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)

Archinstall 2.8.3 Arch Linux Installer Adds COSMIC Desktop Option

([Arch Linux] 25 August 06:05 AM EDT Archinstall 2.8.3)

Just one week after the Archinstall 2.8.2 update, another release of this command-line driven Arch Linux installer is now available for quick and easy Arch deployments.



GNU DDD 3.4.1 Released As GUI Front-End To GDB

([GNU] 24 August 03:12 PM EDT DDD 3.4.1)

As the first new release in more than one year, GNU DDD 3.4.1 is now available as a GUI front-end to the GNU Debugger (GDB).



Mesa's PanVK Vulkan Driver Prepares For Arm Mali Valhall Support

([Mesa] 24 August 10:00 AM EDT PanVK + Valhall)

Mesa's PanVK driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Arm Mali graphics is preparing to support newer "Valhall" hardware.



Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs

([Linux Storage] 24 August 06:45 AM EDT Bcachefs Regrets)

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.



FreeBSD 13.4 Nears Release With Modernized DVD Package Set, Driver Updates

([BSD] 24 August 06:31 AM EDT FreeBSD 13.4)

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 has been released ahead of its planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series delivers the latest and greatest, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still depending upon a FreeBSD 13 base.



KDE Lands Per-Monitor Brightness Controls & Better KWin HDR Tone Mapping

([KDE] 24 August 06:10 AM EDT Plasma 6.2 Ahead)

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 6.2 soft feature freeze happening next week, KDE developers have been preparing some last minut features for the desktop.



Wine 9.16 Begins Working On Driver Store Implementation, Pbuffer Support For Wayland

([WINE] 23 August 08:23 PM EDT Wine 9.16)

Wine 9.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications on Linux.



Google Making Progress On 16KB Page Size For Android

([Google] 23 August 01:19 PM EDT Android 16KB Page Size)

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage.



Bochs DRM Linux Driver Being Modernized - Better Performance For QEMU Display

([Virtualization] 23 August 12:48 PM EDT Bochs DRM)

The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization.



Vulkan 1.3.294 Introduces New Pipeline Binary Extension

([Vulkan] 23 August 08:40 AM EDT VK_KHR_pipeline_binary)

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary.



Big Video Encoding Rework Lands For AMD Open-Source Mesa 24.3 Driver

([Radeon] 23 August 06:34 AM EDT Video Encoding Rework)

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding.



Intel Preps More Xe2 Lunar Lake & Battlemage Driver Code For Linux 6.12

([Intel] 23 August 06:47 AM EDT Intel Xe2 Preparations)

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window.



AMD Prepares Sound Open Firmware Driver For ACP7.0 Hardware

([AMD] 23 August 06:20 AM EDT ACP7.0 SOF)

As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support.



System76 Pop!_OS Scheduler Now Detects Hyprland, Lands Various Fixes

([Operating Systems] 23 August 12:00 AM EDT PopOS-Scheduler)

In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS.



NILFS2 File-System Seeing More Fixes, Additional Ioctls Wired Up Ahead Of Linux 6.12

([Linux Storage] 22 August 05:01 PM EDT NILFS2)

While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled.



Several Newer Gaming Handheld Devices To See Linux Sensor Monitoring Support

([Hardware] 22 August 04:03 PM EDT OXP-Sensors)

The upstream Linux "oxp-sensors" driver began as a driver for supporting the sensors on the OneXPlayer handheld. With time this driver has been extended to support more handheld gaming consoles and a new patch enables support for several more devices.



KDE Gear 24.08 Brings Many App Enhancements & New Features

([KDE] 22 August 12:16 PM EDT KDE Gear 24.08)

KDE Gear 24.08 has been released for this collection of KDE applications that pair with the Plasma desktop.



Ubuntu Will Be Skipping Non-Critical Linux Kernel Updates For September

([Ubuntu] 22 August 08:37 AM EDT Delaying Non-Critical Fixes)

With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October.



Mozilla Developing Whisperfile For Local Audio-To-Text Translation

([Mozilla] 22 August 06:59 AM EDT Whisperfile)

The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations.



Fwupd 1.9.24 Adds Support For More Mediatek & Parade Tech Devices

([LVFS] 22 August 06:20 AM EDT Fwupd 1.9.24)

While celebrating the 9th birthday of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released a new version of the Fwupd firmware updating utility.



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