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 6.16 Bringing A Fix For Old Intel Haswell Graphics

([Intel] 8 May 06:28 AM EDT Linux 6.16 Kernel Graphics Driver Fixes)

With the Linux 6.15-rc6 kernel release due out on Sunday, we're hitting the transition point where the focus on DRM kernel graphics drivers for Linux 6.16 is shifting from feature work to bug-fixing ahead of this next merge window. As such sent out today were drm-misc-next and drm-intel-gt-next pull requests focused on preparing various kernel graphics/display driver fixes for the new code coming to Linux 6.16. The Intel pull request today even contains a fix for aging Intel Haswell graphics.



DragonFlyBSD Sees Progress On UVC Webcam Support

([BSD] 8 May 06:11 AM EDT DragonFlyBSD Webcamera)

For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system.



Mesa 25.2 Merges AMD Support For Setting Queue Priorities

([Radeon] 8 May 05:55 AM EDT AMDGPU Queue Priorities)

Going along with new AMDGPU kernel driver patches on their way to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.16, the Mesa 25.2 user-space driver code has landed the infrastructure for being able to set queue priorities as well as secure queues.



Python 3.14 Reaches Beta With New Tail-Call Interpreter For Better Performance

([Programming] 7 May 08:21 PM EDT Python 3.14 Beta 1)

Python 3.14 Beta 1 is now available in working toward this next major Python release due out in early October.



Intel Teases New Arc Pro Graphics Cards Ahead Of Computex

([Intel] 7 May 06:43 PM EDT Intel Arc Pro)

Intel is teasing new Arc Pro graphics cards coming to market.



New GNOME Executive Director Named: Steven Deobald

([GNOME] 7 May 02:12 PM EDT Steven Deobald)

Last July it was announced Holly Million was stepping down as the GNOME Foundation's Exeuctive Director after less than a year at the helm. Richard Littauer took over as interim Executive Director while this week a new GNOME Foundation Executive Director was hired.



Mesa 25.1 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements

([Mesa] 7 May 01:23 PM EDT Mesa 25.1)

Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems.



Fwupd 2.0.9 Released With Firmware Updating Support For Intel Arc Battlemage

([LVFS] 7 May 12:35 PM EDT Fwupd 2.0.9)

Following his recent PremDay talk on LVFS/Fwupd, Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems.



Raspberry Pi OS Updated With More Wayland Work, Likely The Last Based On Debian 12

([Raspberry Pi] 7 May 09:48 AM EDT Raspberry Pi OS)

Raspberry Pi today announced the latest update to their Raspberry Pi OS, which continues to be based on Debian Linux and likely their last major release before migrating from a Debian 12 base to Debian 13 later in the year.



AMD Strix Point & Intel Lunar Lake: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 25.04 Linux Performance

([Operating Systems] 7 May 08:45 AM EDT 22 Comments)

Last month was a fresh look at the Intel Lunar Lake graphics performance between Windows and Linux while this article is Microsoft Windows 11 Pro vs. Ubuntu 25.04 again but looking at the CPU performance between these competing operating systems. For additional reference, some of the recently completed AMD Strix Point Windows vs. Linux benchmarks were also included for additional insight.



Loongson To Up Linux Kernel Limit To 2,048 LoongArch CPU Cores

([Hardware] 7 May 08:24 AM EDT 2048 LoongArch CPU Cores)

Currently when building the Linux kernel for LoongArch processors there is a maximum limit of 256 CPU cores supported but with a pending patch that limit would be upped to 2,048 CPU cores.



Linux 6.16 To Introduce Block Write Streams For NVMe Flexible Data Placement "FDP"

([Linux Storage] 7 May 06:31 AM EDT NVMe FDP)

Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has queued up a set of patches being worked on the past number of months around block write streams for making use of NVMe SSDs supporting the NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP) specification.



Intel Introducing QAT "GEN6" Driver To The Linux Kernel

([Intel] 7 May 06:12 AM EDT Intel QuickAssist)

Intel has readied a new "qat_6xxx" driver for the Linux kernel for supporting QAT GEN6 devices with QuickAssist Technology. QAT GEN6 will presumably be found with upcoming Xeon 6 Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids processors while the Linux kernel driver should be introduced for Linux 6.16.



Intel P-State Energy Aware Scheduling May Be Ready For Lunar Lake

([Intel] 7 May 05:55 AM EDT Intel P-State EAS)

Going back to last year there have been patches for adapting the Intel P-State Linux driver with support for Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as what began as an Arm big.LITTLE feature but since being explored for use by the Intel P-State driver for hybrid CPUs without SMT which for the moment means Lunar Lake SoCs. A new version of the patches were posted on Tuesday and likely to be the last refinement to this patch series.



Valve Releases Updated Proton 10.0 Beta For Testing

([Valve] 6 May 03:47 PM EDT Proton 10.0-1d)

Last week Valve introduced Proton 10.0 beta as the newest version of their Wine-derived software for Steam Play that enables countless Windows games to run well for Linux gamers on the desktop and with the extremely popular Steam Deck. Out today is another Proton 10.0 beta update with some additional bug and regression fixes over what was shipped last week.



RISC-V LLVM Scheduler Tuning For SpacemiT-X60 On Clang Yields 4~18% Speedups

([LLVM] 6 May 03:34 PM EDT Faster RISC-V Performance)

The SpacemiT-X60 RISC-V SoC can enjoy some very healthy performance improvements with scheduler definitions now merged for the LLVM/Clang 21 compiler.



Microsoft Welcomes Fedora Linux As An Official WSL Distro

([Microsoft] 6 May 12:12 PM EDT Fedora Linux + Windows WSL)

Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines.



Ampere Computing Soft Announces AmpereOne M With 12 Channel DDR5 Memory

([Hardware] 6 May 11:34 AM EDT AmpereOne M)

Ampere Computing last year talked up AmpereOne M for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 192 cores up from the 8-channel DDR5 memory found with the initial AmpereOne processors. They said at the time AmpereOne M would be shipping in Q4-2024. Now half way into 2025, it looks like they quietly announced the AmpereOne M processors.



Kurchu Tool Taking Shape For Assembling Fedora / CentOS Linux Distro ISOs

([Operating Systems] 6 May 11:05 AM EDT CentOS Kurchu)

As an alternative to the likes of the Pungi tool, Kurchu is a newer project within the CentOS/Fedora space for assembling content collections or ISO images of Linux distribution builds. Kurchu is already seeing use by the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for assembling their images while additional functionality continues to be worked on for those wanting to craft their own Fedora/CentOS install images.



Intel's Clear Linux Demonstrates Software Optimization Benefits On AMD EPYC 9005 Series

([Computers] 6 May 12:00 PM EDT 11 Comments)

With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.



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There must be at least 500,000,000 rats in the United States; of course,
I never heard the story before.