Svobodný software

Today could finally be the day. In the works for 5+ years, the Wayland color management and HDR protocol additions look like they will finally be merged in the coming hours...

SUSE/openSUSE has a long history with the AppArmor Linux security module going back to the Novell days and when AppArmor was originally known as SubDomain. OpenSUSE/SUSE and Ubuntu Linux have been big proponents of AppArmor for Linux security but now moving forward on new installations of openSUSE Tumbleweed it will be defaulting to Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux)...

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS along with new point releases for its derivatives had been scheduled for release on Thursday. But a last minute issue has delayed this release...

Along with the recently reviewed ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M for Ampere Altra, ARCTIC Cooling had also recently sent over their ARCTIC Freezer 4U-SP5 heatsink for cooling AMD EPYC 9004/9005 server processors within 4U rackmount height requirements. This cooler does a very good job at keeping even 400 Watt processors running well.

Mesa 25.0-rc3 is out today as a rather large weekly release candidate to Mesa 25.0 that will be debuting as stable later this month...

Given the recent patch proposal to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at the 250Hz vs. 1000Hz comparison on some modern desktop hardware...

In addition to the recent release of SysVinit 3.14 and systemd continuing to tack on new features, the GNU Shepherd system/user service manager written in Guile Scheme is out today with a new release...

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

A patch has been proposed for the Linux kernel to add a C1 demotion knob via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuidle/c1_demotion for more control over lower power state handling for recent Xeon Scalable processors. This C1 demotion knob can help with the performance of some workloads for Intel Xeon servers but at the cost of increased power consumption...

The open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver within Mesa known as "TURNIP" has now matured enough that it's going to be built by default when compiling Mesa for ARM64/AArch64 hardware...

Intel on Tuesday released Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 as their newest feature release of this open-source daemon to help monitor and control the CPU/SoC temperature within laptops and other modern Intel hardware...

Python 3.14 Alpha 5 is out today as the latest of many development releases in stepping toward the Python 3.14 stable release in October...

In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved...

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis...

Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack...

FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec...

Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop...

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware...