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)

A Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Hits Modern AMD CPUs

([Software] 28 April 03:53 PM EDT 42 Comments)

Separate from last week in uncovering a big performance regression on Linux 6.15 affecting workloads like Nginx and that regression getting fixed, I unfortunately discovered another heavy-hitting regression on Linux 6.15. This latest performance regression has been bisected and a possible fix is being thought through by the relevant party, but for the moment has yet to be fixed upstream and affects modern AMD processors.



Kdenlive 25.04 Video Editor Delivers New Features

([Multimedia] 28 April 02:47 PM EDT Kdenlive 25.04)

Kdenlive 25.04 is out today as the newest feature release to this KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear, open-source video editing application.



AMD Linux Network Driver Prepares For "Crater" Ethernet Device

([AMD] 28 April 11:25 AM EDT AMD Crater)

The AMD-XGBE Linux network driver has seen a set of patches published for it in enabling the "new" AMD Ethernet Device codenamed Crater.



Trinity Desktop R14.1.4 Continues With The KDE 3.5 Codebase

([Desktop] 28 April 10:15 AM EDT TDE R14.1.4)

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a long ago fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop released TDE R14.1.4 on Sunday as the newest maintenance release with various bug fixes and minor feature improvements.



Ubuntu 25.04 Advancing The Performance Of The System76 Thelio Astra With Ampere Altra

([Operating Systems] 28 April 08:20 AM EDT 24 Comments)

With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 this month I've looked at its performance on x86_64 laptops and desktop hardware to nice gains on server. That testing so far was focused on Intel and AMD systems given my abundance of x86_64 platforms. Last week I began testing Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 on the System76 Thelio Astra powered by Ampere Altra processors. For those considering the Ubuntu 25.04 upgrade and not minding that it's not a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 25.04 is also allowing for greater performance on ARM hardware.



Wayland Protocols 1.44 Released With Color-Representation

([Wayland] 28 April 06:10 AM EDT Wayland Protocols 1.44)

Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.



GNOME 49 Will Enjoy Better Performance With More Fullscreen Apps

([GNOME] 28 April 05:55 AM EDT Better Direct Scanout)

Another change to look forward to with GNOME 49 come September is better/faster direct scanout for more applications thanks to a change that was merged to the Mutter compositor this past week.



New Linux Patches Aim To Customize Out-Of-Memory Behavior Using BPF

([Linux Kernel] 28 April 05:46 AM EDT OOM + BPF)

A fresh take is being pursued around allowing the Linux kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) behavior to be customized using BPF programs.



Linux 6.15-rc4 Released With Performance Regression Fix, Corrected Bcachefs Case Folding

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 07:03 PM EDT Linux 6.15-rc4)

Linux 6.15-rc4 is now available after a rather eventful week and about one month to go until the stable Linux 6.15.



OpenBSD 7.7 Released With AMD SEV Guest Bits, Initial Radeon RX 9070 GPU Support

([BSD] 27 April 03:17 PM EDT OpenBSD 7.7)

Theo de Raadt announced today the release of OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release for this BSD operating system over the past two decades.



FFmpeg Merges Decoder For Samsung's APV - Advanced Professional Video Codec

([Multimedia] 27 April 12:42 PM EDT FFmpeg APV Decoder)

Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format.



Deferred THP Insertion Nearing The Linux Kernel To Help Avoid Memory Waste

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 08:47 AM EDT Transparent Huge Pages Defer Mode)

A patch currently residing within Andrew Morton's "MM" memory management branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is an addition by Red Hat for introducing deferred THP insertion to khugepaged. This deferred Transparent Huge Page (THP) insertion aims to help reduce memory waste on Linux with some workloads.



XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse Being Quirked For Linux Support

([Hardware] 27 April 06:32 AM EDT XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse)

The XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse boasts a 16K DPI sensor and retails for $65~80 USD but turns out it doesn't even work properly under Linux without a pending kernel patch.



The Linux Kernel's SHA-256 Code Being Improved Upon For Easier & Performant Use

([Linux Kernel] 27 April 06:20 AM EDT SHA256 Refactoring)

The SHA-256 code within the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem is in the process of being refactoring so that it's available via the crypto's library API and also opening it up to support architecture-optimized implementations.



Mold 2.38 Linker Adds Support For LLVM's CREL Format

([Programming] 27 April 06:04 AM EDT Mold 2.38 Linker)

Mold 2.38 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to this open-source, high-speed linker.



Zblock Compressed Slab Memory Allocator Looks Like It Could Be Coming In Linux 6.16

([Linux Kernel] 26 April 04:07 PM EDT Zblock Allocator)

Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening up in just one month, the new Zblock allocator was queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" tree of memory management material likely destined for the next kernel merge window. Zblock is showing much potential as a compressed slab memory allocator.



Fair DRM Scheduler v4 Running Well On Steam Deck, "Looks Solid"

([Linux Kernel] 26 April 08:50 AM EDT Fair DRM Scheduler)

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been pursuing the Fair DRM Scheduler as a "fair" scheduling policy to help with multiple applications/processes aiming to make use of the GPU concurrently. With this week's v4 patch-set to the DRM Fair Scheduler there are some big code changes but overall looking well as a nice scheduling policy for multiple apps/games/processes wanting equal access to GPU resources.



Linux 6.15-rc4 To Fix The Kernel Crashing For 32-bit Systems With Too Much RAM

([Linux Kernel] 26 April 06:54 AM EDT Linux x86 32-bit)

With the Linux kernel now limiting 32-bit systems to 4GB of memory even with the "HIGHMEM" Kconfig option, an issue was uncovered where if the system was still populated with more memory than addressable by 32-bit systems, the kernel would crash. With the Linux 6.15-rc4 kernel due out on Sunday, this issue will be addressed.



GNOME Mutter Adds Support For Tablet Pad Relative Dials On Wayland

([GNOME] 26 April 06:27 AM EDT Tablet Pad Dials)

A new Wayland-only feature merged for GNOME 49's Mutter is support for tablet pad relative dials. These dials found on some drawing tablets now allow for relative moment under the GNOME Wayland session when paired with recent libinput and libwacom releases.



KDE Developers Prepare More Wayland Improvements For Plasma 6.4

([KDE] 26 April 06:16 AM EDT KDE This Week)

As we near the end of April, KDE developers remain quite busy working on more enhancements for the Plasma 6.4 desktop while many of them were also meeting this week in Graz, Austria for further development and planning.



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Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long
period of time.
-- George Carlin