Svobodný software

Following Linus Torvalds' release of the Linux 6.7 kernel last night, the FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-libre 6.7-gnu as their downstream that strips out non-free microcode/firmware blob support and removes other bits that are not deemed in the interest of free software...

As anticipated Linus Torvalds went ahead and just released the Linux 6.7 kernel as the first new version of 2024...

In recent days there have been leaks about an MSI "CLAW" gaming handheld device set to be announced this coming week at CES in Las Vegas. Making this gaming handheld device interesting is that unlike the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally or Legion Go, it's expected to be the first handheld featuring an Intel Meteor Lake SoC. In particular, the recently launched Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. For those curious about what the performance is likely to roughly be in comparison to the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these competing SoCs.

Linux 6.7 should be released later today as the first stable kernel of 2024. In turn the Linux 6.8 merge window will then open tomorrow and run for the next two weeks. For those curious about the features expected for Linux 6.8, here's an early look at some of the changes expected to land for that next kernel cycle...

Debuting in late 2022 was memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used open-source RAM tester. Coming out today is memtest86+ 7.0 as the latest major update to this leading PC memory testing solution...

OpenBLAS 0.3.26 was released this week as the newest feature update to this open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

The Linux 6.7 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today following the one week delay due to the end-of-year holidays. Here's a reminder about some of the best features in Linux 6.7...

Landing in Mesa 24.0-devel this week alongside other exciting changes is some pending work for enhancing VKD3D-Proton and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) support for the RADV Vulkan driver...

In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the "46.alpha" builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published...

After the merge request was open since August of 2022, merged today is support within the GNOME Remote Desktop code for handling graphical remote log-ins...

A few months back AMD announced the MicroBlaze V processor as a soft-core RISC-V processor for embedded system use. With Linux 6.8 the necessary DeviceTree support is landing for the AMD MicroBlaze V...

OpenJPH as the open-source library implementing JPEG2000 Part-15 (JPH / HTJ2K) support is out with a big feature release...

One of the limitations of Google Chrome's Wayland support has been the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) not being supported for GPU-based video acceleration as it's directly targeted the libva-x11 library. But with code merged on Friday to Chromium, libva-drm is now used to allow for working VA-API acceleration on X11 or Wayland...

For the GNOME desktop among the technologies that will hopefully mature into good shape this year are high dynamic range (HDR) display support as well as variable refresh rate (VRR). When it comes to the VRR support there's been more Mutter progress made in this effort...

After no release candidate of Wine 9.0 was published last week due to the end-of-year holidays, Wine 9.0-rc4 is out as the newest test candidate for this forthcoming stable version to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux...

In the land of odd hardware bugs and interesting Linux kernel behavior, a fix was merged today for Linux 6.7 and to be back-ported to existing stable kernel series for dealing with a situation where unexpected system reboots could happen primarily on AMD Ryzen systems when using Firewire (IEEE-1394)...

A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games...

It looks like 2024 could bring improved support for the Snap app sandboxing/packaging format across Linux distributions to better the overall experience of this Flatpak alternative outside the confines of Ubuntu...

With Intel's 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors that were released last month, in addition to the power efficiency improvements, faster DDR5 memory support, and other enhancements, one of the other notable enhancements talked up by Intel was improved AVX-512 support. Here are some benchmarks using the flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ looking at the performance and thermal/clock/power metrics when toggling AVX-512 support.

As part of the VFS changes submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window, a new "BLK_DEV_WRITE_MOUNTED" Kconfig option is added that allows controlling whether writes are allowed to mounted block devices...