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)

Cloudflare Praises Golang PGO For Significant CPU Savings

([Programming] 19 May 06:47 AM EDT Profile Guided Optimizations)

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result.



EXT4 In Linux 6.10 Adds FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH Support

([Linux Storage] 19 May 06:36 AM EDT EXT4 + Linux 6.10)

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems.



Linux 6.10 Scheduler Changes Bring More Refinements

([Linux Kernel] 19 May 06:04 AM EDT Kernel Scheduler)

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior.



Linux Patch Posted For The Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset

([Hardware] 19 May 06:14 AM EDT Bigscreen Beyond)

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR.



Turbostat Gains New Features & New Hardware Support With Linux 6.10

([Hardware] 19 May 05:48 AM EDT Turbostat)

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.



SUSE's YaST Team Drops Cockpit With New Installer Code

([SUSE] 18 May 03:50 PM EDT Ditches Cockpit)

SUSE/openSUSE has been busy crafting a next-gen Linux installer that is a web-based installer and originally known as D-Installer but now going by the name Agama.



Linux 6.10 NFSD Brings Optimizations & Preps For New nfsdctl Utility

([Linux Storage] 18 May 09:53 AM EDT NFSD)

The Linux Network File System (NFS) server code (NFSD) is seeing a new Netlink protocol introduced in Linux 6.10 as part of laying the groundwork for the new "nfsdctl" utility.



Niri 0.1.6 Wayland Compositor Adds Interactive Window Resizing & Mouse View Scrolling

([Wayland] 18 May 09:08 AM EDT Niri 0.1.6)

Niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM and heavy on the animations/effects. Out this morning is Niri 0.1.6 as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor.



GNOME OS Working On A New Installer & Other Enhancements To Make It More Practical

([GNOME] 18 May 06:56 AM EDT GNOME OS)

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues providing the resources for various new GNOME desktop development initiatives. There are various efforts underway for new features and refinements with GNOME 47 in September and a renewed emphasis around GNOME OS.



Linux 6.10 x86 Instruction Decoder Prepares For APX & Other New Intel Instructions

([Intel] 18 May 06:46 AM EDT Performance Events)

The performance events updates were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. This pull adds support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and other new Intel CPU instructions to the x86 instruction decoder.



Linux 6.10 Preps For "When Things Go Seriously Wrong" On Bigger Servers

([Linux Kernel] 18 May 06:34 AM EDT Machine Check Exceptions)

While machine check exception (MCE) events tend to be uncommon, a change made by Intel engineers is accommodating the ability in the Linux kernel to store more machine check records for "when things go seriously wrong" on increasingly high core count servers.



KDE Apps Improving Experience When Running Outside Of Plasma

([KDE] 18 May 06:23 AM EDT KDE Improvements)

KDE development remains very busy ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 desktop release.



Wine 9.9 Brings ARM Improvements, Drops Obsolete WineD3D Features

([WINE] 17 May 08:37 PM EDT Wine 9.9)

Wine 9.9 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms.



Linux 6.10 Adds Support For Posted Interrupts On Bare Metal Hardware

([Hardware] 17 May 12:10 PM EDT Posted Interrupts On Bare Metal)

Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware.



Ubuntu 24.10 To See More Polishing, NVIDIA Wayland By Default & New Welcome Wizard

([Ubuntu] 17 May 10:00 AM EDT Ubuntu 24.10 Features)

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience.



Intel's OpenVINO Now Available In openSUSE

([SUSE] 17 May 09:48 AM EDT openSUSE + OpenVINO)

OpenSUSE is the first major Linux distribution to package up and offer Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit within its package repository.



Linux 6.10 Improves Performance For Opening Unencrypted Files

([Linux Storage] 17 May 08:37 AM EDT FSCRYPT)

FSCRYPT is the file-system encryption framework within the Linux kernel for supporting optional encryption on file-systems like EXT4, F2FS, and others. With Linux 6.10 an optimization is coming for enhancing the performance of opening files on file-systems supporting FSCRYPT-based encryption but when the files are unencrypted.



Linux 6.10 Wires Up More Compute Express Link "CXL" Functionality

([Hardware] 17 May 06:49 AM EDT Linux 6.10 CXL)

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem development continues to be led by Intel engineers and with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel there are yet more features in tow.



EROFS Adds Zstd & Btrfs Gets Minor Performance Work In Linux 6.10

([Linux Storage] 17 May 06:21 AM EDT EROFS + Btrfs Updates)

The EROFS and Btrfs file-systems saw their feature patches merged as part of the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window.



Intel Readies Xeon Phi Removal For GCC 15

([Intel] 17 May 06:32 AM EDT Dropping Xeon Phi)

For the GCC 14 compiler release is the deprecation of the Xeon Phi targets. With Intel Knights Landing and Knights Mill being end-of-life at Intel, they are working to do away with the GNU Compiler Collection support. A patch has been posted to drop the Xeon Phi ISAs with GCC 15.



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