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)

AMD Publishes GC 11.5.2 Firmware For Upcoming RDNA3.5 Hardware

([Radeon] 12 September 02:36 PM EDT AMD GC 11.5.2)

AMD today committed their GC 11.5.2 firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git for the necessary firmware binary blobs needed for hardware initialization by their open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver with this newer RDNA3.5 variant.


Fedora 42 Will Try Again To Use The New Anaconda Installer's Web UI

([Fedora] 12 September 02:15 PM EDT Fedora 42 Early Features)

With Fedora 41 working its way to release toward the end of October, some early feature/change proposals for Fedora 42 are being filed for what will be the Fedora Linux release out next spring.


KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 Brings New Capabilities

([KDE] 12 September 01:42 PM EDT Plasma Wayland Protocols)

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 is out today for providing the set of Wayland protocol XML files for currently non-standard protocols that are relied upon by the Plasma desktop with KWin compositor.


AMD XDNA Linux Driver v3 Published For Ryzen AI Upstreaming

([AMD] 12 September 11:00 AM EDT AMD XDNA Driver v3)

AMD engineers continue work toward upstreaming their XDNA kernel driver for Linux in enabling the Ryzen AI NPU on open-source. The "v3" patches were posted on Wednesday but given the timing it looks like it will be missing out still on merging for the upcoming Linux 6.12 LTS cycle.


EXT4 Extsize Hints Being Worked On As Step Toward Non-Torn/Atomic Writes

([Linux Storage] 12 September 09:00 AM EDT EXT4 Extsize Hints)

Ojaswin Mujoo with IBM has posted an initial set of "request for comments" patches implementing extsize hints for EXT4, similar to the hints being worked on for the XFS file-system. This is important work in ultimately striving toward handling non-torn / atomic writes within the EXT4 file-system.


Linux Mint Takes To Forking Some APT Components

([Operating Systems] 12 September 07:30 AM EDT Captain + Aptkit)

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.


STF Opens Up Maintainer Fellowship Application Process

([Free Software] 12 September 07:00 AM EDT Sovereign Tech Fund)

Last month Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund announced they would be opening a fellowship program for open-source maintainers. The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has been providing great investments into open-source projects while this fellowship is around investing in open-source maintainers that may be working on multiple open-source projects. The application process is now open for those interested open-source maintainers.


Intel Demonstrates Up To 48% Improvement For AVX-512 Optimized PostgreSQL

([Intel] 12 September 07:43 AM EDT AVX-512 + PostgreSQL)

With the upcoming PostgreSQL 17 database server release there is some initial AVX-512 optimizations that are looking quite nice according to Intel's findings.


Mesa PanVK Vulkan Driver Sees Initial Support For Arm Mali 2nd Gen Valhall GPUs

([Mesa] 12 September 06:45 AM EDT PanVK Vulkan)

Merged yesterday into the code for Mesa 24.3 is initial support within the PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali v10 graphics hardware. The v10 architecture is for second-gen Valhall GPUs and goes along with the ongoing Linux kernel driver work for the Panthor CSF-based driver support.


Redis 8.0 Community Edition M1 Released With New Data Structures

([Programming] 12 September 06:52 AM EDT Redis 8.0 CE M1)

For those continuing to make use of the open-source Redis in-memory, key-value database rather than some of the new open-source forks such as Valkey, the first milestone release of Redis 8.0 Community Edition is now available for testing.


Wine Making Improvements To Its GitLab, Eyes Contributor Covenant For CoC

([WINE] 12 September 06:34 AM EDT Wine GitLab)

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has recently been devoting some time to enhancing their GitLab deployment with new features and also in welcoming the Mono project to their GitLab instance. In case you missed it, Microsoft recently shifted stewardship of Mono over to Wine.


Gentoo Linux Touts Better MIPS & Alpha Platform Support

([Operating Systems] 11 September 08:55 PM EDT Gentoo Linux + MIPS + Alpha)

While Gentoo Linux recently ended their support for Itanium (IA-64) hardware, this popular source-based Linux distribution continues to support other aging platforms... Today they sent out an announcement highlighting their improved support for MIPS and Alpha based hardware.


VirtualBox 7.1 Released With Improved UI, Wayland Clipboard Sharing

([Virtualization] 11 September 02:04 PM EDT VirtualBox 7.1)

Oracle today released version 7.1 of their VirtualBox virtualization software with an improved GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing support, OCI integration improvements, and other enhancements.


AMD Submits Initial Zen 5 Enablement For LLVM/Clang Compiler

([AMD] 11 September 12:51 PM EDT LLVM Znver5)

Early in the year we enjoyed seeing AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support upstreamed for the GCC 14 compiler in making it into that annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release. It was great seeing AMD Zen 5 support make it into this open-source compiler well ahead of any Zen 5 products being announced. Since then the GCC support for the new Znver5 target has continued to be improve upon meanwhile we've been waiting to see similar treatment for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Finally this week that AMD Zen 5 (znver5) support has been submitted for review in upstreaming it for LLVM.


Ubuntu 24.10 To Enhance Snap Permissions Handling

([Ubuntu] 11 September 12:00 PM EDT Ubuntu 24.10 Snap Permissions)

With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, Canonical is introducing permission prompting for more control over Snap access to systems to enhance security.


AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Linux Performance With 105 Watt cTDP

([Processors] 11 September 12:25 PM EDT 34 Comments)

Motherboard vendors have begun rolling out updated BIOS versions for AMD AM5 platforms that allow a configurable TDP on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors to allow a 105 Watt cTDP compared to the base 65 Watt TDP. For those wondering about the Linux performance and power efficiency impact from running these mid-tier Zen 5 desktop processors at the higher cTDP value, here is the full set of benchmarks compared to my original review data on Linux.


Linux 6.12 Kernel To Add New Features For Intel & AMD Systems, Many Other Changes Too

([Linux Kernel] 11 September 08:47 AM EDT Linux 6.12 Feature Preview)

With Linux 6.11 expected for release on Sunday that in turn will mark the start of the two-week merge window for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 cycle will get underway and work towards its stable release in mid to late November. Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window here is a look at some of the material anticipated for merging during this next cycle.


Device Tree Patches Posted For Review To Boot Linux On Apple A7 To A11 Devices

([Apple] 11 September 06:50 AM EDT iPhones, iPod, iPad, Apple TV Devices)

Device Tree patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for review and possible upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel for booting Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods that use the A7 to A11 SoCs.


Verso Taking Shape As A Servo-Powered Web Browser

([Free Software] 11 September 06:22 AM EDT Verso Web Browser)

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo.


LLVM Makes Progress On Using ClangIR To Compile GPU Kernels

([LLVM] 11 September 06:04 AM EDT LLVM + ClangIR + GPU Kernels)

ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack.


More

While walking down a crowded
City street the other day,
I heard a little urchin
To a comrade turn and say,
"Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse,
I'd be happy as a clam
If only I was de feller dat
Me mudder t'inks I am.

"She t'inks I am a wonder, My friends, be yours a life of toil
An' she knows her little lad Or undiluted joy,
Could never mix wit' nuttin' You can learn a wholesome lesson
Dat was ugly, mean or bad. From that small, untutored boy.
Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink Don't aim to be an earthly saint
How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! With eyes fixed on a star:
If a feller was de feller Just try to be the fellow that
Dat his mudder t'inks he is." Your mother thinks you are.
-- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow"