Svobodný software

With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that... ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase...

Patches posted this week by Oracle's Lorenzo Stoakes are the latest attempt at lightweight guard pages for the Linux kernel...

Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 "X1E80100" series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git...

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code...

Thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers have been working on greater USB permissions/controls for Flatpak-based Linux applications...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.20, Wine-Staging 9.20 is now available for this experimental blend of Wine featuring 357 extra patches currently atop the upstream codebase for various testing/experimental features and functionality...

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation...

Sent out overnight were a few input subsystem patches ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel release tomorrow. Notable from this pull is adding input support for the MSI Claw A1M gaming handheld as well as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless gaming controller...

KDE developers are wrapping up addressing initial fallout/regressions from the recent Plasma 6.2 desktop release as well as pushing ahead with more feature work for Plasma 6.3...

Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" platforms...

Wine 9.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development version of this open-source software to enable running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux...

Years in the making has been the idea of Proxy Execution for the Linux kernel as a means of implementing priority inheritance by leveraging information from a task's scheduler context and its execution context. While the Proxy Execution patches themselves aren't yet queued for merging upstream, some prep patches look like they'll make it for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window...

Merged today to Linux 6.12 Git were bug fixes to AMD's Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB) handling that can be optionally used as part of the Retbleed and Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigations on older AMD processors...

In a rather surprising post this morning, laptop vendor MALIBAL that offers both Linux and Windows systems is suggesting to not support the Coreboot project for open-source system firmware...

The OpenCL 3.0 compute specification has been out in finalized form since September 2020. Since then NVIDIA's official Windows/Linux drivers have been exposing OpenCL 3.0 going back to 2021, the Intel Compute Runtime stack has also been exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for years, and even with Mesa's Rusticl open-source OpenCL implementation it's beginning to see Gallium3D drivers with conformant OpenCL 3.0. Yet if installing the AMD ROCm compute stack right now, you'll see OpenCL 2.1. But it looks like OpenCL 3.0 will soon be here for ROCm...

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical has announced the availability of an Intel NPU driver Snap package within their Snap Store to make it easier to leverage the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra processors within Ubuntu Linux...

Merged to upstream SDL today is an OpenVR video driver that was developed at Valve Software...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than €23 million (about $24.94M USD) into sixty open technologies...

Microsoft announced today the new and now open-source OpenHCL paravisor for the virtualization stack for enabling Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with this Rust-written software stack. This effort by Microsoft has been five years in the making and is now open-source and will continue to be developed in the open...