Svobodný software

The long-in-development work on Cache Aware Scheduling looks like it will come to a head soon with it looking like Cache Aware Scheduling will land for Linux 7.2. Ahead of the upcoming merge window I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at different areas where this feature is shining.

The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn't enjoy much adoption over the years and is now looking at possible removal from the Linux kernel...

The Raspberry Pi hardware monitoring driver "RASPBERRYPI-HWMON" is being extended to allow exposing voltage measurements on these ARM single board computers...

A feature that has been worked on for a while now by Intel Linux engineers is for allowing run-time updates of the Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) module without having to reboot the running server. For Linux 7.2 it looks like that feature will be all-set for allowing the easier roll-out of security updates and the like for this confidential computing capability on modern Intel Xeon servers...

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today the release of Workshop as their new Snap-based application for launching development environments with ease...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project working to implement binary compatibility for computer programs and drivers for Microsoft Windows now has experimental support for running on 64-bit ARM...

It looks like Google's Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" could finally be enjoying nice native Wayland support soon!..

NVIDIA's Vera data center CPU isn't ramping up until later this year but I recently had the opportunity to try out this new ARM-based CPU designed for agentic AI workloads. NVIDIA's Vera CPU with its in-house-designed Olympus CPU cores ends up packing a heavy-hitting punch with competitiveness to Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs that I have never seen out of any other ARM or non-x86_64 processors. Continue on with these early benchmarks of the NVIDIA Vera CPU on Linux.

The AlmaLinux project announced the releases today of both AlmaLinux OS 9.8 and AlmaLinux OS 10.2...

GlobalPlatform announced today the launch of Pavona as an open-source silicon ecosystem backed by founding members such as Meta, Qualcomm, Tenstorrent, Winbond, and the University of Oxford, among others...

NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch...

A set if 17 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for introducing a new tool in the kernel source tree, pmtctl. This new pmtctl tool is for interfacing with Intel Platform Monitoring Technology...

The past few Linux kernel cycles there has been experimental support for large folios with Btrfs while for Linux 7.2 it looks like this modern file-system will be taking things further with huge folios...

Linux cryptography expert Eric Biggers of Google posted a set of patches on Monday for providing proof-of-concept support for ML-KEM and X-Wing for post-quantum cryptography...

Back in 2021 Facebook open-sourced CacheLib as a new caching engine. Back in 2021 it was done to help scale services with non-volatile memory caching to offset increasing DRAM costs at the time. Now in 2026, DRAM memory prices are astronomical compared to 2021 pricing given the AI surge. And, surprisingly, Meta is out with a new CacheLib release after being absent the past two years...

In addition to the release today of Sway 1.12 for that i3-inspired Wayland compositor, Labwc 0.20 is also out today as another wlroots-based Wayland compositor...

Sway 1.12 is out today as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor powered by the wlroots library...

Merged today for what will become Mesa 26.2 next quarter is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now supporting the VK_KHR_shader_fma extension...

An exciting Intel innovation expected to be added for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is introducing the new USB4STREAM protocol for USB4/Thunderbolt as a "super simple" way to "basically just transfer raw packets from one host to another". This can be useful for quickly backing up a system from one host to another, sharing of web cameras or other peripherals across systems, or other environments where not having networking or wanting to avoid the traditional Linux networking stack...

With Linux 7.1 ISDN, ham radio, and other old network code was removed in lightening the kernel source tree by around 138 thousand lines of code. Some additional Linux networking code cleaning is expected for Linux 7.2 with the ISA and PCMCIA hardware around ARCnet set to be removed...