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's AMD Radeon Vulkan Driver Adds Experimental Support For The BC-250 Mining Board

([Radeon] 4 March 06:49 AM EST BC-250 + RADV)

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.


Direct3D Video Decode To Vulkan Video API Being Worked On For Wine

([WINE] 4 March 06:32 AM EST Vulkan Video Under D3D11 Video)

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API.


Intel Revises DRM Sharpness Property For Use With Lunar Lake Sharpening Capabilities

([Intel] 4 March 06:18 AM EST DRM Sharpness Property)

Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That's culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted.


Rust-Written Redox OS Expands Use Of Dynamic Linking

([Operating Systems] 3 March 08:17 PM EST Redox OS)

The Redox OS open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language is continuing to enjoy nice progress in 2025 on its goals. The Redox OS project has published their February 2025 status update that highlights achievements made over the past month.


Godot 4.4 Open-Source Game Engine Released With Many Improvements

([Linux Gaming] 3 March 12:18 PM EST Godot 4.4)

Godot 4.4 is out as stable today for serving as the newest feature release to this leading open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine.


GNOME Mutter 48.rc Released With Wayland Color Management, Dynamic Triple Buffering

([GNOME] 3 March 12:07 PM EST GNOME Mutter 48.rc)

Ahead of the GNOME 48 stable release due out later this month, tagged now is the Mutter "48.rc" release candidate milestone. While the feature freeze passed last month, there has been a lot of last minute improvements merged for Mutter to squeeze into this GNOME 48 release.


Firefox 136 Available With AMD GPU Linux Video Acceleration, AArch64 Linux Binaries

([Mozilla] 3 March 11:46 AM EST Firefox 136)

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times.


How The Ubuntu Linux Performance Has Evolved For SiFive RISC-V Over The Last Four Years

([Operating Systems] 3 March 01:18 PM EST 9 Comments)

SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.


AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation "INVLPGB" Support Appears Ready For The Linux Kernel

([AMD] 3 March 10:00 AM EST AMD INVLPGB)

Back in December Linux kernel patches were posted by a Meta engineer for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found with Zen 3 and newer processors. The Linux kernel would use INVLPGB for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. After these patches went through 14 rounds of review since December, it looks like this AMD broadcast TLB invalidation support is now ready for the mainline Linux kernel!


Raspberry Pi CM4 Now Available With "Extended Temperature" Variants

([Raspberry Pi] 3 March 08:45 AM EST Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4)

Raspberry Pi has been on a spree lately with many new product launches such as the Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi Monitor, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, and Compute Module 5 in the past few months. Today the company announced an expansion of their offerings in the Compute Module 4 line-up.


Rustup 1.28 Adds New Windows AArch64 & LoongArch Platform Support

([Programming] 3 March 08:32 AM EST Rustup 1.28)

Rustup 1.28 is out today as the newest version of this official tool that is the Rust project's recommended means of installing the Rust programming language support.


Intel Preps Linux For eUSB2V2 To Enhance USB 2.0 For Higher Resolution Laptop Webcams

([Hardware] 3 March 06:57 AM EST eUSB2V2)

Last September the USB Implementers Forum quietly published an update to the USB 2.0 specification... The Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" supplement to provide for better performance with significantly higher data rates to USB 2.0 while maintaining the low-voltage electrical interface.


Linux Gaining SMP Support For The OpenPOWER Microwatt

([Linux Kernel] 3 March 06:23 AM EST Multiple Cores)

Open-sourced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an open-source, soft processor core of Power ISA 3.0 and intended for use on FPGA boards and then there was seemingly short-lived work to fabricate a Microwatt chip and Microwatt also found its way for use within a BMC implementation. Linux 5.14 added support for this soft CPU core while the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle is set to introduce SMP support for Microwatt.


Optimized AMD SEV Cache Flushing Patches Posted For Linux

([AMD] 3 March 06:06 AM EST Secure Encrypted Virtualization)

The newest upstream-focused work around AMD SEV for Secure Encrypted Virtualization with EPYC server processors is a set of patches to better optimize cache flushing.


Linux 6.14-rc5 Released: "Nothing Strange Stands Out"

([Linux Kernel] 2 March 03:00 PM EST Linux 6.14-rc5)

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc5 kernel as the Linux 6.14 stable kernel approaches toward release later in March.


NVIDIA Is Finding Great Success With Vulkan Machine Learning - Competitive With CUDA

([NVIDIA] 2 March 10:00 AM EST NVIDIA Vulkan AI)

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA.


TurnkeyML 6.0 Released With OpenAI-Compatible Server, Other Changes

([Programming] 2 March 06:32 AM EST TurnkeyML 6.0)

Back in 2023 ONNX and AMD announced TurnkeyML as an "AI insights toolchain". There hasn't been too much news about TurnkeyML since then and they now describe the project itself as a "no-code AI toolchain" while this week brought the release of the big TurnkeyML 6.0 software.


ARM Linux Kernel May Shift To Generic Entry Code: Less Assembly But Lower Performance

([Arm] 2 March 06:16 AM EST ARM Linux Kernel Entry)

A pull request was sent out on Friday that could potentially land for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel to transition ARM's kernel entry code from some architecture-specific Assembly over to using the generic entry code path. It means more unification and transitioning some Assembly code over to C, but it also comes with some hits to performance.


SDL 3.2.6 Released With HiDPI Icons & Color Management On Wayland

([Linux Gaming] 2 March 06:02 AM EST SDL 3.2.6)

Following the official SDL 3 release back in January, SDL 3.2.6 was released this weekend as the newest iteration of this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer that is commonly leveraged by cross-platform games.


Steam Survey For February 2025 Shows A Big Drop To Linux Use

([Linux Gaming] 2 March 06:25 AM EST Steam Survey)

Back during January Steam on Linux dropped by 0.23% to a 2.06% marketshare while overnight the numbers were published for February 2025...


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Breathe deep the gathering gloom.
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bed-sitter people look back and lament;
another day's useless energies spent.

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son.
Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night;
Removes the colors from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is real, and which is an illusion."
-- The Moody Blues, "Days of Future Passed"