Svobodný software

Ant Group and Alibaba have proposed PVM, the Pagetable Virtual Machine, as a new virtualization framework built upon the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. PVM does not require hardware-assisted virtualization while working with KVM-enabled software like Kata Containers...

Last July AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card in China with a reduced Navi 31 GPU. Beginning tomorrow, 27 February, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is being made available worldwide. Today the review embargo expires on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for the worldwide scope and within the US will be priced around $549 USD.

Released last June was the SDDM 0.20 display manager with experimental Wayland support and other enhancements after being in development for three years. Out this morning is SDDM 0.21 as another step toward SDDM 1.0 with improved Wayland support and other enhancements to this Qt-tooled display manager...

Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák after more than one decade working officially for AMD and years before that as an independent open-source contributor going back to the R300g days still has not run out of new performance optimizations to pursue. The most recent accomplishment for this leading Mesa contributor are some refinements to the OpenGL threading "glthread" code for lowering the memory footprint...

Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors...

When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver...

WayVNC 0.8 was released this weekend as the VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC attaches to wlroots-using compositors and creators virtual input devices and exposes the display via the RFB protocol for the lack of Wayland having any standardized VNC-type support for remote/network computing...

The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks...

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support...

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...

Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9...

Microsoft's in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution has routinely seen weekly-ish updates to this open-source code used within Azure, WSL, and other areas of the Redmond company. But it's been one month since the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 release... That changed Saturday night with a shiny new release...

GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input...

CachyOS 240224 was released today for this Arch Linux derived desktop distribution that focuses on being a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" with a variety of desktop options, employing LTO and other optimizations for packages, optional x86-64-v3 binaries, and other tuning to make for a speedy out-of-the-box Linux experience...

Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system...

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened...

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1...