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 VFS Fix For 5 Year Old Bug That Could Cause Corruption, Security Issues Or Crash

([Linux Storage] 27 July 07:00 AM EDT Linux VFS Fix)

Ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window set to close tomorrow, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent in a set of two VFS fixes. One of the fixes is more noteworthy that is for a five year old bug that could cause on-disk corruption, security issues, or a kernel crash.



UBIFS File-System Being Hardened Against Power Loss Scenarios

([Linux Storage] 27 July 06:36 AM EDT UBIFS)

While most Linux file-systems are rather robust in recovering when the system experiences a power loss, the UBIFS file-system is more prone to problems when a power-cut happens. With patches submitted for the Linux 6.11 merge window, UBIFS is seeing some hardening so it can better cope with the loss of power.



KDE Drives Fixes Into Its Triple Buffering, Adds Konsole Feature To Save Terminal Output

([KDE] 27 July 06:18 AM EDT KDE Changes)

In addition to refining the KDE Human Interface Guidelines, KDE developers have been busy with a variety of other tasks this week in polishing their open-source desktop stack.



Open-Source Apple GPU Vulkan Driver Merged For Mesa 24.3

([Mesa] 27 July 02:00 AM EDT Apple Vulkan Driver In Mesa)

Merged today for Q4's Mesa 24.3 feature release is a brand new open-source Vulkan driver: Honeykrisp, the driver providing Vulkan API support for Apple Silicon GPUs as part of the Asahi Linux effort.



Linus Torvalds Addresses His Latest ARM64 Annoyance: Installing Compressed Kernel Images

([Arm] 26 July 02:57 PM EDT Compressed Kernel Images By Default)

Following Linus Torvalds receiving an Ampere Altra Max workstation from Ampere Computing, he's been dabbling more with ARM64 now that it affords him more AArch64 compute power than his Apple Silicon powered MacBook. Torvalds kicked off the Linux 6.11 merge window by landing some of his own code to further enhance the ARM64 kernel and as we approach the end of the v6.11 merge window this weekend, he's merged some more ARM64 code.



NVIDIA's Open-Source Linux Kernel Driver Performing At Parity To Proprietary Driver

([Display Drivers] 26 July 01:19 PM EDT 64 Comments)

With the recently introduced NVIDIA 555 Linux driver stable series their open-source GPU kernel driver modules are in great shape across consumer and professional graphics products. Over the past two years the support has evolved so much that NVIDIA is now promoting their open-source kernel driver usage and with the NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta posted this week they are defaulting to using their open-source kernel driver modules in place of the proprietary option -- on the Turing and newer GPUs supported by the open-source code. Here is a fresh look at the impact.



LLVM 19.1-rc1 Compiler Released With More C23 / C++23 & New Intel Extensions

([LLVM] 26 July 12:51 PM EDT LLVM 19.1-rc1)

LLVM 19.1-rc1 was released today as the first tagged development snapshot of LLVM 19 that is working its way toward the stable LLVM 19.1 version expected in September.



Fwupd 1.9.22 Released With Framework SD Expansion Card & Raspberry Pi 5 Support

([LVFS] 26 July 12:34 PM EDT Fwupd 1.9.22)

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 1.9.22 as the newest version of this open-source solution for allowing system and peripheral firmware updates to be carried out quickly and easily from Linux systems.



Linux 6.11 Is Looking Good In Early Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper

([Linux Kernel] 26 July 08:23 AM EDT Linux 6.11)

With the Linux 6.11 kernel merge window wrapping up this weekend, I've begun "kicking the tires" on the new kernel that will then see the weekly release candidates over the next two months. For some initial Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 Git benchmarking on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation, the new kernel is appearing fit and offering some nice performance gains in a few areas.



ASRock Announces Passively Cooled Radeon RX 7900 Series

([Hardware] 26 July 06:59 AM EDT Passively Cooled Radeon RX 7900)

For those striving for a quiet PC while having high-end specs, ASRock today announced passively-cooled Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.



New Dell PC Driver & Intel Performance Limit Reasons Help Laptops On Linux 6.11

([Hardware] 26 July 06:38 AM EDT x86 Platform Drivers)

The x86 platform driver updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.11 merge window. The x86 platform drivers predominantly benefit Intel/AMD laptops on Linux but also some other x86 non-laptop hardware and then more recently also some ARM64 laptop drivers appearing in this area of the kernel.



AlmaLinux Picking Up glibc Patch Ahead Of RHEL To Rescue VFX Houdini Users

([Operating Systems] 26 July 06:15 AM EDT Fixing Houdini)

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very popular with the VFX crowd, those relying on the SideFX Houdini 3D animation software are running into a bit of a pickle if trying to use RHEL 9.4. There's a glibc bug causing random crashes for Houdini that Red Hat has been slow to pickup but is now going to be shipped by AlmaLinux early to satisfy VFX users.



KDE Human Interface Guidelines Being Further Refined & Polished

([KDE] 26 July 05:56 AM EDT KDE HIG 2024)

Back in early June the KDE Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" were updated. These design principles for KDE software were updated to modern standards, adapt to the latest Qt toolkit behavior, and also making it more inviting to new contributors. Since then the KDE HIG has continued to see more refinements.



VirtualBox 7.1 Beta Released With Modernized GUI, Wayland Support For Clipboard Sharing

([Virtualization] 25 July 03:53 PM EDT VirtualBox 7.1)

Oracle today released the first public beta of their VirtualBox 7.1 virtualization software.



Linux Mint 22 Released - Built Atop Ubuntu 24.04 With Latest Cinnamon Desktop

([Operating Systems] 25 July 12:12 PM EDT Linux Mint 22)

Linux Mint 22 was formally released today as the newest major release of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base while featuring its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment and other software apps.



AMD Working On More Precise GPU Reset Capabilities For Their Linux Driver

([Radeon] 25 July 11:20 AM EDT Per Ring Resets)

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.



VMware Hypercall API Makes It Into Linux 6.11 For Basis To Allow Confidential Computing

([Virtualization] 25 July 11:05 AM EDT VMware Hypercall API)

When it comes to virtualization with the Linux 6.11 kernel, in addition to the latest AMD SEV-SNP code making it upstream, for those making use of VMware virtualization products their initial "VMware Hypercall" API has been merged.



Amazon's Graviton Has Evolved Into A Formidable CPU Contender: Graviton1 To Graviton4 Benchmarks

([Processors] 25 July 10:18 AM EDT 16 Comments)

Amazon's Graviton4 server processor that recently went into GA in the AWS cloud is easily the most competitive AArch64 server processor we've seen to date and proving capable of being able to compete with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors across various workloads. Since Graviton4 went GA on AWS earlier this month I've looked at the Graviton4 comparison to other instances at 64 vCPUs and also comparing the Graviton4 96-core metal performance to various Intel, Ampere, and AMD processors. Given the interest in those Graviton4 benchmarks, today's article is another look at Graviton4 looking at the metal performance compared to prior generation Graviton3, Graviton2, and Graviton1 instances for showing just how far Amazon's Graviton processor performance has evolved.



Qt Creator 14 IDE Released With Support For Lua-Based Plugins

([Qt] 25 July 08:35 AM EDT Qt Creator 14)

The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 14 as the newest version of this Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE) for developers.



AMD's Unified AI Software Stack Might Be A Boon For Other Vulkan/SPIR-V Hardware Too

([AMD] 25 July 06:56 AM EDT Unified AI Software Stack + SPIR-V)

Earlier this month AMD talked more about their Unified AI Software Stack plans for debuting in the coming months to provide a unified software view where AI work can be seamlessly offloaded to Ryzen processors, AMD graphics, or AMD Ryzen AI NPU hardware. Another possible and exciting prospect came to mind when going through the LLVM/Clang 19 changes this week.



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Hoaars-Faisse Gallery presents:
An exhibit of works by the artist known only as Pretzel.

The exhibit includes several large conceptual works using non-traditional
media and found objects including old sofa-beds, used mace canisters,
discarded sanitary napkins and parts of freeways. The artist explores
our dehumanization due to high technology and unresponsive governmental
structures in a post-industrial world. She/he (the artist prefers to
remain without gender) strives to create dialogue between viewer and
creator, to aid us in our quest to experience contemporary life with its
inner-city tensions, homelessness, global warming and gender and
class-based stress. The works are arranged to lead us to the essence of
the argument: that the alienation of the person/machine boundary has
sapped the strength of our voices and must be destroyed for society to
exist in a more fundamental sense.