Svobodný software

Thanks to the Canonical decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream Linux kernels in Ubuntu releases moving forward, Ubuntu 24.10 shipping in October will have the Linux 6.11 kernel that is debuting as stable in mid-September. Canonical's kernel engineers are currently preparing for rolling out that new kernel version in the Oracular Oriole archive...

The LLVM Fortran "Flang" compiler effort has been a long time coming over the years with this programming language continuing to be popular among some HPC codebases and other applications. The "Flang-New" compiler code has been maturing nicely and is looking like soon it could be possibly be renamed to Flang...

The AMD PMC driver used for the SoC power management controller already supports the initial AMD Zen 5 SoCs but new patches coming in as "fixes" for the Linux 6.11 kernel extend the coverage for some upcoming AMD platforms...

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the Xe Direct Rendering Manager that is becoming the default kernel graphics driver beginning with Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware (it currently works as an experimental option with existing Intel graphics hardware going back to Tigerlake). The latest work coming out of Intel is their latest push on enabling GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

Azure Linux as Microsoft's in-house Linux operating system that is used for a variety of purposes is out with a new feature release...

Being merged for Mesa 24.3 to the Freedreno open-source Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now supporting the Adreno 621 and 505 graphics processors...

Coming as a surprise this afternoon is Microsoft deciding to contribute the Mono Project to be stewarded by the Wine development community...

For those planning on upgrading to an AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series Zen 5 desktop for Linux use, here are some benchmarks I recently carried out of several different DDR5 memory kits with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X while looking at the Linux performance under a variety of different workloads.

As the successor to KOffice, Calligra is KDE's office and graphics suite. Today marks the release of Calligra Office 4.0 with updates to the Words word processor, Sheets spreadsheet, Stage presentation, and Karbon vector graphics programs...

LinkedIn has replaced CentOS as their default server operating system choice with Azure Linux to power all of their server needs...

AMD for months has already been working on heterogeneous core topology optimizations for Linux within the AMD P-State CPUFreq driver and other heterogeneous CPU topology improvements for dealing with Ryzen systems sporting a mix of "classic" (full) cores with the denser "C" cores. Today though they've announced a brand new "Heterogeneous Core Driver" for further enhancing Linux support for AMD platforms sporting a combination of core types...

A big set of patches have been submitted for DRM-Next of "new stuff" to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and the AMDKFD compute driver with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle...

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware...

Oracle engineers continue working on the TrenchBoot initiative to advance boot security and integrity for Linux. The tenth iteration of the TrenchBoot patches were posted this week as it works its way toward the mainline kernel...

Miracle-WM as the Mir-powered Wayland compositor inspired by i3 and Sway is out with another new release. It's rather ironic that while Miracle-WM is principally developed by a Canonical engineer associated with Ubuntu Linux, these recent Miracle-WM releases are being driven in part by preparing for a Fedora Miracle spin due out as part of the Fedora Linux 41 release in October...

The Godot open-source, cross-platform game engine continues advancing wonderfully as an alternative to the more well established but proprietary and commercial-focused game engines. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 released today as the first tagged development snapshot toward the next version of this great game engine...

Cemu is the Wii U emulator that went open-source and began building on Linux two years ago. Since then they've continued building up their Linux support and out today is the Cemu 2.1 emulator release with even better Linux support...

Last week an AmpereOne server finally arrived at Phoronix! Ampere Computing sent over a reviewer server of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship AArch64 server processor with 192 custom cores and using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD platform. I have been carrying out a number of benchmarks for this much-anticipated AArch64 cloud native processor and have initial performance and power efficiency metrics to share today to see how it compares to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server competition.

In addition to the recent news of AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborating over improvements, some more good news for this leading BSD open-source project is the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) now beginning to invest in FreeBSD...

Ubuntu maker Canonical partnered with AMD for supporting Ubuntu Linux on the AMD-Xilinx Kria development boards for their UltraScale+ / Versal Adaptive SoC evaluation kit. Currently the official builds are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but it appears an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS build is being worked on and will come complete with Wayland support...