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)

Mesa 25.2-rc2 Released With Intel Wildcat Lake Enablement, Legacy-X11 Option Deprecated

([Mesa] 23 July 10:41 AM EDT Mesa 25.2)

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series.



Btrfs Preps Performance Improvements & Experimental Large Folios For Linux 6.17

([Linux Storage] 23 July 08:55 AM EDT Linux 6.17 + Btrfs)

With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17.



OVMF Debug Log Driver Slated For Linux 6.17 To Help Analyze UEFI VM Boot Issues

([Virtualization] 23 July 08:40 AM EDT OVMF Debug Log Driver)

For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed.



Pogocache 1.0 Released: Claims Better Performance Than Memcache, Valkey & Redis

([Programming] 23 July 08:11 AM EDT Pogocache 1.0)

Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives.



Cloud Hypervisor 47 Provides Nicer Error Messages

([Virtualization] 23 July 06:26 AM EDT Cloud Hypervisor 47)

Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor.



Arm Publishes Open-Source Accelerator Driver For Ethos-U65/85 NPUs

([Arm] 23 July 06:06 AM EDT Arm Ethos NPU Accelerator Driver)

The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs.



FreeBSD 15.0 Aims To Have A KDE Desktop Install Option

([BSD] 22 July 08:24 PM EDT FreeBSD + KDE Install Option)

The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment.



Python 3.14 RC1 Released With Free-Threaded Python Officially Supported

([Programming] 22 July 06:00 PM EDT Python 3.14)

The first release candidate of Python 3.14 is now available for testing as what will be this year's big feature update to this popular scripting language.



Fedora Weighs Dropping Release Criteria For DVD Optical Media

([Fedora] 22 July 01:18 PM EDT Fedora Release Criteria)

The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Intel-based Macs as release-blocking.



Apple Silicon SoC/DT Changes Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.17

([Apple] 22 July 01:03 PM EDT Apple Silicon + Linux 6.17)

Sven Peter today sent out all of the Apple SoC driver and DeviceTree (DT) updates aiming for the soon-to-happen Linux 6.17 merge window.



A Number Of Problems Make Debian & Other Linux Distros A Pain On Snapdragon X Laptops

([Debian] 22 July 10:08 AM EDT Linux Shortcomings For Windows On Arm)

While downstream Ubuntu is the most popular Linux option for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered "Windows on Arm" laptops, that's because of their concept images containing a number of "hacked packages" to lead to a decent user experience. But for upstream Debian Linux the prospects of running it on Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptops is less than ideal with a number of problems persisting -- similar to other Linux distributions focused on running the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream software.



Fedora 43 Cleared To Ship With Zstd Initrd, Updated Compiler Toolchains & More

([Fedora] 22 July 08:47 AM EDT Fedora 43)

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week voted to approve a number of new features/changes for the upcoming Fedora 43 release.



AMDGPU LLVM Backend Flips On "True16" Mode For All RDNA3 GPUs

([Radeon] 22 July 06:52 AM EDT AMDGPU LLVM)

A late change to the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end that may help efforts particularly for the ROCm compute support on RDNA3 hardware is finally merging support for using true 16-bit instructions and registers on all RDNA3 GPUs.



Arm Preparing Support For Latest Mali GPUs With Panthor Open-Source Driver

([Arm] 22 July 06:33 AM EDT Mali G725 And Friends)

Arm engineer Karunika Choo has been leading the effort to enable support for the latest Mali GPUs within the open-source and upstream "Panthor" DRM kernel graphics driver for Linux. This work includes being able to enable the latest Mali 5th Gen GPUs on this open-source graphics driver.



Fwupd 2.0.13 Released With New Hardware Support, Numerous Fixes

([LVFS] 22 July 06:12 AM EDT Fwupd 2.0.13)

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today announced the availability of Fwupd 2.0.13 for handling firmware updates on modern Linux systems.



Mesa 25.3 Merges Vulkan WSI Support For Using Atomic Mode-Setting

([Mesa] 18 Hours Ago Mesa Vulkan WSI + Atomic KMS)

A nearly five year old merge request was merged today to Mesa Git for Q4's Mesa 25.3 release. This merge transitions the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) from using the DRM "legacy" kernel mode-setting APIs over to the modern atomic mode-setting interfaces.



Intel Wildcat Lake OpenGL & Vulkan Support Upstreamed In Mesa

([Intel] 21 July 06:05 PM EDT Intel Wildcat Lake)

Intel Linux software engineers have recently been busy working on Wildcat Lake support primarily for the kernel drivers while now that work has been extended to Mesa for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers.



AMD ROCm 6.4.2 Released With Official Support For The Radeon RX 7700 XT

([AMD] 21 July 04:50 PM EDT Radeon RX 7700 XT + ROCm)

While we await AMD to officially release ROCm 7.0 as the next major release of their open-source GPU compute stack, out this afternoon is ROCm 6.4.2 as the newest stable point release. ROCm 6.4.2 expands the officially supported Radeon consumer GPUs as well as bringing various fixes and enhancements to the various libraries and components making up this AMD GPU compute ecosystem stack.



NVIDIA Makes More Hopper & Blackwell Header Files Open-Source

([NVIDIA] 21 July 11:54 AM EDT NVIDIA Open-Source)

Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement.



AMD Strix Halo Radeon 8060S Enjoys Improved Ray-Tracing With Mesa 25.2

([Display Drivers] 21 July 10:30 AM EDT 6 Comments)

With the Mesa 25.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics driver code having been branched last week ahead of its stable release in August, I carried out some fresh benchmarks on AMD's exciting Strix Halo platform using the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics to see where the Linux performance is now at for the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.



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You can't run away forever,
But there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start.
-- Jim Steinman, "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through"