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)

RVCC Proposed As An LLVM Incubator For High Performance RISC-V Optimizations

([LLVM] 30 March 09:42 AM EDT LLVM RVCC Compiler)

A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration "RVCC" as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal.


Ubuntu MATE Leader Stepping Down, Seeking New Contributors

([Ubuntu] 30 March 09:25 AM EDT Ubuntu MATE)

After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going.


Rspamd 4.0 Released For Open-Source Spam Filtering

([Free Software] 30 March 09:17 AM EDT Rspamd 4.0)

Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system.


RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low-Latency Encode/Decode Options

([Radeon] 30 March 08:56 AM EDT RADV Vulkan Video Low-Latency)

The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added new low-latency Vulkan Video encode/decode options for those seeking better performance.


Intel Graphics Driver For Linux 7.1 Preps Workaround For Dell XPS Panther Lake Laptop

([Intel] 30 March 06:32 AM EDT Panel Replay Disable)

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week's drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling.


AMD Revives Linux Kernel Patches For Hardware-Accelerated vIOMMU

([AMD] 30 March 06:03 AM EDT AMD vIOMMU)

Back in 2023 AMD posted hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU patches for the Linux kernel as a request for comments (RFC). In 2024 they then posted a second iteration of the AMD vIOMMU patches but then seemingly fell off the radar. This morning is now the first set of updated AMD vIOMMU patches sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list with the RFC tag now removed.


SolveSpace 3.2 3D CAD Tool Adds Qt Frontend, Experimental Web Version

([Free Software] 30 March 05:48 AM EDT SolveSpace 3.2)

SolveSpace 3.2 was released this past week as the newest feature update to this open-source parametric 3D CAD tool for creating 2D/3D parts and other CAD diagrams.


Linux 7.0-rc6 Released With The Fixes Still Coming In Heavy

([Linux Kernel] 29 March 07:08 PM EDT Linux 7.0)

Linux 7.0-rc6 was just released in quickly working toward the stable Linux 7.0 release in mid-April. This was another busy week with lots of bug fixes.


Linux Ham Radio KISS Serial Driver Being Modernized In 2026

([Free Software] 29 March 10:52 AM EDT MKISS Driver)

Here's something that wasn't on my bingo card for this year of the "MKISS" driver for ham radio being modernized in 2026 as opposed to just being dropped. The MKISS code hasn't seen much driver activity since the original Git import of the Linux kernel more than twenty years ago.


Intel Prepares Wireless Mode Support For QAT Gen6 Hardware

([Intel] 29 March 09:56 AM EDT QuickAssist QAT Gen6 Wireless)

Last year Intel began preparing their QuickAsist Linux driver support for QAT Gen6 hardware with upcoming platforms. That initial Intel QAT Gen6 driver enablement landed back in Linux 6.16 while for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel they are preparing support for a new wireless mode with this next-gen QuickAssist hardware.


Many EXT4 Fixes Lined Up For Linux 7.0-rc6

([Linux Storage] 29 March 07:30 AM EDT EXT4 Fixes)

Ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due to be released later today, quite a number of EXT4 file-system fixes were sent out this morning.


AMDXDNA Driver Introducing Per-Process Memory Usage Queries In Linux 7.1

([Linux Kernel] 29 March 06:51 AM EDT Ryzen AI NPU Driver)

Sent out this week was another drm-misc-next pull heading to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window. Notable with this week's Direct Rendering Manager code changes was introducing per-process buffer object "BO" memory usage query support for user-space.


Nginx 1.29.7 Delivers Multipath TCP Support

([Linux Networking] 29 March 06:37 AM EDT Nginx 1.29.7)

Released this week was Nginx 1.29.7 as the newest mainline version of this HTTP(S) web server. Releasing alongside Nginx 1.28.3 stable, it fixed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and some other vulnerabilities. Making Nginx 1.29.7 more exciting though is that it landed Multipath TCP support.


RadeonSI Driver Lands Fixes For EDuke32 For Those Wanting To Enjoy Duke Nukem 3D In 2026

([Radeon] 29 March 06:27 AM EDT EDuke32)

It's fairly rare for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to hit OpenGL rendering game bugs these days as besides more games going opting for Vulkan API use, RadeonSI is rather robust and very mature at this stage. Recently though a Linux gamer that upgraded to a Radeon RX 9070 XT RDNA4 graphics card noticed that the open-source EDuke32 Duke Nukem 3D build and its derivatives were failing to render properly with the RadeonSI driver.


GIMP 3.2.2 Released With Minor UI/UX Updates & Bug Fixes

([Free Software] 28 March 03:58 PM EDT GIMP 3.2.2)

It was just two weeks ago that GIMP 3.2 released, one year after the big GIMP 3.0 debut. Out today is GIMP 3.2.2 with various bug fixes, plug-in / file format handling updates, and some minor UI/UX work.


AMD Introduces GAIA Agent UI For Privacy-First Web App For Local AI Agents

([AMD] 28 March 10:55 AM EDT AMD GAIA Agent UI)

AMD's GAIA AI agent framework (that previously stood for "Generative AI Is Awesome" albeit they seemed to have dropped promoting it as that name) for Ryzen AI hardware is out with a new version. AMD GAIA 0.17 introduces Agent UI as a new privacy-first web application for local AI agents.


Linux 7.0-rc6 Bringing A Lot Of Audio Quirks / Fixes

([Multimedia] 28 March 07:57 AM EDT Audio Fixes)

The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux.


LLVM's DTLTO Now More Efficiently Adding Files To The Link For Much Better Performance

([LLVM] 28 March 07:28 AM EDT Distributed ThinLTO)

Last year LLVM began landing their Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" support as an enhancement to their ThinLTO approach for link-time optimizations. An improvement merged this week to LLVM addresses a performance bottleneck discovered when adding files to the link.


Gedit Aims For More Frequent Releases, Bans AI / LLM Contributions

([GNOME] 28 March 07:11 AM EDT Gedit 50 Released)

Following the release of GNOME 50, Gedit 50 was released on Friday as the newest version of this graphical text editor aligned with the GNOME desktop. Moving forward the Gedit developers are banning AI / large language model (LLM) driven developments and aim to ship more releases faster.


Fish 4.6 Shell Brings Support For Recent systemd Environment Variables

([Free Software] 28 March 06:54 AM EDT Fish 4.6)

Fish 4.6 released today as the newest version of this Rust-based interactive shell for Linux and other platforms.


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I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who
are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that
either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some
respects, both.

I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that
God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty,
it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.
-- Abraham Lincoln