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Canonical engineer Till Kamppeter was at FOSDEM 2024 last weekend in Belgium to talk up the Snap packaging format spearheaded for Ubuntu Linux as well as their ongoing work around Ubuntu Core Desktop for providing an all-Snap based operating system...

When it comes to open-source compiler toolchain components and more broadly often unsung heroes in the low-level open-source space, one of the most interesting successes in recent years has been the Mold linker that has proven itself a viable alternative to GNU ld and Gold or LLVM's lld linkers. Mold is already in great shape and typically proving itself well while moving ahead they are working toward kernel/embedded programming support as one of the last grounds to tackle...

AMD has merged updated video processing engine "VPElib" code into their Mesa driver with their latest feature work...

AMD engineers on Monday posted a few new patch series for enabling some updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within their open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. This new IP is presumably part of the ongoing hardware enablement work for their next-generation RDNA4 graphics...

Intel Arrow Lake platform support has been merged to Mesa 24.1 for providing the ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) open-source drivers with support for the next-generation Intel Core integrated graphics...

Last month it was noted on Phoronix that Canonical's kernel team is looking at folding their low-latency kernel optimizations into their generic kernel builds. Right now Ubuntu maintains a separate "lowlatency" kernel flavor with Kconfig tweaks in the name of low-latency responsiveness as an alternative to their "generic" kernel default, but for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS it continues looking like they'll move forward with this change of incorporating the changes into their default kernel build...

While there are a lot of Wayland compositors out there that aren't too different from each other in terms of features, one of the more unique ones is Greenfield. The Greenfield Wayland compositor has been out there for a few years now as an in-browser HTML5-based solution that is continuing to prove itself capable and even fast enough for handling Linux gaming...

Mozilla's latest non-browser foray and attempt at generating additional revenue is Mozilla Monitor Plus, what formerly was known as the free service Firefox Monitor for monitoring of exposed personal information such as email addresses as part of security breaches to various web services...

With Ryzen AI found in the very newest Ryzen processors, AMD began making use of IP from their acquisition of Xilinx. Today though AMD is announcing their Embedded+ Architecture that is taking the marriage of AMD and Xilinx tech much further by combining the wares onto a single PCB for new embedded applications as an integrated compute platform.

Last year at FOSDEM 2023 there was a presentation on the state of AMD open-source firmware and since then a lot has changed from the AMD openSIL announcement to new platforms being in the process of being enabled. At FOSDEM 2024 this past weekend in Brussels was a fresh look at the current state of AMD open-source firmware...

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high-performance Java Virtual Machine formerly developed by IBM as the J9 VM...

Stemming from work done at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better handling hypervisor live updates, a "request for comments" patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list for Pkernfs. The Pkernfs proposal was first detailed publicly by AWS last year and is for persisting guest memory and kernel/device state safely across Kexec...

When it comes to making use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel, one of the areas where it makes a lot of sense is for the video codec drivers given the amount of unknown/untrusted data submitted by user-space for video processing and it being a wide attack surface for bad actors. With the memory safety features of Rust this can be a big benefit to such drivers and Collabora is currently experimenting with a virtual codec driver Rust implementation to prove the concept...

Overnight the latest fixes to the Linux 6.8 kernel were merged including two that are "serious" and will be back-ported to the existing stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well...

Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release...

Daniel Kiper with Oracle has provided a status update on current GRUB bootloader development activities, a look ahead, and plans for hopefully having out the next release in November...

When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console...

Google is announcing today they are contributing $1M USD to the Rust Foundation to focus on enhancing interoperability between the C++ and Rust programming languages...

Last week the new AMD Ryzen 8000G series processors with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics became available in retail channels. The initial launch-day Linux testing was focused on the Ryzen 7 8700G processor, which showed great uplift for the integrated graphics over the Ryzen 5000G series with Vega/GFX9 graphics and the Ryzen 7000 series with their cut-down RDNA2 integrated graphics. In today's article the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G is the focus of the Linux testing along with an expanded set of comparison processors re-tested.

Ahead of any processors being released with support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and Advanced Vector Extensions 10 (AVX10), Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution is already beginning to roll-out binaries compiled for APX+AVX10 use...