Given the recent patch proposal to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the 250Hz vs. 1000Hz comparison on some modern desktop hardware.

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers.

The open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver within Mesa known as "TURNIP" has now matured enough that it's going to be built by default when compiling Mesa for ARM64/AArch64 hardware.

A patch has been proposed for the Linux kernel to add a C1 demotion knob via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/c1_demotion for more control over lower power state handling for recent Xeon Scalable processors. This C1 demotion knob can help with the performance of some workloads for Intel Xeon servers but at the cost of increased power consumption.

Intel on Tuesday released Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 as their newest feature release of this open-source daemon to help monitor and control the CPU/SoC temperature within laptops and other modern Intel hardware.

Python 3.14 Alpha 5 is out today as the latest of many development releases in stepping toward the Python 3.14 stable release in October.

In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved.

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis.

Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack.

FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec.

Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop.

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month.

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process.

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win.

Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard.

For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.

GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.