Svobodný software

Theo de Raadt announced today the release of OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release for this BSD operating system over the past two decades...

Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format...

A patch currently residing within Andrew Morton's "MM" memory management branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is an addition by Red Hat for introducing deferred THP insertion to khugepaged. This deferred Transparent Huge Page (THP) insertion aims to help reduce memory waste on Linux with some workloads...

The XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse boasts a 16K DPI sensor and retails for $65~80 USD but turns out it doesn't even work properly under Linux without a pending kernel patch...

The SHA-256 code within the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem is in the process of being refactoring so that it's available via the crypto's library API and also opening it up to support architecture-optimized implementations...

Mold 2.38 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to this open-source, high-speed linker...

Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening up in just one month, the new Zblock allocator was queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" tree of memory management material likely destined for the next kernel merge window. Zblock is showing much potential as a compressed slab memory allocator...

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been pursuing the Fair DRM Scheduler as a "fair" scheduling policy to help with multiple applications/processes aiming to make use of the GPU concurrently. With this week's v4 patch-set to the DRM Fair Scheduler there are some big code changes but overall looking well as a nice scheduling policy for multiple apps/games/processes wanting equal access to GPU resources...

With the Linux kernel now limiting 32-bit systems to 4GB of memory even with the "HIGHMEM" Kconfig option, an issue was uncovered where if the system was still populated with more memory than addressable by 32-bit systems, the kernel would crash. With the Linux 6.15-rc4 kernel due out on Sunday, this issue will be addressed...

A new Wayland-only feature merged for GNOME 49's Mutter is support for tablet pad relative dials. These dials found on some drawing tablets now allow for relative moment under the GNOME Wayland session when paired with recent libinput and libwacom releases...

As we near the end of April, KDE developers remain quite busy working on more enhancements for the Plasma 6.4 desktop while many of them were also meeting this week in Graz, Austria for further development and planning...

Following recent Vulkan 1.1 support within Mesa for the PanVK driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan driver support, Vulkan 1.2 is now being advertised...

This week Intel announced "200S Boost" for Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" K-Series desktop processors as effectively a new overclocking profile rolling out to existing Z890 motherboards via a BIOS update. Enabling the 200S Boost profile is said to help with low-latency workloads like gaming by allowing higher fabric / die-to-die / memory frequencies. While some Windows benchmarks have begun emerging for the Intel 200S Boost mode and some limited gains, I was curious about the performance under Linux so here are some 200S Boost benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K on Ubuntu 25.04.

Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support...

While last week Intel released an update Compute Runtime for GPU compute with the OpenCL and Level Zero APIs on Windows and Linux, today they released a new preview version for readying a shiny new feature: Ultra Low Latency Scheduling "ULLS" for Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics...

GCC 15.1 was just released as the newest annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. This first stable GCC 15 release brings a COBOL compiler front-end, many C and C++ language support improvements, support for new CPUs and ISA capabilities, better Rust programming language support, debugging enhancements, and a whole lot more...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted today by longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar are looking to remove support for "ancient" 32-bit CPUs. In particular, if these patches are accepted, the Linux kernel would be ending support for old i486 CPUs as well as early i586 CPU models...

Nearly two years ago patches for casefolding / case insensitive file and folder support on Bcachefs were posted by a Valve/Linux developer. That support was upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver but it turns out that it never properly worked. Patches now set for merging into the Linux 6.15 will fix that case insensitive file/folder opt-in support so that it is now properly supported...

One of the interesting new features merged to the Linux kernel last year was the DRM Panic infrastructure so that Linux can display an error screen akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" when encountering problems. With follow-on kernel releases it's been extended to add QR code error messages and other improvements. But DRM Panic does require the support/cooperation of the different Direct Rendering Manager drivers and so far Intel graphics haven't been supported...

Intel today released a new version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch in order to apply optimizations to PyTorch for benefiting Intel's hardware. With the Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.7 release, there is support for new large language models (LLMs) as well as various performance optimizations and other enhancements...