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)

Linux 7.2 Slab Changes Include More Performance Optimizations

([Linux Kernel] 17 June 04:00 PM EDT Slab Allocator)

The slab memory allocation changes for Linux 7.2 have been merged and continue to see more work around shaves and performance optimizations.



AMD's Lemonade AI Server Now Much More Useful With MCP Server Integration

([AMD] 17 June 03:43 PM EDT Lemonade 10.8)

The open-source Lemonade AI server for "100% free and private" AI usage across Windows and Linux in leveraging AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, Radeon GPUs, and x86_64 CPUs, is now much more powerful with today's v10.8 release.



Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Targets Modern DisplayLink Hardware

([Hardware] 17 June 12:23 PM EDT Vino DRM Driver)

The original DisplayLink USB display adapters were great for working with an upstream, open-source driver while sadly the newer DisplayLink tech has been limited to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space daemon. But posted today is an experimental "Vino" driver that is a clean-room, reverse-engineered driver for newer DisplayLink hardware.



Epic Games Announces Lore Open-Source Version Control System

([Programming] 17 June 10:45 AM EDT Lore)

Epic Games announced today they have created a new version control system that is now open-source as Lore. Given the proliferation and excellence of Git, you may be wondering why Epic Games is pursuing another VCS option... They are specifically catering Lore to games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes.



Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake Performance On Linux 7.1

([Software] 17 June 10:30 AM EDT 4 Comments)

After recently noting the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage performance improving with Linux 7.1 and similarly finding performance gains for the Arc Pro B70 on Linux 7.1, several Phoronix readers have been wondering whether the newer Xe3 graphics with Panther Lake similarly benefit. Here are some CPU and iGPU benchmarks of the Core Ultra X7 358H "Panther Lake" SoC between Linux 7.0 and the recently stabilized Linux 7.1 kernel.



Myna Announced As Speech-To-Text Solution For The Ubuntu Desktop

([Ubuntu] 17 June 09:34 AM EDT Ubuntu Myna)

Earlier this month plans were shared publicly of Ubuntu 26.10 aiming to build a context-aware desktop with local AI features and one of the first capabilities to be integrated speech-to-text support. Now we have more details on the speech-to-text plans with Canonical announcing the Myna project.



Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL Support Successfully Merged For Linux 7.2

([Linux Kernel] 17 June 08:21 AM EDT Linux 7.2 DRM)

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display and accelerator driver changes have been merged for Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 DRM merge is headlined by the long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support for the AMDGPU open-source driver as part of the larger effort of finally proceeding with a full HDMI 2.1 implementation for this AMD Radeon Linux driver.



Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support

([Qt] 17 June 06:31 AM EDT Qt Creator + AI Agents)

The Qt Creator integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ programming is out today with Qt Creator 20 and this new version is headlined by adding AI agent support.



GCC 17 Lands Initial Infrastructure For C++29

([GNU] 17 June 06:23 AM EDT -std=c++29)

Merged yesterday to the GCC Git development codebase for next year's GCC 17 release is the initial infrastructure laying out support for -std=c++29 and the like for targeting the C++29 standard not anticipated for release until around 2029.



FreeBSD Updates Its Graphics Driver Port From Linux 6.12 LTS

([BSD] 17 June 06:04 AM EDT FreeBSD drm-kmod Port)

As part of improving the experience of FreeBSD on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have updated their drm-kmod port against the state of the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel.



Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support

([Apple] 17 June 05:40 AM EDT AppleTalk + Linux)

While the AppleTalk networking protocols were innovative when they first appeared for their plug-and-play capabilities, Apple itself ended their AppleTalk support back in 2009. Now 17 years later, the Linux kernel is ending AppleTalk support due to a recent surge of AI-generated patches.



IO_uring, NVMe & Other Block + Device Mapper Changes Merged For Linux 7.2

([Linux Storage] 17 June 04:00 AM EDT Linux 7.2 Storage)

Linux 7.2 continues seeing a fair amount of storage-related changes from file-systems to the block device code itself, software RAID, the wonderful IO_uring interface, and more. Here is some of the latest feature work that has been merged for Linux 7.2.



Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance

([Mozilla] 16 June 08:46 PM EDT Firefox + zlib-rs)

Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs.



Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel

([Linux Storage] 16 June 05:16 PM EDT New Linux File-Systems)

There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such as FTRFS and VMUFAT being some of the most recent and then even having multiple NTFS drivers for Linux, there is now documentation in place to formally lay out criteria for new file-systems to be accepted.



KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware

([Operating Systems] 16 June 04:29 PM EDT Plasma 6)

It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution.



Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2

([Linux Storage] 16 June 04:20 PM EDT Btrfs Changes For Linux 7.2)

The Btrfs file-system feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with a few noteworthy changes for this copy-on-write file-system.



Wayland's Weston 16 Alpha Brings HDR Improvements, Vulkan Renderer Fixes

([Wayland] 16 June 01:52 PM EDT Weston 16 Alpha)

Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.



Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More

([Linux Kernel] 16 June 01:05 PM EDT Faster anon_pipe_write)

Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.



Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental "LEO"

([Intel] 16 June 11:41 AM EDT Intel Nova Lake)

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January. With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.



Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency

([Linux Storage] 16 June 11:02 AM EDT Lower Latency Linux 7.2)

A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding "VFS: Busy inodes after unmount" messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.



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Year, n.:
A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"