Queued up as part of the DeviceMapper dm-crypt changes for Linux 6.10 is adding a new "high priority" option.

Sent in to DRM-Next as part of last week's drm-misc-next changes is implementing support for tracking cleared free memory and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

April 2024 is now in the books after writing 257 original Linux/open-source-related news articles and another 13 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews. Here's a look back at the most exciting (popular) content from April.

Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel's more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It's been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23.

Redox OS as the from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system had a successful April with now having USB keyboards and mice now working with their USB HID driver.

Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic.

Last week Noctua announced the NH-L12Sx77 low-profile CPU cooler as effectively an upgraded version of their NH-L12s CPU cooler that is now slightly taller to offer better performance and improved system compatibility.

NVIDIA today released RTX Remix v0.5 as the newest version of this software for remastering old/classic games with path tracing. RTX Remix builds off DXVK and leverages NVIDIA Omniverse and other tech from the green giant like DLSS to enhance older games.

The release candidate of the GCC 14 compiler is available for testing as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

TUXEDO Computers a few weeks ago announced the first Linux laptop shipping with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840 series SoC and now they've announced another one powered by the latest Ryzen 7 8845HS.

Prominent open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged a new tantalizing set of patches that boost the 3D texturing performance for those using RDNA1 GPUs and older.

Plans to have official support for the Arm-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS sadly didn't pan out. But there is semi-working support available for running Ubuntu 24.04 on this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 powered laptop.

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.

Given the upstream Redis software licensing changes, Fedora is evaluating replacing Redis with the new Valkey project.

TornadoVM 1.0.4 is out today as the newest version of this solution for Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. TornadoVM allows for nice Java heterogeneous hardware support and with the TornadoVM 1.0.4 brings yet more features.

Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

Git 2.45 is out today as an important step forward for this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system.

The openSUSE Leap 15.6 based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 has graduated out of its beta phase and is onto the release candidate period. Notable with openSUSE Leap 15.6 is now having nice support for the Cockpit web-based server management solution.

As part of my Linux 6.9 benchmarking I've been trying out many hardware combinations and overall seeing nice performance out of this kernel that will debut as stable in the next 2~3 weeks. AMD EPYC 4th Gen performance is boosted, Intel Xeon Max sees some AI improvements, and as shown in some prior Intel Core Ultra performance benchmarks is enhanced as well. Here are some more benchmarks looking at the Intel Core Ultra 7 "Meteor Lake" performance on Linux 6.9 compared to the current Linux 6.8 stable kernel.

Merged last week to Mesa 24.2-devel was an important merge request for the Broadcom V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.