Svobodný software

Earlier this week Wine developer Gabriel Ivăncescu with CodeWeavers laid out a great proposal: leveraging AI for assisting with the code review process for more punctual review and upstreaming of patches into the Wine codebase for this software that allows Windows games and apps to run on Linux and other platforms. While great in theory, at this stage just amounted to an April Fools' gag for Wine...

Last week being surprised to see a number of AMD EPYC performance gains with Linux 6.9 using that in-development kernel, I was curious about what other platforms may be benefiting from better performance on this kernel that will debut as stable in May. This week I turned to running some fresh benchmarks of Intel Xeon Max using the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR. More than 230 benchmarks were carried out of Linux 6.8 stable versus Linux 6.9-rc2 in looking for any performance differences.

For years the PostgreSQL database server has been adding various JSON features while now the latest addition for dealing with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structured data is the JSON_TABLE() SQL function...

The Power Profiles Daemon software under the UPower project has released version 0.21 which now is automatically battery-state aware for adjusting the CPU power/performance behavior depending upon whether your Linux laptop is connected to AC or battery power...

LLVM's BOLT is an amazing tool for optimizing the layout of binaries and in turn can lead to some mighty useful performance improvements. But now an Arm compiler engineer has taken to leveraging BOLT for creating a binary analysis tool to vet the correctness of security hardening options...

Following the release of the Qt 6.7 toolkit earlier this week, released today is the Qt Creator 13 integrated development environment. Qt Creator is the Qt/C++ tailored IDE aimed to help accelerate developer productivity with tight Qt integration and supporting a variety of features...

Queued up recently into the crypto subsystem's development branch ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is support for VFIO live migration with Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) driver...

Just two days after a Linux 6.9 pull request was submitted for Bcachefs to better cope with "extreme file-system damage", another pull request for this current cycle was submitted that aims to improve the recovery capabilities of this newer copy-on-write open-source file-system...

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression...

The Netherlands-based PC vendor NovaCustom that specializes in privacy/security minded hardware and user freedoms has announced their V54 and V56 laptops. These new laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoCs are self-proclaimed as the fastest Coreboot laptops in the world...

Last year the X.Org Server disabled byte-swapped clients by default over being a large and known attack surface within the X.Org/XWayland codebase. That's proven itself to further be the case with 3 of 4 new CVEs made public today being around the byte-swapped code...

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release...

In February was the announcement of the Crucial T705 PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSD while reaching retail channels in March. This is a very speedy PCIe 5.0 solid-state drive that Crucial recently sent over for our Linux testing and review.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed support in the RADV Vulkan driver for the Vulkan VK_EXT_device_address_binding_report extension with Mesa 24.1...

In addition to the Linux Foundation and others starting Valkey as a fork of the open-source Redis following the upstream move to dual source-available licensing, Redict is another new fork getting established...

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution...

Driven by the XZ security fiasco with malicious code aimed at remote code execution, more open-source projects are re-evaluating their dependence on XZ out of an abundance of caution. The latest to take action is the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility with LVFS that will now prefer Zstd compression instead of XZ...

Sound Open Firmware 2.9 has been released for this open-source project providing audio DSP firmware infrastructure and an adjoining SDK. This effort that started out by Intel for opening up more of their audio hardware firmware has expanded into a multi-vendor project with the likes of AMD and Mediatek also participating around this sound firmware infrastructure, audio driuvers, etc...

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation...

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired...