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Fedora Linux for a while already stopped building i686 kernel releases and dropped their dedicated i686 repositories while now for the Fedora 44 release there is a proposal to take things further: finish gutting the i686 support. The new change proposal seeks to no longer include packages built for the i686 architecture and thereby dropping multi-lib support for 32-bit packages on 64-bit hosts. There wouldn't be any packages built any longer for i686 under this F44 proposal...

Cryptsetup 2.8 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used utility used to setup disk encryption under Linux around the DM-CRYPT kernel functionality for LUKS volumes and more...

Adding to the many graphics driver features to look forward to with next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is now Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.12.5 release just occurred as the next feature release to this open-source graphics compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime and also by various graphics APIs under Microsoft Windows with the Intel graphics driver...

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa supports GFX9/Vega graphics cards but not the later CDNA-based Instinct accelerators. However, some patches merged today for Mesa 25.2-devel did introduce some "random bits and pieces" for CDNA but not a full implementation...

While we await the formal IBM Power11 launch in 2025, IBM engineers are already working on compiler support for "future" post-Power11 processors with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

While the latest Intel Core Ultra processors have done away with Hyper Threading (HT), Intel Xeon CPUs continue supporting HT/SMT, including with their latest Xeon 6300 series budget server processors. As the new AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors also support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and can be found at the same core/thread count count as the flagship Xeon 6369P processor, it makes for an interesting look at comparing the SMT/HT performance impact and power efficiency. Here are some benchmarks showing the Xeon 6300 against the AMD EPYC 4005 in SMT performance.

Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version...

GIMP 3.1.2 was just released as the first development version on the road toward GIMP 3.2 stable...

Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources...

Support for UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting "SBAT" looks like it could be buttoned up in the mainline kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension...

Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.16-rc3 in marching toward the Linux 6.16 kernel release due out around late July...

Merged minutes ago ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release due out shortly was this week's batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates. Beyond the usual KVM fixes merged for the week, a bit of feature code was pulled in by Linus Torvalds for this post-merge-window phase...

While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance...

The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session...

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year...