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)

Microsoft Contributes Windows On ARM64 "aarch64-w64-mingw32" Support To GCC 15

([Microsoft] 7 May 01:44 PM EDT GCC aarch64-w64-mingw32)

Microsoft engineers have contributed Windows On ARM64 support to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the new "aarch64-w64-mingw32" target.



Apple Announces The M4 Chip With Up To 10 CPU Cores

([Apple] 7 May 11:00 AM EDT Apple M4)

While rolling out the new iPad Pro tablets today, Apple announced the M4 as their newest in-house silicon design.



Red Hat Announces RHEL AI

([Red Hat] 7 May 10:30 AM EDT RHEL AI)

Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado... Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI.



Raspberry Pi Connect Reaches Beta For Remote Raspberry Pi Access

([Raspberry Pi] 7 May 09:58 AM EDT Raspberry Pi Connect)

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the beta availability of Raspberry Pi Connect as a means of securely having remote GUI access to your Remote Pi from a web browser.



Vulkan 1.3.284 Released With Another Extension To Help Zink

([Vulkan] 7 May 08:44 AM EDT VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes)

Vulkan 1.3.284 was published on Monday with only a few changes but bearing one notable new extension.



AMD Posts Patches For Improving Heterogeneous Core Type CPUs On Linux

([AMD] 7 May 08:23 AM EDT "Addresses Critical Issues")

AMD engineers posted a new set of Linux driver patches on Tuesday that "addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types" while using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.



Fedora 41 Approved To Make Package Builds More Reproducible

([Fedora] 7 May 06:48 AM EDT Reproducible Package Builds)

In addition to approving -O3 optimized Python builds, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESC)) this week unanimously approved a Fedora 41 change proposal for making RPM package builds more reproducible.



Linux 6.10 Goes Ahead In Removing Sysctl Sentinel Bloat

([Linux Kernel] 7 May 06:32 AM EDT Savings Per Array)

Over the past year there's been much work happening within the Linux kernel's sysctl code for clearing up ~64 bytes of bloat per array throughout the kernel by dropping the last sysctl "sentinel" entry at the end of each array. This also helps in reducing the build time of the kernel and is a nice improvement. With Linux 6.10, the sysctl sentinel clearing throughout different subsystems is set to happen.



AMD Core Performance Boost For Linux Getting Per-CPU Core Controls

([AMD] 7 May 06:19 AM EDT AMD Core Performance Boost)

For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis.



GCC 14.1 Compiler Released - Intel APX & AVX10.1 Support, AMD Zen 5 Target & -fhardened

([GNU] 7 May 06:07 AM EDT GCC 14.1)

GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions.



ECC DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-5200 Memory Performance For AMD Ryzen Zen 4

([Memory] 6 May 02:30 PM EDT 6 Comments)

Back when looking at the AMD Ryzen 7000 series budget server performance last year, DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs were used with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T Ryzen server given that's what was broadly available at the time. Since then there's been more ECC UDIMMs coming to market above DDR5-4800 speeds. Recently I bought a pair of Kingston Server Premier 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 ECC CL46 UDIMMs (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) and that's the focus of today's tests. For those curious if the faster ECC UDIMMs are worthwhile compared to the commonality of DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs, these benchmarks are for you.



AlmaLinux 9.4 Released With Support For Hardware Deprecated By RHEL

([Operating Systems] 6 May 02:02 PM EDT AlmaLinux 9.4)

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 stable, the AlmaLinux crew today announced AlmaLinux 9.4.



PowerPC 40x Processor Support To Be Dropped From The Linux Kernel

([Hardware] 6 May 09:54 AM EDT PowerPC 400 Series)

In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too.



Fedora Cleared To Build Python Package With "-O3" Optimizations

([Fedora] 6 May 09:38 AM EDT Fedora Python -O3 Optimized)

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the "-O3" compiler optimization level rather than the "-O2" default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance.



Linux 6.10 To Drop Support For Very Old DEC Alpha Hardware

([Hardware] 6 May 08:50 AM EDT DEC Alpha)

The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier.



Framework Laptop EC Driver Being Prepared For Linux

([Hardware] 6 May 06:40 AM EDT Framework Laptop Embedded Controller)

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.



FreeBSD 14.1 Beta Released For Testing

([BSD] 6 May 06:16 AM EDT FreeBSD 14.1)

The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November's FreeBSD 14.0 release.



NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.12 Brings Fixes, Chrome Compatibility Work

([Multimedia] 6 May 06:02 AM EDT nvidia-vaapi-driver)

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs.



Dillo 3.1 Lightweight Web Browser Released After Nine Years

([Free Software] 6 May 05:51 AM EDT Dillo 3.1)

Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015... Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine.



GIMP 2.10.38 Released As What Might Be The Last Of GIMP 2

([Free Software] 6 May 12:00 AM EDT GIMP 2.10.38)

GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the "possibly last" GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes.



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"Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love
you knowing nothing?"
-- Lloyd Cole and the Commotions