 Reminders)

Just a quick reminder this "Black Friday" if you would like to help show your support.


Updated Ubuntu 24.10 Install Image Released For Snapdragon X1 Elite Laptops

([Ubuntu] 28 November 02:45 PM EST Ubuntu 24.10 For Snapdragon Laptops)

In mid-October was the release of a developer preview for Ubuntu 24.10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops. Yesterday an updated Ubuntu 24.10 release was made available catering to these popular, current-generation ARM-powered laptops that typically ship with Windows 11 for ARM.


NFS Server Scalability Improvement & Other NFS Enhancements For Linux 6.13

([Linux Storage] 28 November 01:00 PM EST NFS With Linux 6.13)

There are a few Network File System (NFS) enhancements worth pointing out with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.


Linux Kernel Performance Bottlenecks Spotted By Mold Developer

([Linux Kernel] 28 November 09:32 AM EST Kernel Bottlenecks)

Open-source developer Rui Ueyama who is the lead developer of the Mold high performance linker and previously on the LLVM lld linker has written a detailed mailing list post that highlights some observed performance bottlenecks within the Linux kernel.


Intel Graphics Compiler Removes Support For Ice Lake & Older

([Intel] 28 November 07:18 AM EST Ice Lake Gen11 & Older)

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL GPU compute support as well as being depended upon by the Windows 3D driver stack has now removed platform support up to and including Ice Lake.


Mozilla Firefox Switches To .tar.xz For Linux Packaging

([Mozilla] 28 November 06:51 AM EST Firefox .tar.xz)

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience.


LLVM Merges Support The For Tenstorrent TT-Ascalon-D8 RISC-V CPU

([LLVM] 28 November 06:42 AM EST TT-Ascalon-D8)

Adding to the interesting code building up for next spring's release of the LLVM 20 compiler stack is having the Tenstorrent TT-Ascalon D8 as the newest RISC-V processor target.


IO_uring Enjoys Hybrid IO Polling & Ring Resizing With Linux 6.13

([Linux Storage] 28 November 06:30 AM EST Linux 6.13 IO_uring)

Merged last week back toward the start of the Linux 6.13 merge window were a number of interesting IO_uring enhancements for this first major kernel version of 2025.


Feature-Packed systemd 257 Nears Release With RC3 Availability

([systemd] 27 November 08:52 PM EST systemd 257-rc3)

Systemd 257 is nearing release as the next major feature release for this widely-used init system and software suite on Linux systems.


exFAT Driver With Linux 6.13 Reduces FAT Chain Traversal For Better Performance

([Linux Storage] 27 November 08:27 PM EST exFAT)

For those making use of the Microsoft exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel brings an optimization that will help some operations by reducing the FAT chain traversal.


AMD Begins Work Upstreaming More Versal 2 SoC Support For Linux

([AMD] 27 November 02:40 PM EST Versal 2)

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.


RISC-V Changes For Linux 6.13 Deliver Pointer Masking In User-Space

([RISC-V] 27 November 11:56 AM EST Linux 6.13 RISC-V)

The RISC-V CPU port updates have been sent out for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.


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X windows:
It's not how slow you make it. It's how you make it slow.
The windowing system preferred by masochists 3 to 1.
Built to take on the world... and lose!
Don't try it 'til you've knocked it.
Power tools for Power Fools.
Putting new limits on productivity.
The closer you look, the cruftier we look.
Design by counterexample.
A new level of software disintegration.
No hardware is safe.
Do your time.
Rationalization, not realization.
Old-world software cruftsmanship at its finest.
Gratuitous incompatibility.
Your mother.
THE user interference management system.
You can't argue with failure.
You haven't died 'til you've used it.

The environment of today... tomorrow!
X windows.