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 Media Driver 2026Q1 Continues Nova Lake S Enablement

([Intel] 22 April 08:26 AM EDT Intel Media Driver 2026Q1)

Intel today published their official quarterly feature release to their open-source Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux.



Ghostty OpenGL-Accelerated Terminal Available On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

([Ubuntu] 22 April 06:27 AM EDT Ghostty On Ubuntu)

Since Ubuntu 25.04 Ptyxis has been the default terminal emulator after it initially became available in Ubuntu 24.10. For the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, Ptyxis remains the default but Ghostty is now available too.



QEMU 11.0 Released With CET Virtualization Support, Native Nitro Enclaves

([Virtualization] 22 April 06:14 AM EDT QEMU 11.0)

The QEMU 11.0 emulator is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.



F2FS, EXT4 & XFS Focus On Fixes For Linux 7.1

([Linux Storage] 21 April 08:48 PM EDT Flash-Friendly File-System)

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window that will wrap up on Sunday. This follows earlier merges for the XFS and EXT4 drivers too.



Linux May Drop Old Network Drivers Now That AI-Driven Bug Reports Are Causing A Burden

([AI] 21 April 03:45 PM EDT AI Bug Reports)

Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users.



Framework Previews The OCuLink Dev Kit

([Hardware] 21 April 02:15 PM EDT Framework OCuLink Dev Kit For eGPUs)

In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops.



Framework Computer Announces The Framework Laptop 13 Pro

([Hardware] 21 April 02:15 PM EDT Framework Laptop 13 Pro)

At Framework Computer's next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop.



AlmaLinux Comments On California Age Verification Law

([Operating Systems] 21 April 12:40 PM EDT AlmaLinux)

The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act.



NTFS-3G FUSE Driver Sees First New Release In Four Years

([Linux Storage] 21 April 11:41 AM EDT NTFS-3G)

Coming today as a big surprise -- one week after the new NTFS file-system driver was merged for Linux 7.1 and separately the existing NTFS3 kernel driver seeing some fixes -- is a new release of the NTFS-3G driver providing a FUSE-based user-space driver for NTFS on Linux and other platforms.



Intel IRDMA Driver Adds Support For GEN4 Hardware In Linux 7.1

([Intel] 21 April 08:55 AM EDT Intel IRDMA Gen4)

The IRDMA driver as Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware.



AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Benchmarks: The Best Desktop Performance For Linux Developers, Creators

([Processors] 21 April 09:00 AM EDT 57 Comments)

Today we can finally share performance benchmarks of the long-rumored AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor. This new halo product for the Ryzen 9000 series desktop line-up offers captivating performance for developers frequently compiling code, creators, technical computing workloads for students or hobbyists or those not able to afford a Threadripper / EPYC type workstation, or similar heavy computing use. With the 16 cores / 32 threads and both CCDs having 3D V-Cache, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 offers leading performance among current generation desktop processors.



RADV Driver Enables Host Image Copy By Default For RDNA2 & Newer

([Radeon] 21 April 08:24 AM EDT VK_EXT_host_image_copy)

Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default.



Linux 7.1 Lands Workaround For Arm C1-Pro Erratum

([Arm] 21 April 06:35 AM EDT C1-Pro Bug)

Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation.



Initial Linux Driver Patches For Smart Data Accelerator Interface "SDXI"

([Hardware] 21 April 06:22 AM EDT Smart Data Accelerator Interface)

Recently sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list was the initial patches for implementing the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) as a vendor-neutral architecture for memory-to-memory data movement offload.



Linux 7.1 Staging Ushered In More Developers To Make Their First Kernel Contributions

([Linux Kernel] 21 April 06:00 AM EDT Linux 7.1 Staging)

Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel.



HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library

([Free Software] 20 April 08:23 PM EDT HarfBuzz)

Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements.



AMD's GAIA Makes It Easier To Import/Export Custom AI Agents Across PCs

([AMD] 20 April 08:36 PM EDT AMD GAIA)

AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today's GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support.



Linux 7.1 KVM Adds "Very Experimental" Support For pKVM Protected Guests

([Virtualization] 20 April 03:59 PM EDT pKVM Protected Guests)

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes were recently merged for the Linux 7.1 merge window for further enhancing KVM as this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack.



While New NTFS Driver Merged, NTFS3 Driver Sees Fixes & Minor Changes For Linux 7.1

([Linux Storage] 20 April 03:41 PM EDT NTFS In Linux 7.1)

Last week saw the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver.



Box64 0.4.2 Begins Working On POWER PPC64LE Backend, Support For SteamRT3 + Proton 11

([Linux Gaming] 20 April 01:16 PM EDT Box64 0.4.2)

While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures.



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There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need
the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the
world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the
long winter evenings.
-- Quentin Crisp