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)

Raspberry Pi Announces rpi-image-gen To Help Craft Custom Software Images

([Raspberry Pi] 21 March 09:45 AM EDT rpi-image-gen)

Following a slew of hardware announcements in the past few months like the RP2350 shipping, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, Raspberry Pi Monitor, and Raspberry Pi 500, today they have a new software announcement. Today they formally announced "rpi-image-gen" as a new tool to help customers in crafting customized software OS images.



Linux 6.14 Sees Last Minute Fix For A Two Year Old Regression Causing A 30% Performance Drop

([Linux Kernel] 21 March 09:00 AM EDT Linux 6.14 Performance Fix)

Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit.



AMD Announces Open-Source "GAIA" For GenAI But Currently Windows-Only

([AMD] 21 March 08:30 AM EDT AMD GAIA)

AMD on Thursday announced GAIA for "Generative AI Is Awesome" as a means of easily running local large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI PCs with the XDNA NPU. GAIA provides an easy software demonstration for Ryzen AI capabilities but sadly for the moment is limited to Microsoft Windows platforms.



ASUS ROG Flow Z13 Improvements For Linux, RGB Controls For The ROG Ally

([Hardware] 21 March 06:46 AM EDT ASUS Linux Driver Improvements)

A set of eleven patches being worked on for the ASUS HID and platform drivers work to enhance the support for the AMD Strix Halo powered ROG Flow Z13 (2025) laptop as well as adding RGB control support for the ROG Ally gaming handheld.



Dynamic EPP & Raw EPP Features Coming To AMD P-State Driver

([AMD] 21 March 06:28 AM EDT AMD P-State)

The AMD P-State Linux kernel driver for CPU frequency scaling with modern Ryzen processors has been working out quite well and proving very effective over the prior ACPI CPUFreq generic driver use. Beyond recently being extended to becoming the default for EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, AMD P-State has recently been seeing some patches for additional feature work.



Vulkan 1.4.311 Released With New Extension For BFloat16

([Vulkan] 21 March 05:55 AM EDT Vulkan 1.4.311)

The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions.



Intel Updates Advanced Performance Extensions "APX" Code For The Linux Kernel

([Intel] 20 March 08:59 PM EDT Intel APX)

In addition to Intel software engineers this week being busy doing a late restructuring of AVX10 support in moving away from possible 256-bit maximum vector register size (a great move and still so excited to see this materialize!), there are also Intel engineers continuing work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on the Linux kernel side.



The Most Interesting Linux 6.14 Features From NTSYNC To AMD Ryzen AI & Rust Abstractions

([Linux Kernel] 20 March 04:28 PM EDT Linux 6.14 Changes)

Barring any last minute issues or hesitation by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.14 kernel is aiming for releasing as stable this coming Sunday on 23 March. Here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes to find with Linux 6.14.



Mesa 25.0.2 Changes Range From Fixing Soft FP64 For Old AMD GPUs To RX 9070 Fixes

([Mesa] 20 March 12:30 PM EDT Mesa 25.0.2)

Even amid the ongoing FreeDesktop.org GitLab cloud/server migration, Eric Engestrom has managed to release Mesa 25.0.2 on schedule as the newest stable release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems.



Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Performance For The AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series

([Display Drivers] 20 March 10:30 AM EDT 36 Comments)

With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company's official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.



Arm Bringing Up Support For Newer Mali GPUs With The Open-Source Panthor Driver

([Arm] 20 March 09:00 AM EDT Arm Mali-G710, G715, G720, G725)

Arm engineer Karunika Choo today sent out the latest patches developing a new GPU-specific initialization framework for the Panthor open-source kernel graphics driver as part of bringing up support for newer Mali GPUs.



Google Developing "Live Update Orchestrator" As New Means Of Live Linux Kernel Updates

([Google] 20 March 07:11 AM EDT Live Update Orchestrator)

While there is Kpatch, Ksplice, and other live patching solutions already in use for patching a running Linux kernel for deploying security updates without downtime, Google engineers are developing the Live Update Orchestrator as a new means of transitioning to a new updated kernel with minimal downtime.



DAMON Self-Tuned Memory Tiering Shows Nice Improvement For Linux Servers

([Linux Kernel] 20 March 06:52 AM EDT Little Tuning Needed)

Linux developer SeongJae Park has posted a set of patches for the Linux kernel's wonderful DAMON code to provide for self-tuned memory tiering that "just works" and is racking up some nice performance wins.



Google Chrome Replacing FreeType With Rust-Written Skrifa For Font Handling

([Google] 20 March 06:37 AM EDT FreeType To Skrifa)

The Google Chrome web browser is moving away from the FreeType font rendering library and instead pursuing their Skrifa project that is written in Rust for better memory safety around handling fonts on the web.



Miracle-WM 0.5 Released For Mir-Based Wayland Tiling Window Manager

([Wayland] 20 March 06:16 AM EDT Miracle-WM 0.5)

Miracle-WM 0.5 released on Wednesday as their first update of 2025 for this Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager. With this release comes a number of new features and other enhancements.



SoftBank Acquiring ARM Server CPU Vendor Ampere Computing

([Arm] 19 March 07:38 PM EDT SoftBank Acquiring Ampere)

SoftBank Group just announced they will be acquiring Ampere Computing, the leader in ARM64 server processors that has come under increasing pressure with more of the public cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon/AWS turning to their own in-house ARM64 server processor designs.



Fedora 43 Hopes To Set An Expectation That Package Builds Are Reproducible

([Fedora] 19 March 04:26 PM EDT Reproducible Package Builds)

A change proposal filed for the upcoming Fedora Linux 43 development cycles hopes to establish an expectation that RPM package builds for the distribution are reproducible.



GNOME 48 Released With New Default Font, HDR Support, New Audio Player & More

([GNOME] 19 March 12:38 PM EDT GNOME 48.0)

GNOME 48 is officially out as the newest stable release for this open-source desktop that will be powering the likes of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04.



Another Round Of Rust Compiler Improvements Merged For GCC 15.1

([GNU] 19 March 11:28 AM EDT More Rust In GCC 15.1)

A few days ago there was a batch of 145 patches merged for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to enhance the Rust "gccrs" front-end. That big set of patches merged the Polonius borrow checker and made other notable improvements. Today another 144 patches for enhancing gccrs were merged ahead of the GCC 15.1 stable release due out in the coming weeks.



Intel Wrapping Up Family 18 / Family 19 CPU Model Preparations Ahead Of Linux 6.15

([Intel] 19 March 10:20 AM EDT Family Model Version)

Over the past year Intel has been working to prepare the Linux kernel for the end of the "Family 6" CPU era. There's been a big rework to the Intel CPU model handling within the Linux kernel given that "Family 6" has been in use since the 1990s and moving forward Intel CPUs will appear in Family 19 like Diamond Rapids along with Family 18 as part of the new CPU identification. Thus a lot of Linux kernel checks need to be reconfigured for the multi-family Intel handling. With Linux 6.15 it looks like most of that will be finally wrapped up.



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"Oh what wouldn't I give to be spat at in the face..."
-- a prisoner in "Life of Brian"