Svobodný software

As part of the GNOME Foundation funded Digital Wellbeing project, the GNOME Shell for GNOME 50 has merged options to prevent unlocking the desktop session past their bed time. The intent here is on rounding out GNOME's parental controls functionality...

A patch for the open-source exFAT file-system driver for Linux can boost the sequential read performance by about 10% in preliminary tests...

An open-source developer has worked through the last of the issues preventing the Adobe Creative Cloud installers for Windows from running on Linux via Wine. With pending patches, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 are expected to install and run on Linux...

Queued yesterday into the platform-drivers-x86.git's "for-next" branch are the patches for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver to begin reporting damaged device detection. This code being in the "for-next" branch makes it material for the next version of the Linux kernel and initially will be able to report to the user on damaged USB-C ports...

As part of my various end-of-year benchmarks, recently I looked at the Linux LTS kernel performance on AMD EPYC 9005 over the past year, the AMD EPYC Milan-X performance over the past four years, and various other performance comparisons over time to look the evolution of the Linux software performance. Another run I had carried out was looking at the AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" series since its launch just over two years ago. Here is a look at how an up-to-date Linux software stack can deliver some additional performance gains for these energy efficiency and cost-optimized server processors.

A patch queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle enables the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) functionality by default on the mainline kernel for capable CPUs and those not affected by side-channel attacks due to TSX Async Abort (TAA) and similar vulnerabilities. For newer Intel CPUs with safe TSX support, this change can mean better performance with the kernel defaults...

If all goes well the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will further enhance the NVIDIA graphics performance under its default GNOME Wayland session. The improvements might be upstreamed to GNOME 50 in time but otherwise it's looking like Ubuntu 26.04 will carry its own patch(es) for improving the NVIDIA Wayland performance...