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)

Linux BHI Mitigation Being Tweaked Following 12% Database Performance Hit

([Linux Security] 20 April 08:00 AM EDT Native BHI)

A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors.



Open-Source "Terakan" Vulkan Driver For Radeon HD 6000 Series Shown On Windows

([Radeon] 20 April 06:41 AM EDT Terakan)

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows.



AMD Sends In More Kernel Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 6.10

([Radeon] 20 April 06:21 AM EDT Linux 6.10 AMDGPU)

Following last week's AMDGPU pull to DRM-Next preparing more next-gen GPU support and other updates for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window, another batch of feature changes were sent out on Friday ahead of this next kernel cycle.



KDE Developers Work Through More Bug Fixes & Features For Plasma 6.1

([KDE] 20 April 06:06 AM EDT KDE This Week)

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week.



Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements

([WINE] 19 April 08:34 PM EDT Wine 9.7)

Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms.



Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries

([Mozilla] 19 April 02:56 PM EDT ARM64 Firefox)

While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change.



Git 2.45 Begins Landing Code For SHA1 & SHA256 Interoperability For Repositories

([Programming] 19 April 01:54 PM EDT Git 2.45-rc0 Released)

Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories.



Godot's Vulkan Backend Seeing Better Performance, 10~20% Reduction In Frame Times

([Linux Gaming] 19 April 01:00 PM EDT Godot Better Vulkan)

The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users.



Miracle-WM 0.2 Released For Mir-Based Wayland Compositor

([Wayland] 19 April 12:02 PM EDT Miracle-WM 0.2)

Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management.



Linux 6.10 Preps A Kernel Panic Screen - Sort Of A "Blue Screen of Death"

([Linux Kernel] 19 April 10:09 AM EDT DRM Panic Handler)

While systemd 255 last year introduced a "blue screen of death" inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it's not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set to be introduced now with Linux 6.10 is a parallel "blue screen of death" like error presenting experience with the introduction of the DRM panic handler.



Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 Brings Improved OpenCL/OpenGL Sharing

([Intel] 19 April 09:42 AM EDT 24.13.29138.7)

As the first new release to Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes.



Tow-Boot 2023.07 U-Boot Distribution Released With New Board Support

([Free Software] 19 April 08:45 AM EDT Tow-Boot 2023.07-007)

It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader.



Rockchip NPU Open-Source Driver Taking Shape, Will Aim For Upstream Accel Driver

([Hardware] 19 April 06:36 AM EDT Rockchip NPU)

It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort.



Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 Brings VP9 Fix & AV1 Refinements

([Intel] 19 April 06:23 AM EDT oneVPL)

Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection.



Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release Next Week

([Fedora] 18 April 02:39 PM EDT Fedora 40)

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.



Rust-Written LAVD Kernel Scheduler Shows Promising Results For Linux Gaming

([Linux Gaming] 18 April 01:35 PM EDT Rust-Written, BPF-Based Scheduler)

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.



Ubuntu 24.04 Boosts Performance, Outperforming Windows 11 On The AMD Ryzen Framework 16 Laptop

([Operating Systems] 18 April 11:25 AM EDT 42 Comments)

With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation.



openSUSE Factory Achieves Bit-By-Bit Reproducible Builds

([SUSE] 18 April 10:13 AM EDT openSUSE Packages Are Reproducible)

While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds.



Intel Preps Adaptive Sync SDP, Lunar Lake Display & More DG2 PCI IDs In Linux 6.10

([Intel] 18 April 08:45 AM EDT Intel Kernel Graphics Driver)

On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel's open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality.



Autodafe 0.2 Released For Freeing Your Project From Autotools

([Programming] 18 April 07:00 AM EDT Autodafe)

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."



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A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary.
Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now
has no excuse for further procrastination.