Svobodný software

Earlier this month Intel compiler engineers began adding AVX10.2 support into the GCC 15 open-source compiler. Now as we approach the end of August, another big batch of AVX10.2 enablement has landed for this next GNU Compiler Collection release...

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land...

Released on Sunday night was a new version of the Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) Zstd plug-in for accelerating Zstandard compression with QAT-enabled adapters and modern Xeon Scalable processors sporting QAT accelerators...

Linux 6.11 as often is the case each kernel cycle brings a lot of new improvements for recent/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms. There are big step forwards for AMD confidential computing, initial RDNA4 graphics support, new AMD P-State driver features, and much more on the AMD side. On the Intel side there is ongoing work around Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage but not yet stable. Intel also has initial Panther Lake audio support, more NPU driver enhancements, and a range of other kernel additions to benefit their platforms.

The Linux 6.11-rc5 kernel is already out as stable today, roughly a half-day ahead of time due to travels by Linus Torvalds...

Codon is an open-source project that leverages the LLVM compiler infrastructure and aims for super fast Python code with as much as 10~100x speedups. Released this week was Codon 0.17 as the newest step forward for this alternative Python implementation...

Just one week after the Archinstall 2.8.2 update, another release of this command-line driven Arch Linux installer is now available for quick and easy Arch deployments...

As the first new release in more than one year, GNU DDD 3.4.1 is now available as a GUI front-end to the GNU Debugger (GDB)...

Mesa's PanVK driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Arm Mali graphics is preparing to support newer "Valhall" hardware...

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer...

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 has been released ahead of its planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series delivers the latest and greatest, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still depending upon a FreeBSD 13 base...

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 6.2 soft feature freeze happening next week, KDE developers have been preparing some last minut features for the desktop...

Wine 9.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage...

The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization...

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window...

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding...

As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support...

In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS...