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)

Red Hat & Microsoft Bringing RHEL To WSL

([Red Hat] 19 November 08:45 AM EST RHEL On Windows Subsystem For Linux)

The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.


Debian 13 Is Quickly Approaching - Desktop Artwork Voting Now Underway

([Debian] 19 November 08:37 AM EST Debian 13 Trixie)

The Debian 13 "Trixie" release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching.


WayVNC 0.9 Released For Wayland VNC Server With New Features

([Wayland] 19 November 08:29 AM EST WayVNC 0.9)

WayVNC 0.9 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server catering to wlroots-based Wayland compositors. WayVNC makes it easy to get a VNC server up and running on Sway and other wlroots-based compositors while with today's update is much more capable.


Intel SNC6 Sub-NUMA Clustering Support With Linux 6.13

([Intel] 19 November 06:22 AM EST Intel SNC6)

A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.


MiTAC Releases AMD openSIL Based Open-Source Firmware For Their Capri2 EPYC Server

([Hardware] 19 November 06:39 AM EST Capri2 Server With Open Firmware)

Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD's in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization.


Arch Linux Working To Affirm Its Package Sources Under A BSD Zero Clause License

([Arch Linux] 19 November 06:13 AM EST Arch Linux Package Sources License)

Arch Linux package sources with its PKGBUILD files and similar have lacked carrying a clear license. Arch Linux developers have been working to come together to allow all Arch Linux package sources to be licensed under a BSD zero-clause "BSD0" license.


GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu Continues Dealing With More Blobs In The Kernel

([GNU] 19 November 06:04 AM EST GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu)

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.


AMD Begins Adding "GFX950" GPU Support To LLVM For Next CDNA Accelerator

([LLVM] 18 November 05:15 PM EST AMD GFX950)

As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year's LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for "GFX950", the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators.


Linux 6.13 Quadrupling Workqueue Concurrency Limit

([Linux Kernel] 18 November 04:32 PM EST Linux 6.13 Workqueues)

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.


Ubuntu Praises 5~7% PGO Compiler Optimization Performance Benefits

([Ubuntu] 18 November 03:34 PM EST Profile Guided Optimizations)

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.


Linux 6.13 Rolling Out NVMe 2.1 Support & NVMe Rotational Media

([Linux Storage] 18 November 01:15 PM EST Linux 6.13 Block Changes)

All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.


New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5

([Software] 18 November 10:56 AM EST 7 Comments)

At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.


GCC 15 Compiler Development Shifts From Features To Bug Fixing

([GNU] 18 November 08:54 AM EST GCC 15 Enters Stage 3)

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.


Raspberry Pi OS Now Defaults To 512MB Swap, Updates Labwc Compositor

([Raspberry Pi] 18 November 07:02 AM EST Raspberry Pi OS)

With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.


LLVM Clang 20 Merges Intel Diamond Rapids Support With "-march=diamondrapids"

([LLVM] 18 November 07:00 AM EST -march=diamondrapids)

Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.


DXVK 2.5.1 Released To Fix A Major Regression & Other Bugs

([Linux Gaming] 18 November 06:39 AM EST DXVK 2.5.1)

DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.


Btrfs With Linux 6.13 Delivers Performance Improvements & Other Features

([Linux Storage] 18 November 06:18 AM EST Linux 6.13 Btrfs)

Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.


FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 3 Released - FreeBSD Now Publishing OCI Container Images

([BSD] 18 November 06:03 AM EST FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 3)

The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.


Linux 6.13 For ARM64 Brings GCS Support & Protected VMs With Arm CCA

([Arm] 18 November 05:48 AM EST ARM64 Features)

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.


Linux 6.12 Released With Real-Time Capabilities, Sched_Ext, More AMD RDNA4 & More

([Linux Kernel] 17 November 05:22 PM EST Linux 6.12)

As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.


More

Around the turn of this century, a composer named Camille Saint-Saens wrote
a satirical zoological-fantasy called "Le Carnaval des Animaux." Aside from
one movement of this piece, "The Swan", Saint-Saens didn't allow this work
to be published or even performed until a year had elapsed after his death.
(He died in 1921.)
Most of us know the "Swan" movement rather well, with its smooth,
flowing cello melody against a calm background; but I've been having this
fantasy...
What if he had written this piece with lyrics, as a song to be sung?
And, further, what if he had accompanied this song with a musical saw? (This
instrument really does exist, often played by percussionists!) Then the
piece would be better known as:
SAINT-SAENS' SAW SONG "SWAN"!