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 6.17 Readies EDAC Support For Intel Granite Rapids D, Wildcat Lake, Raptor Lake HX

([Intel] 12 July 07:13 AM EDT Error Detection And Correction)

In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel.



NVIDIA Publishes RTXNTC 0.7 Beta For Neural Texture Compression

([NVIDIA] 12 July 06:55 AM EDT NVIDIA RTXNTC 0.7)

NVIDIA software engineers ended out the week by releasing a new beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) SDK. The RTXNTC software is NVIDIA's interesting solution for compressing material texture sets with very promising results for helping to reduce game data sizes moving forward.



GNOME Builder & Digital Wellbeing Code Improved This Week

([GNOME] 12 July 06:43 AM EDT This Week in GNOME)

On top of this week's release of the GNOME 49 Alpha, other application improvements and more came about in the past few days.



KDE Preps More Crash KWin Crash Fixes, New Feature Work For Plasma 6.5

([KDE] 12 July 06:13 AM EDT KDE Mid-July)

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap of all interesting things and fixes merged for the week to Plasma.



Wine 10.12 Released With Experimental EGL Backend For The X11 Driver

([WINE] 11 July 08:48 PM EDT Wine 10.12)

Wine 10.12 has been uncorked as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems.



Attack Vector Controls Could Be Ready For Linux 6.17 Introduction

([Linux Security] 11 July 01:02 PM EDT Attack Vector Controls)

The AMD engineering led work on Attack Vector Controls for the Linux kernel could be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel with the remaining patches now being queued within a TIP branch.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 Ray-Tracing Performance Improving With Mesa 25.2

([Display Drivers] 11 July 09:48 AM EDT 17 Comments)

With the feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 25.2 expected to take place next week and kick off the release process for this quarterly Mesa 3D version to debut as stable in August, I've begun running more benchmarks of this latest code on popular GPUs. As it pertains to the newest AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics processors, the most exciting area with Mesa 25.2 are the Vulkan ray-tracing improvements. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the upcoming Mesa 25.2 performance for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card on Linux.



Smarter Cache Flushing For AMD SEV KVM Guest VMs Expected For Linux 6.17

([AMD] 11 July 08:46 AM EDT Optimized Cache Flushing)

Going back several months have been patches out of Google to optimize AMD cache flushing for KVM-based Linux guest virtual machines when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). As anticipated, that AMD SEV cache flushing optimization work looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle.



Improved Debugging Support For AMDGPU Driver Expected For Linux 6.17

([Radeon] 11 July 08:10 AM EDT AMDGPU DebugFS Improvement)

Sent out on Thursday along with Intel's huge Xe driver pull request with new features was the drm-misc-next material for the week. Notable with the drm-misc-next code were actually a set of AMDGPU driver patches to enhance the debugging with the information exposed via the DebugFS interface.



RadeonSI Begins Upstreaming Its OpenGL Mesh Shader Support

([Mesa] 11 July 06:48 AM EDT GL_EXT_mesh_shader)

OpenGL doesn't receive nearly as much love these days as the Vulkan API, but over the past several months there's been at least one notable new extension in the works: cross-vendor mesh shader support with the pending GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension. Beginning today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D upstreaming process has begun for introducing mesh shader support for this Radeon OpenGL driver.



QuestDB 9.0 Released For High Performance, Time-Series Database

([Programming] 11 July 06:35 AM EDT QuestDB 9.0)

QuestDB 9.0 debuted today as the latest major update to this high performance, time-series database that is open-source under an Apache 2.0 license. QuestDB continues to be built using a combination of Java, C++, and Rust for being an interesting time-series database.



GCC 12.5 Compiler Released To End Out The GCC 12 Series With 241+ Bug Fixes

([GNU] 11 July 06:23 AM EDT GCC 12)

For those who seldom update to new compiler versions, GCC 12.5 was released today as the newest and final update to the GCC 12 compiler that debuted back in 2022.



Intel Readies Big Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.17: Multi-Device Prep, SR-IOV, WCL

([Intel] 10 July 08:59 PM EDT Intel Xe Driver)

Intel has some terrific improvements lined up for their modern "Xe" kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. New hardware support, SR-IOV preparations for Battlemage, other Intel Battlemage work, and also preparations for the upcoming multi-device support.



NovaCustom Launching An Intel Meteor Lake NUC Box Running On Dasharo/Coreboot

([Hardware] 10 July 08:14 PM EDT NovaCustom NUC Box)

For those interested in a small form factor PC running on the open-source Coreboot firmware, Netherlands-based vendor NovaCustom is launching an Intel Meteor Lake powered NUC box running on the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot.



OpenCL 3.0.19 Released With SPIR-V Queries & Android Hardware Buffer Extensions

([Standards] 10 July 03:23 PM EDT OpenCL 3.0.19)

The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.19 documentation as the latest specification for the OpenCL 3.0 compute API.



Nouveau NAK Lands A Big Improvement For NVIDIA Kepler GPUs: As Much As 2.5x Faster

([Nouveau] 10 July 01:14 PM EDT Nouveau NAK)

Merged today to the open-source NVIDIA "NAK" compiler code within Mesa 25.2 is Kepler instruction scheduling. This real instruction scheduling support for GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors can provide some significant performance benefits in select workloads.



Linux 6.15.6, 6.12.37 LTS & Other Stable Kernels Deliver TSA Mitigations

([Linux Kernel] 10 July 11:24 AM EDT Linux Stable Kernels)

Greg Kroah-Hartman just released the Linux 6.15.6 point release as well as the Linux 6.12.37 LTS kernel and new point releases in prior-year Long Term Support kernel versions. The main headline of today's stable kernel releases are picking up the mitigations for the Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) mitigations that were disclosed this week for AMD processors.



Blender 4.5 RC1 Released With Much Better Vulkan Support

([Free Software] 10 July 10:04 AM EDT Blender 4.5)

The release candidate of the Blender 4.5 3D modeling software is now available for testing. There are many great improvements to find with Blender 4.5 and this new version is all the more important in being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release for this popular cross-platform 3D modeling software.



LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 Released With Various File Performance Improvements

([LibreOffice] 10 July 08:38 AM EDT LibreOffice 25.8 RC1)

The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements.



Canonical Releases Multipass 1.16 As Now Fully Open-Source Project

([Ubuntu] 10 July 08:25 AM EDT Multipass 1.16)

Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software.



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There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the
sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that
hits your neighbors' homes, too.
-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"