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)

Proposed Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" For LLVM Is Great News

([LLVM] 22 May 06:18 AM EDT Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation)

A new proposal volleyed today among LLVM developers is for Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" for the ThinLTO link-time optimization code. This is great news for today's high core count CPUs when looking to compile very large LLVM modules.


Expanded Reset Support Coming For AMDGPU To Recover From More GPU Compute Hangs

([Radeon] 22 May 05:50 AM EDT Pipe Reset Support)

A set of 42 patches were posted on Thursday for the AMDGPU kernel driver and associated AMDKFD compute driver code for enabling pipe reset capabilities for compute workloads.


Linux Sound Subsystem Also Seeing Many Fixes Driven By AI/LLMs

([Multimedia] 22 May 05:43 AM EDT Linux Sound)

It's not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing -- including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues -- leading to "craziness" from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many "assisted-by" patches coming about in recent weeks.


Today's Linux Networking Fixes: "Craziness Continues With No End In Sight"

([Linux Networking] 21 May 07:04 PM EDT Linux 7.1 Networking)

Driven by AI/LLM bots like Shashiko uncovering new issues within the Linux kernel source tree, including various security vulnerabilities like Dirty Frag, the mailing list has been wild with bug reports and fixes. Today's networking fixes pull request for Linux 7.1 continues to highlight the ongoing craziness and fears that the worst may be yet to come.


CHUWI's $449 USD Wildcat Lake Laptop Should Work Fine With Linux

([Hardware] 21 May 03:53 PM EDT CHUWI UniBook)

CHUWI this week announced their UniBook laptop as a ~$449 USD laptop that aims to compete with Apple's MacBook Neo. While shipping with Microsoft Windows 11, it should be Linux-friendly and we'll soon be putting it to the test at Phoronix.


Linux 7.2 To Enable SR-IOV Support For Intel Nova Lake's Xe3P Graphics

([Intel] 21 May 03:22 PM EDT SR-IOV For Nova Lake)

Open-source Intel software engineers today sent out their latest round of Xe kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.2 merge window.


SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer Now Warns For No-Desktop Installs, Supports systemd-boot

([SUSE] 21 May 02:07 PM EDT SUSE Agama Installer)

SUSE engineers continue working on their modern "Agama" operating system installer used by the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Linux distributions. Out today is Agama 21 to incorporate their latest OS installer enhancements.


NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell Performance Delivering Excellent Linux Performance

([Graphics Cards] 21 May 11:43 AM EDT 33 Comments)

Recently I received the line-up of the NVIDIA RTX PRO "Blackwell" workstation graphics cards for seeing how these newest professional offerings from NVIDIA are performing on Linux and competing against the AMD Radeon AI PRO and Intel Arc Pro B-Series competition.


KMSCON 10.0 Released With Natural Scrolling Option, Libseat VT Support

([Free Software] 21 May 09:45 AM EDT KMSCON 10.0)

KMSCON 10.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this terminal emulator for Linux that can serve as an alternative to the in-kernel VT.


Ryzen AI AMDXDNA Driver Adding Expandable Heap Support With Linux 7.2

([AMD] 21 May 08:57 AM EDT Expandable Heap)

AMD engineers continue enhancing the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux.


VKD3D 2.0 Released For Wine's Direct3D 12 Implementation Atop Vulkan

([WINE] 21 May 07:04 AM EDT VKD3D 2.0)

Wine developers have announced the release of VKD3D 2.0, the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API. VKD3D is what's used by upstream Wine for D3D12 compared to Valve's downstream VKD3D-Proton within Steam Play (Proton).


AlmaLinux To Unveil Media/Entertainment Linux OS Edition

([Operating Systems] 21 May 06:31 AM EDT AmaLinux Media + Entertainment Version)

AlmaLinux shared with us that they will be introducing a new version of their RHEL-derived Linux operating system that is built specifically for media and entertainment use-cases.


More AMDGPU Driver Fixes Prepped For Linux 7.2

([Radeon] 21 May 06:23 AM EDT Linux 7.2 AMDGPU)

AMD is ready with more AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window.


chipStar 1.3 Released For Running HIP/CUDA Code On SPIR-V With OpenCL

([Programming] 21 May 06:16 AM EDT chipStar 1.3)

A new release of chipStar is now available as the open-source tool for compiling and running HIP/CUDA code in a vendor-neutral manner with the SPIR-V intermediate representation on OpenCL or even Intel Level Zero as the run-time alternative. This is part of the ambitious effort to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP code to ultimately run on alternative vendors with increasing levels of success.


New Patches Allow The Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G To Be More Useful Under Linux

([Microsoft] 21 May 06:01 AM EDT Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G)

Back in 2024 there were Linux patches to enable a partially-working Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Now in 2026, there are new patches for making that ARM-powered Microsoft Surface laptop actually working more respectably under Linux... Like a working display and more.


AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL To Be Initially Disabled-By-Default

([Radeon] 20 May 05:34 PM EDT Disabled By Default)

One of the most exciting developments in recent times for the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is HDMI 2.1 FRL support for the AMDGPU driver along with Display Stream Compression support as they work toward providing full HDMI 2.1 support for this open-source AMD Radeon driver. The details how AMD managed to pull this feat off given prior resistance from the HDMI Forum remains to be confirmed, but it's moving ahead and out today is the latest iteration of the HDMI 2.1 FRL+DSC patches.


The Very Exciting Cache Aware Scheduling Looks Like It Will Land For Linux 7.2

([Linux Kernel] 20 May 03:44 PM EDT Cache Aware Scheduling)

As a very exciting development ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window opening in about one month's time, it looks like the long-awaited Cache Aware Scheduling support will finally be merged! CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE has made it into a TIP branch with all the Cache Aware Scheduling code for helping with Linux performance on modern CPUs sporting multiple last level caches.


Firefox 153 Nightly Rolls Out New Settings UI

([Mozilla] 20 May 12:50 PM EDT Firefox Settings)

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser's settings area.


Initial Benchmarks Of The SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V CPU With The K3 Pico-ITX

([Processors] 20 May 11:43 AM EDT 29 Comments)

One of the RISC-V SoCs we have been most looking forward to this year is the SpacemiT K3 that features the X100 RISC-V cores that are RVA23 compliant and among the first readily available RVA23 RISC-V platform for running on the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. In this article is a preview of some very early benchmarks of the SpacemiT K3 with the new Pico-ITX single board computer offering.


Patches Trying To Bring Mainline Linux Support For The Infineon/Intel XMM6260 Modem

([Intel] 20 May 10:25 AM EDT Intel XMM6260 + Linux)

While it has been nearly seven years since Apple acquired the Intel Mobile Communications' smartphone modem business and fifteen years since Intel acquired the wireless solutions division of Infineon, in 2026 we might see mainline Linux kernel support for the out-of-date XMM6260 modem.


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UNIX Trix

For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will
save your support staff a few hours of precious time. Before you send your
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-- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems