Svobodný software

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were two competing solutions for new LLVM Clang capability / thread safety analysis to the Linux kernel. Two developers had separately been working on implementations for the Linux kernel to make use of Clang's "-Wthread-safety" functionality. Ultimately the upstream kernel will likely settle upon the superior or unified solution while already making use of these new checks is uncovering Linux kernel bugs...

Years in the making, GNU G-Golf 0.8 was released on Friday as a significant release for this GNU project. No, it's not a golfing simulator or anything like that, but rather a Guile Object Library for GNOME so that you can develop GTK applications from the Guile/Scheme programming language...

FEX 2502 is out today as the newest monthly feature release to this user-space emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux including the likes of Wine/Proton and Steam for being able to enjoy modern games on AArch64 Linux systems...

The KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop has received a lot of last minute polishing and fixes ahead of its planned release next week. Plasma 6.3 is scheduled for its stable debut next Tuesday on 11 February...

The FreeBSD 13.5 release dance has begun for closing out the FreeBSD 13 series...

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 as the newest annual stable release of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine 10.1 is out today. Wine 10.1 kicks off the bi-weekly development release cycle trek that will culminate with the release of Wine 11.0 next year...

While the GNOME project has long been closely tied to the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME's LocalSearch has decided to abandon its GStreamer use in favor of using FFmpeg/libav directly...

It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring...

Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity...

With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.

Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code...

Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution...

With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs...

NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit...

AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year to this official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

A year ago I raised attention about crypto-config as a new Ubuntu project for system-wide cryptography configuration. That crypto config tool continues being developed by Canonical engineers for a gradual roll-out into the Ubuntu Linux landscape...

Android and Chrome OS already are carrying the VirtIO Media driver as a means of enabling virtualization of host media devices into a guest while now patch review is underway in trying to get VirtIO Media upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel...

After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.

While the AMDXDNA driver was merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs atop a mainline kernel build, there's still the user-space software needed for making use of the neural processing units found in Ryzen AI SoCs. AMD talked more about programming Ryzen AI NPUs last weekend in Belgium at the FOSDEM 2025 developer conference...

Intel's software engineers working on the OpenVINO AI toolkit today released OpenVINO 2025.0 that brings support for the much talked about Deepseek models along with other large language models (LLMs), performance improvements to some of the existing model support, and other changes...