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 Might Drop Fieldbus Support For Industrial Systems With No One Maintaining It

([Hardware] 19 October 06:39 AM EDT Fieldbus)

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation.


KDE Developers Wrapping Up Fallout From Plasma 6.2, Spinning More Plasma 6.3 Features

([KDE] 19 October 06:20 AM EDT KDE This Week)

KDE developers are wrapping up addressing initial fallout/regressions from the recent Plasma 6.2 desktop release as well as pushing ahead with more feature work for Plasma 6.3.


Linux 6.12-rc4 Adding Controller Support For The MSI Claw A1M & 8BitDo Ultimate 2C

([Hardware] 19 October 06:29 AM EDT Input Updates)

Sent out overnight were a few input subsystem patches ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel release tomorrow. Notable from this pull is adding input support for the MSI Claw A1M gaming handheld as well as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless gaming controller.


Wine 9.20 Released With WineDbg Now Using Capstone Disassembler

([WINE] 18 October 04:37 PM EDT Wine 9.20)

Wine 9.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development version of this open-source software to enable running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.


Intel Working On Coreboot Support For Xeon 6 Platforms

([Intel] 18 October 04:42 PM EDT Intel + 9elements)

Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" platforms.


Ubuntu Considers Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut

([Ubuntu] 18 October 12:55 PM EDT Ubuntu + Dracut?)

As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux.


Linux 6.13 Poised To Land Prep Patches Working Toward Proxy Execution

([Linux Kernel] 18 October 11:26 AM EDT Linux Proxy Execution)

Years in the making has been the idea of Proxy Execution for the Linux kernel as a means of implementing priority inheritance by leveraging information from a task's scheduler context and its execution context. While the Proxy Execution patches themselves aren't yet queued for merging upstream, some prep patches look like they'll make it for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window.


Linux Fixes Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier "IBPB" Handling For Older AMD CPUs

([AMD] 18 October 10:42 AM EDT IBPB)

Merged today to Linux 6.12 Git were bug fixes to AMD's Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB) handling that can be optionally used as part of the Retbleed and Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigations on older AMD processors.


Laptop Vendor MALIBAL Suggests Not Supporting Coreboot

([Coreboot] 18 October 09:00 AM EDT Not Supporting Coreboot?!)

In a rather surprising post this morning, laptop vendor MALIBAL that offers both Linux and Windows systems is suggesting to not support the Coreboot project for open-source system firmware.


AMD ROCm Looks Like It Will Finally Be Supporting OpenCL 3.0 Soon

([Radeon] 18 October 06:38 AM EDT AMD ROCm + OpenCL 3.0)

The OpenCL 3.0 compute specification has been out in finalized form since September 2020. Since then NVIDIA's official Windows/Linux drivers have been exposing OpenCL 3.0 going back to 2021, the Intel Compute Runtime stack has also been exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for years, and even with Mesa's Rusticl open-source OpenCL implementation it's beginning to see Gallium3D drivers with conformant OpenCL 3.0. Yet if installing the AMD ROCm compute stack right now, you'll see OpenCL 2.1. But it looks like OpenCL 3.0 will soon be here for ROCm.


Valve Contributes OpenVR Video Driver To SDL

([Valve] 18 October 06:14 AM EDT SDL + OpenVR Video Driver)

Merged to upstream SDL today is an OpenVR video driver that was developed at Valve Software.


Ubuntu Snaps Up Intel's NPU User-Space Software So It's Easier To Accelerate AI

([Ubuntu] 18 October 06:27 AM EDT snap install --beta intel-npu-driver)

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical has announced the availability of an Intel NPU driver Snap package within their Snap Store to make it easier to leverage the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra processors within Ubuntu Linux.


Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Has Invested Over $24.9M In Open-Source In Two Years

([Free Software] 18 October 06:07 AM EDT Sovereign Tech Fund)

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than €23 million (about $24.94M USD) into sixty open technologies.


Microsoft Open-Sources Rust-Written OpenHCL For Running Confidential Intel/AMD VMs

([Microsoft] 17 October 08:28 PM EDT Microsoft OpenHCL)

Microsoft announced today the new and now open-source OpenHCL paravisor for the virtualization stack for enabling Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with this Rust-written software stack. This effort by Microsoft has been five years in the making and is now open-source and will continue to be developed in the open.


Intel NPU Driver Being Updated To Handle Larger AI Workloads

([Intel] 17 October 04:54 PM EDT Intel IVPU Linux Driver)

Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads.


Exploring The Zen 5 SMT Performance With The AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" CPU

([Processors] 17 October 01:38 PM EDT 25 Comments)

Continuing on with the testing around the AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors, today is a look at the Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) performance impact for Turin while using the AMD EPYC 9755 as the highest-end "Turin Classic" processor with 128 cores / 256 threads. Similar SMT on/off tests for "Turin Dense" with the EPYC 9965 192-core / 384-thread will also be coming in a future benchmarking comparison on Phoronix. These tests are mainly intended for reference purposes for those curious about the SMT benefits at such high core counts and what workloads may or may not still benefit from SMT especially when having so many threads while using 12-channel DDR5-6000 memory.


PyTorch 2.5 Released With Improved Intel GPU Support

([Programming] 17 October 12:58 PM EDT PyTorch 2.5)

PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library.


Red Hat Engineer Nikita Popov Now The Lead Maintainer For LLVM

([LLVM] 17 October 10:27 AM EDT LLVM Lead Maintainer)

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.


Linux 6.13 To Introduce Intel 5th Gen NPU Support For Panther Lake

([Intel] 17 October 08:50 AM EDT Intel 5th Gen NPU In iVPU)

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.


AMD Working On GPU Compute Virtualization Support With ROCm/HIP For VMs

([Radeon] 17 October 06:46 AM EDT ROCm VMs)

Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack.


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Brief History Of Linux (#1)
Re-Inventing the Wheel

Our journey through the history of Linux begins ca. 28000 B.C. when a
large all-powerful company called MoogaSoft monopolized the wheel-making
industry. As founder of the company, Billga Googagates (rumored to be the
distant ancestor of Bill Gates) was the wealthiest man in the known world,
owning several large rock huts, an extravagant collection of artwork (cave
paintings), and a whole army of servants and soldiers.

MoogaSoft's unfair business practices were irritating, but users were
unable to do anything about them, lest they be clubbed to death by
MoogaSoft's army. Nevertheless, one small group of hobbyists finally got
fed up and starting hacking their own wheels out of solid rock. Their
spirit of cooperation led to better and better wheels that eventually
outperformed MoogaSoft offerings.

MoogaSoft tried desperately to stop the hobbyists -- as shown by the
recently unearthed "Ooga! Document" -- but failed. Ironically, Billga
Googagates was killed shortly afterwards when one his own 900-pound wheels
crushed him.