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)

Intel Open-Source Vulkan Driver Merges Initial AV1 Decode Support

([Intel] 10 January 08:37 PM EST Intel ANV With Vulkan Video AV1 Decode)

Merged this Friday night for Mesa 25.0 is initial Vulkan Video AV1 decode support for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.



Wine 10.0-rc5 Brings Another 31 Bug Fixes

([WINE] 10 January 04:53 PM EST Wine 10.0-rc5)

Wine 10.0 is working its way toward a stable release likely in the next week or two, but today there is Wine 10.0-rc5 with the latest round of fixes.



Experimental Linux Address Space Isolation "ASI" v2 Patches: I/O Throughput Lower By 70%

([Linux Security] 10 January 02:17 PM EST Linux ASI v2)

Google engineers and others have been talking about Address Space Isolation "ASI" for the Linux kernel to better deal with speculative execution attacks and other CPU vulnerabilities. Last summer there were some new "request for comments" patches working on Linux Address Space Isolation and today a second iteration of those RFC patches were published. They are now out for review but they are unlikely to see much use: the I/O throughput as measured by FIO takes a 70% hit.



Git 2.48 Released With Initial Support For The Meson Build System

([Programming] 10 January 01:40 PM EST Git 2.48)

Git 2.48 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading distributed version control system.



More Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest Enablement Merged For Linux 6.13

([Intel] 10 January 12:02 PM EST Clearwater Forest Bits)

Squeezing into the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel code today as part of the latest batch of "fixes" are two additional enablement bits for the upcoming high-density Intel Xeon Clearwater Forest server processors.



Lenovo Discovers Situation Of Linux Dropping PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs To Gen 1 Speeds

([Linux Storage] 10 January 10:33 AM EST Gen5 To Gen1 Speeds)

A change made to the Linux kernel in June 2023 has led to a situation where PCIe Gen5 NVMe solid state drives could potentially drop down to Gen1 speeds... Lenovo engineers spotted this issue and bisected the problem along with coming up with a solution.



Servo Browser Engine Adds Dark Mode, Some XPath Support

([Free Software] 10 January 09:50 AM EST Servo Dark Mode)

The Servo open-source web browser layout engine project has published their newest monthly recap to highlight the progress they made during December 2024. They ended the year on a high note with getting dark mode support working and other features wired up -- including enough to now be able to read Discord messages but not yet enough to actually post messages on Discord.



VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 Brings A Few Fixes For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan

([Valve] 10 January 09:02 AM EST VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1)

Hans-Kristian Arntzen with Valve has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.14.1 as this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan implementation.



Ubuntu Considers Taking It Easier On Software Updates Over Weekends

([Ubuntu] 10 January 07:03 AM EST Less Weekend Updates)

Ubuntu developers are looking at extending their policy of not releasing stable release updates (SRUs) around the weekend as well as not phasing them up to 100% during those weekend times either.



12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix

([Intel] 10 January 06:40 AM EST Haswell Fix)

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.



Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games

([Mesa] 10 January 06:25 AM EST Faster Gaming Performance)

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.



COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates

([Desktop] 9 January 05:05 PM EST COSMIC Alpha 5)

Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.



AMD Secure TSC Support Might Finally Be Ready For Landing In The Linux Kernel

([AMD] 9 January 04:42 PM EST Secure TSC For SEV-SNP)

Going back to January 2023 were patches for enabling Secure TSC support for use by SEV-SNP guests with AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" and newer processors... Two years later and after sixteen rounds of revising the Linux kernel patches, it looks like the AMD Secure TSC support is finally ready for landing in the mainline Linux kernel.



Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 Brings More Battlemage Optimizations

([Intel] 9 January 01:39 PM EST Intel Compute Runtime)

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.52.32224.5 release was made earlier today as the newest update to this open-source Linux and Windows compute stack for Intel graphics hardware for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero implementations.



Google & Linux Foundation Launch "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" Fund

([Google] 9 January 12:23 PM EST Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers)

Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.



KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta Released With A Ton Of Improvements

([KDE] 9 January 11:05 AM EST KDE Plasma 6.3)

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.



Microsoft's Azure Linux Introduces New AMD Graphics Driver Options

([Microsoft] 9 January 10:28 AM EST Azure Linux + Latest AMDGPU)

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.



KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 Brings Power/Performance vs. Color Accuracy Preference

([KDE] 9 January 08:40 AM EST Plasma Wayland Protocols)

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.



LLVM Clang Lands Targeting Support For The SiFive P550 RISC-V Performance Core

([RISC-V] 9 January 06:51 AM EST -mcpu=sifive-p550)

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.



Intel PMT Telemetry Now Available For Battlemage Graphics Cards

([Intel] 9 January 07:00 AM EST Intel Platform Monitoring Technology)

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.



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When in panic, fear and doubt,
Drink in barrels, eat, and shout.