Svobodný software

An Amazon/AWS engineer raised the alarms on Friday over the current Linux 7.0 development kernel leading to the throughput for the PostgreSQL database server being around half that of prior kernel versions. The culprit halving the PostgreSQL performance is known but a revert looks like it may not happen and currently suggesting that PostgreSQL may need to be adapted...

In addition to 3mdeb firmware engineers porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte EPYC Turin server motherboard, the staff at this firmware consulting company are also porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a modern Ryzen AM5 desktop motherboard. They continue making good strides with that quest for the first readily-available Ryzen desktop motherboard with open-source system firmware...

In the past few days was the release of FreeCAD 1.1 and SolveSpace 3.2 for open-source computer aided design (CAD) while now joining the party is Design 50 Alpha as a GNOME-aligned 2D CAD design tool...

KDE Plasma developers continue working on new features for Plasma 6.7 while continuing to land more fixes and hardening for the current Plasma 6.6 stable series...

OpenRazer 3.12 released in mid-March as the latest feature update to these open-source drivers for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is OpenRazer 3.12.1 for enabling two more Razer products on Linux plus shipping a couple fixes...

Wine 11.6 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

The Rust-based Redox OS operating system is preparing to land a new CPU scheduler thanks to work being carried out by open-source developer Akshit Gaur on modernizing the platform's process scheduling subsystem...

Intel today released their Linux NPU Driver 1.32 as the user-space driver components that interacts with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for supporting the NPU hardware with Core Ultra processors...

Most of my Intel Panther Lake benchmarking over the past two months for the new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware has been done with Ubuntu Linux given the pervasiveness of it, especially in the corporate/enterprise space. But for those looking at achieving even greater out-of-the-box Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake, the Arch Linux based CachyOS does a pretty fine job at further advancing the performance.

Following an April Fools' Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available...

With Linux 6.19 AMD GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.1 dGPUs now default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon Linux driver. For these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics cards it means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improved functionality in using this modern AMDGPU kernel graphics driver on Linux. One of the exceptions has been the GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri still defaulting to the older Radeon driver but a patch has been volleyed to make that change...

Meta's great Linux engineering team have been working through some fresh performance optimizations recently from optimizing /proc/interrupts outputs to renewing their investment in jemalloc. A new Linux kernel patch this week provides another optimization to avoid a possible situation of throttling the TCP throughput unnecessarily on Linux systems...

Developers working on the FreeBSD laptop initiative to make the FreeBSD operating system more suitable for running on modern laptop hardware have drafted their road-map of further action items they hope to accomplish in 2026...

Rob Clark on Thursday sent out the batch of MSM DRM driver feature changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. This new work for DRM-Next includes enhancements to the Adreno X2-85 GPU support as found within the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs plus various enhancements to existing Qualcomm graphics/display hardware...

Vulkan 1.4.348 released this morning as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.348 comes four new extensions...

A few Linux kernel releases have passed since there have been any new features to talk about for the AMD P-State driver for CPU frequency scaling / power management with modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. But for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel there are some new features now ready for mainline...

Sent out today were the networking subsystem fixes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel. These networking fixes in time for Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc7 release include addressing performance issues within the Qualcomm Ath11k and Ath12k WiFi drivers that have always existed ever since the drivers were upstreamed...

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source (MIT-licensed) software project.. the Agent Governance Toolkit. Microsoft is trying their hand at coming up with runtime security governance for autonomous AI agents...

Just over one year ago Intel Linux engineers began working on cache-aware load balancing for Linux or more commonly referred to as Cache Aware Scheduling. The functionality for helping modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors especially hasn't yet been upstreamed to the Linux kernel but yesterday the fourth version of these patches were posted for review...

With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here's a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 since its launch last year in going from Ubuntu 25.04 to Ubuntu 26.04.