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)

Heterogeneous CPU Cores, HDMI & Other Work Continues For Enhancing FreeBSD On Laptops

([BSD] 7 August 10:29 AM EDT FreeBSD On Laptops)

It's just not Microsoft Windows and to a lesser extent Linux that can have challenges in dealing with heterogeneous CPU cores like Intel P/E hybrid cores but FreeBSD developers have begun working through those headaches too in trying to ensure a good experience of modern laptops running this BSD operating system.



Rust 1.89 Released With More AVX-512 Intrinsics & x86 Target Features

([Programming] 7 August 08:28 AM EDT Rust 1.89)

Rust 1.89 is out today as the newest update to this popular programming language implementation prided by its memory safety features and more.



Flang-Tidy Cleaning/Correcting Fortran Code In "Sort Of Opinionated Fashion"

([LLVM] 7 August 06:53 AM EDT Flang-Tidy)

Similar to Clang-Tidy for tidying up C/C++ code using LLVM/Clang components, Flang-Tidy is in development as a tool for Fortran static analysis built upon LLVM's modern Flang compiler code. Flang-Tidy may be upstreamed in the future to LLVM while for now it's developed by TU Munich and Max Planck Computing.



Linux 6.17 SoundWire Support Extended To Upcoming AMD ACP 7.2 Hardware

([Hardware] 7 August 06:00 AM EDT AMD Audio Co-Processor 7.2`)

The Linux 6.17 sound subsystem code last week introduced support for AMD ACP 7.2 as the next version of AMD's Audio Co-Processor IP. This appears to be for yet-to-be-released hardware and now over in the SoundWire subsystem is similar enablement work landing for AMD ACP 7.2.



Linux 6.17 Will Correctly Map By Default F13 To F24 Keys On PS/2 Keyboards

([Hardware] 7 August 06:25 AM EDT F13 To F24 Function Keys)

It has taken until 2025 for the AT/PS2 keyboard driver to map F13 through F24 function keys by default. But that day has come and the support was merged today as part of the input driver changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel.



Intel Phasing Out 16x MSAA Support - Being Disabled With Xe3 Graphics

([Intel] 7 August 06:07 AM EDT Intel Dropping 16x MSAA)

Intel is phasing out 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with modern upscaling tech like XeSS / FSR / DLSS being superior and more performant plus there being alternative anti-aliasing techniques. Upcoming Xe3 graphics are seeing 16x MSAA support retroactively disabled as the Intel graphics driver moves away from this highest-level MSAA sampling count.



PyTorch 2.8 Released With Better Intel CPU Performance For LLM Inference

([Programming] 6 August 08:50 PM EDT PyTorch 2.8)

PyTorch 2.8 released today as the newest feature update to this widely-used machine learning library that has become a crucial piece for deep learning and other AI usage. There are a few interesting changes worth highlighting with the new PyTorch 2.8 release.



Linux 6.17 KVM Additions Include Intel LKGS From FRED, Smarter AMD SEV Cache Flushing

([Virtualization] 6 August 08:30 PM EDT Kernel-Based Virtual Machine)

The KVM feature changes were merged a few days ago with all of their enhancements for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. Some nice improvements made it this cycle for enhancing the open-source Linux virtualization stack.



Windows Subsystem For Linux "WSL" Updated For A Yet-To-Be-Public Security Vulnerability

([Microsoft] 6 August 06:58 PM EDT WSL 2.5.10)

Microsoft today released an updated version of Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" that allows running Linux binaries atop Windows 11. There is only one change noted and it's for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability.



Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Wassette" Using Rust + WebAssembly To Help AI Agents

([Microsoft] 6 August 04:44 PM EDT Microsoft Wassette)

Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents.



Mesa 25.2 Released With Many Improvements For RADV, Intel & NVK Drivers

([Mesa] 6 August 01:46 PM EDT Mesa 25.2)

Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop.



Intel Xe Enabling SR-IOV PF By Default, Marking Driver As "Broken" For Non-4K Kernels

([Intel] 6 August 10:25 AM EDT Intel Xe)

On top of all the Linux 6.17 kernel graphics driver feature changes that landed last week like promoting Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics to on-by-default, SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs, multi-GPU preparations, Wildcat Lake enablement work, and more, some additional Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for merging to Linux 6.17 in the coming days.



AlmaLinux Introduces Native NVIDIA Support Using Open-Source Kernel Driver

([NVIDIA] 6 August 09:59 AM EDT AlmaLinux + NVIDIA)

The AlmaLinux project announced today that there is now "native" NVIDIA graphics driver support for AlmaLinux 10 and AlmaLinux 9 using NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules that are now conveniently packaged in an AlmaLinux repository for easy usage complete with NVIDIA's closed-source user-space packages like CUDA.



Linux 6.17 Fixes A Performance Bottleneck In The Futex Code

([Linux Kernel] 6 August 08:50 AM EDT FUTEX)

Merged last week for Linux 6.17 were the FUTEX locking changes that include addressing an observed performance bottleneck.



Btrfs Sees Urgent Fix Following Recent Reports Of Log Tree Corruption

([Linux Storage] 6 August 08:11 AM EDT Btrfs Log Tree Corruption)

On Linux 6.15.3+ there have been increased reports of log tree corruption being hit by users of the Btrfs file-system. Fortunately, a fix has now been submitted for Linux 6.17 Git and then for back-porting to the recent stable kernel versions.



Valve's ACO Compiler Used By AMD Drivers Optimize Scheduling Heuristic For Newer GPUs

([Radeon] 6 August 06:30 AM EDT Improved Scheduling Heuristics)

Merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel to benefit the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D AMD drivers are improved scheduling heuristics for the ACO compiler back-end developed by Valve.



Linux 6.17 Optimizes khugepaged For ARM64 With Huge "16x" Impact For One Code Path

([Arm] 6 August 06:20 AM EDT khugepaged optimization)

Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems.



GTK3 Version Of gconfig Merged For Linux 6.17

([Linux Kernel] 6 August 05:59 AM EDT Linux 6.17 Kbuild)

All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3.



systemd 258-rc2 Released In Preparing For H2'2025 Linux Distributions

([systemd] 5 August 09:00 PM EDT systemd 258)

Released two weeks ago was systemd 258-rc1 with many changes throughout its massive codebase. Out today is a second release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 258.



Rust Making Progress On Its 2025 Project Goals

([Programming] 5 August 08:35 PM EDT Rust 2025 Goals)

The Rust project put out a status update concerning its 2025 project goals to summarize what has been accomplished during the first half of the year.



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He asked me if I knew what time it was -- I said yes, but not right now.
-- Steven Wright