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 & AMD Power Management Driver Improvements Ready For Linux 7.3

([Hardware] 17 August 08:11 AM EDT Power Management)

In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3.


KTransformers 0.7 Expands AVX-512 Support To Benefit AMD EPYC Servers

([AI] 17 August 07:28 AM EDT KTransformers 0.7)

KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release.


Con Kolivas Revives "-ck" Patches & MuQSS To Improve Linux Desktop Responsiveness

([Linux Kernel] 17 August 06:26 AM EDT Linux 7.2-ck)

Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work, out of the blue he announced a new -ck patch series today with updated MuQSS code.


Linux 7.3 On PowerPC Now Supports In-Kernel Rust, Initial Power12 Enablement Begins

([Hardware] 17 August 06:13 AM EDT Linux Rust + PowerPC)

The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures.


ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready With Linux 7.3, NVIDIA Olympus Workarounds

([Arm] 17 August 06:00 AM EDT Break-Before-Make Level 3)

AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features.


GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu Released Following More Driver Cleaning

([Linux Kernel] 17 August 05:27 AM EDT GNU Linux-libre 7.2)

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom.


Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements

([Linux Kernel] 16 August 07:12 PM EDT Linux 7.2)

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.


GIMP Making Progress On New Project File Format After Nearly 30 Years With XCF

([Free Software] 16 August 04:15 PM EDT New GIMP File Format)

The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases.


tlbi= Boot Option Submitted Ahead Of Linux 7.2 Kernel Release

([Linux Kernel] 16 August 01:01 PM EDT tlbi=ipi)

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option.


Debian Marks 33rd Birthday As One Of The Oldest Maintained Linux Distros

([Debian] 16 August 10:13 AM EDT Debian Turns 33)

Today marks thirty three years since the Debian Linux distribution was started by the late Ian Murdock.


AVX-512 xor_gen Continues To Look Exciting For Helping Linux RAID With Modern CPUs

([Linux Storage] 16 August 06:54 AM EDT AVX-512 xor_gen)

Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available.


Linux 7.3 binfmt_misc To Allow BPF Programs To Dynamically Choose Execution Environments

([Linux Kernel] 16 August 06:37 AM EDT binfmt_misc)

The Linux kernel's binfmt_misc functionality allows non-native/custom files to be run directly such as for Windows EXE files to be handled by Wine or JAR files to be handled by the Java runtime. For the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window, the miscellaneous binary formats support is being extended so a binary type can be matched programmatically and the interpreter determined on a per-exec basis. BPF programs can also then be attached to dynamically choosing an execution environment on a per-binary basis.


New Linux Driver Enables 12VHPWR Monitoring For ASUS ROG Astral Graphics Cards

([Hardware] 16 August 06:19 AM EDT ASUS ROG Astral 12VHPWR)

For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards.


Marek Olšák's 19 Latest Patches Further Optimizing RADV & ACO

([Radeon] 15 August 08:17 PM EDT RADV + ACO Optimizations)

Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler.


GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements

([GNOME] 15 August 01:12 PM EDT GNOME 51.beta)

The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set.


Intel's Jay Graphics Shader Compiler Now Passing Vulkan CTS With Xe2/Xe3 Hardware

([Mesa] 15 August 10:23 AM EDT Intel Jay Compiler)

Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers.


RustConn 0.20 Continues Further Polishing This GTK4/libadwaita-Based Connection Manager

([GNOME] 15 August 07:55 AM EDT RustConn 0.20)

RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita.


Late Sound Fixes For Linux 7.2 Bring More Device Quirks, Intel Nova Lake HDMI-In Capture

([Hardware] 15 August 07:03 AM EDT Linux 7.2 Sound Fixes)

Ahead of the presumed Linux 7.2 stable kernel release tomorrow, some last minute sound fixes/quirks have been merged for this next kernel version.


KDE Plasma 6.8 To Allow Fine-Tuning Mouse/Touchpad Speeds

([KDE] 15 August 06:51 AM EDT Plasma 6.8 Improvements)

KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements.


Debian Developers Begin Voting Over LLM Usage Within The Project

([Debian] 15 August 06:40 AM EDT Debian + LLMs)

Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not.


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Mad Programmer Commits Suicide

KENNETT, MO -- For two years Doug Carter toiled away in his basement computer
lab working on his own 'Dougnix' operating system. Apparently he was sick of
Windows 95 so he decided to create his own OS, based loosely on Unix. He had
developed his own 'DougUI' window manager, Doug++ compiler, DougFS filesystem,
and other integrated tools.

All was going well until last week when he hooked his computer up to the
Internet for the first time. It was then that he stumbled on to www.linux.org.
Reports are sketchy about what happened next. We do know he committed suicide
days after, leaving behind a rambling suicide note. Part of the note says:

"I've wasted the past two years of my life... Wasted... Gone... Forever...
Never return to. [illegible] Why did I bother creating my own OS... when Linux
is exactly what I needed!?!?!?! If I had only known about Linux! Why someone
didn't tell me? [illegible] Wasted! Aggghhh!" [The rest of the note is filled
with incomprehensible assembly language ramblings.]