Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today.

At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on "dual architecture" hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It's a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at how Windows 11 Pro is competing against the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in creator/workstation workloads.

Lemonade as the open-source local AI server backed by AMD and supported across AMD CPUs / GPUs / NPUs on Windows and Linux is out with a big update.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards.

GCC 16.1 as the first stable version of the GCC 16 compiler is releasing as soon as later this week if all goes well. Among the many improvements in this year's open-source compiler update are continued enhancements to the error messages as well as having an experimental HTML output option for messages.

Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages.

Following the release of Proton 11.0 Beta 1 from two weeks ago that updated against Wine 11.0, this heart to Valve's Steam Play is now out with a second beta release.

Following yesterday's polarizing news of Canonical to begin shipping AI features in Ubuntu Linux over the course of the next year, Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical has now provided some clarifications around their AI plans.

The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is preparing a new feature called hardware scheduler time quantum for ensuring fairness between multiple users/contexts wanting to leverage this neural processing unit for AI workloads.

7-Zip 26.01 was released on Monday and making this release significant are huge pages support on Linux and some users may be interested in the new options around the path generation mode for the output directory when extracting archives.

WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library.

It's crazy to realize it has been ten years already since Red Hat abandoned their Btrfs plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dropped it, which was a technology preview feature since RHEL6. In its place Red Hat engineers began developing Stratis for next-gen Linux storage with ZFS/Btrfs-like features but instead building atop XFS, LUKS, Device Mapper, and Clevis. After a while since the last major release, Stratis Storage 3.9 released today.

The newest Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" feature enabled by AMD engineers is protected memory support using the Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) support on newer GPUs.

Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD.

After looking at the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor earlier this month with its nice performance evolution for Arrow Lake on Linux, today we are looking at the other new Intel desktop CPU offering: the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus that retails for just $219 USD.

The Linux 7.1 mainline kernel will allow building a real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel for the ARM architecture with no longer needing any out-of-tree patches.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes.

One of the last feature pulls merged by Linus Torvalds prior to tagging Linux 7.1-rc1 this weekend were some power utility updates for those tools living within the kernel source tree.

Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs.