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)

Fwupd 2.0 Released To Drop Legacy & Deprecated Bits, Adds New Features

([LVFS] 4 October 09:41 AM EDT Fwupd 2.0)

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced Fwupd 2.0 as a major release to this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems. Fwupd 2.0 clears out a lot of long deprecated and legacy bits while adding new features and shipping many fixes.


Blender 4.3 Beta Delivers Experimental Vulkan UI Rendering

([Free Software] 4 October 08:58 AM EDT Blender 4.3)

Blender 4.3 is available today in beta form to encourage public testing of this next feature release to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.


Red Hat Engineer Working On DRM Panic Support For AMDGPU Driver

([Radeon] 4 October 06:52 AM EDT DRM Panic)

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.


Zink Seeing VA-API Video Acceleration Implemented Over Vulkan Video

([Mesa] 4 October 06:39 AM EDT VA-API On Vulkan Video)

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath.


Zrythm Digital Audio Workstation Abandoning GTK For Qt6

([Free Software] 4 October 06:31 AM EDT From GTK To Qt)

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.


Servo Browser Adds Android Downloads, Improved Tabbing & More

([Mozilla] 4 October 06:14 AM EDT Servo Browser)

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.


New AMD Linux Patches Aim To Further Boost Performance For Heterogeneous CPU Designs

([AMD] 3 October 08:22 PM EDT Better Performance)

A new set of patches from AMD Linux engineers today aim to boost the performance for heterogeneous CPU designs such as the recent Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs that have multiple core types.


Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" List Prices Top Out At $17,800 USD

([Intel] 3 October 02:30 PM EDT Intel Xeon 6900P Pricing)

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD.


Mesa 24.2.4 Released With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Fixes

([Mesa] 3 October 01:58 PM EDT Mesa 24.2.4)

Mesa 24.2.4 is out today as the newest stable point release to this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers.


MRDIMM 8800MT/s vs. DDR5-6400 Memory Performance With Intel Xeon 6

([Memory] 3 October 04:00 PM EDT 11 Comments)

Last week when kicking off the Intel Granite Rapids benchmarking with the Xeon 6980P processors there was particularly strong performance within HPC and other scientific computing workloads. Besides going now up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket, another reason for the especially strong generational uplift and against the current AMD EPYC competition is Xeon 6 Granite Rapids introducing Multiplexed Rank memory support. One of the areas I've been eager to explore is quantifying the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800MT/s performance difference and this article is dedicated to looking at that memory performance impact for the Xeon 6900P series.


Fedora's Kernel Build Now Enabling Sched_Ext Support

([Fedora] 3 October 08:37 AM EDT Fedora + sched_ext)

Now that sched_ext was upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel as part of the many great features in Linux 6.12, Fedora's kernel builds are prepared to enable this innovative scheduler feature that allows for new scheduling policies to be loaded via (e)BPF programs.


UXL Foundation Hosting Virtual oneAPI DevSummit 2024 Next Week

([Linux Events] 3 October 05:46 AM EDT oneAPI DevSummit)

The Unified Acceleration Foundation (UXL Foundation), which was formed out of Intel's oneAPI software efforts, will be hosting a virtual developer summit.


Google Updates Patches For AutoFDO+Propeller Optimized Linux Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 3 October 06:48 AM EDT Faster Performance)

Google engineers have been working on support for the Linux kernel to leverage AutoFDO feedback directed optimizations and Propeller optimizations when compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang. In turn this can help Linux systems see 2~10% better performance thanks to the more optimized kernel.


Giga Computing Announces GA On Their AmpereOne Servers

([Arm] 3 October 06:17 AM EDT General Availability)

After years of AmpereComputing talking about AmpereOne AArch64 server processors, it looks like we are finally on the cusp of seeing broader availability of the processors and servers/motherboards for this ARM server platform up to 192 cores. At the end of August I finally received a temporary review system with the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship SKU. That server was the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR and is supposed to be seeing availability real soon. Now the latest on the AmpereOne front is Giga Computing (Gigabyte) announcing general availability of their servers.


NetworkManager 1.50 Released - Now Ensures Offensive Terms Don't Appear In Settings

([Linux Networking] 3 October 06:00 AM EDT NetworkManager 1.50)

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.


Steam Remote Play Adds AV1 Video Streaming Support Plus More Linux Fixes

([Valve] 2 October 08:18 PM EDT Steam Remote Play + AV1)

Steam's Remote Play feature that allows playing Steam games on phones / tablets / TVs / other PCs while streamed from your main gaming system now is able to handle AV1 video streaming.


Linux 6.12 Drops New Driver That Ended Up Breaking Laptop Touchpad Support For Many Users

([Hardware] 2 October 04:32 PM EDT Reverting Pixart)

If you have been trying out Linux 6.12-rc1 or a recent Linux Git snapshot and discovered your laptop's touchpad is no longer working, you are far from alone. The good news is the issue has been quickly tracked down and has led to a new input driver being reverted.


Some Intel Linux Driver Maintainers Have Left The Company

([Intel] 2 October 02:23 PM EDT Intel Layoffs)

With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.


Redox OS Making Progress On RISC-V Support, Eyes QEMU & Neovim Ports

([Operating Systems] 2 October 12:54 PM EDT September Status Update)

The Redox OS open-source Rust-written operating system project has published their September 2024 status update.


Intel Xeon 6980P SNC3 vs. HEX Clustering Mode Performance

([Processors] 2 October 11:10 AM EDT 2 Comments)

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors that launched last week there are SNC3 and HEX clustering modes for these new processors. The default Sub-NUMA Clustering 3 (SNC3) mode for the three compute dies while the HEX mode is like SNC1 mode formerly for all three compute dies acting as one NUMA node. Using the flagship 128-core Intel Xeon 6980P processors, I ran some benchmarks looking at the real-world performance difference for SNC3 vs. HEX clustering modes on Granite Rapids.


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Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to
say in those awkward situations? Worry no more...

Are you sure you're telling the truth? Think hard.
Does it make you happy to know you're sending me to an early grave?
If all your friends jumped off the cliff, would you jump too?
Do you feel bad? How do you think I feel?
Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
Don't you know any better?
How could you be so stupid?
If that's the worst pain you'll ever feel, you should be thankful.
You can't fool me. I know what you're thinking.
If you can't say anything nice, say nothing at all.