Svobodný software

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is set to make a €688,800 investment into the Samba open-source project that re-implements the SMB networking protocol and focused on better file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems...

As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts...

AMD today committed their GC 11.5.2 firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git for the necessary firmware binary blobs needed for hardware initialization by their open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver with this newer RDNA3.5 variant...

With Fedora 41 working its way to release toward the end of October, some early feature/change proposals for Fedora 42 are being filed for what will be the Fedora Linux release out next spring...

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 is out today for providing the set of Wayland protocol XML files for currently non-standard protocols that are relied upon by the Plasma desktop with KWin compositor...

AMD engineers continue work toward upstreaming their XDNA kernel driver for Linux in enabling the Ryzen AI NPU on open-source. The "v3" patches were posted on Wednesday but given the timing it looks like it will be missing out still on merging for the upcoming Linux 6.12 LTS cycle...

Ojaswin Mujoo with IBM has posted an initial set of "request for comments" patches implementing extsize hints for EXT4, similar to the hints being worked on for the XFS file-system. This is important work in ultimately striving toward handling non-torn / atomic writes within the EXT4 file-system...

With the upcoming PostgreSQL 17 database server release there is some initial AVX-512 optimizations that are looking quite nice according to Intel's findings...

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems...

Last month Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund announced they would be opening a fellowship program for open-source maintainers. The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has been providing great investments into open-source projects while this fellowship is around investing in open-source maintainers that may be working on multiple open-source projects. The application process is now open for those interested open-source maintainers...

For those continuing to make use of the open-source Redis in-memory, key-value database rather than some of the new open-source forks such as Valkey, the first milestone release of Redis 8.0 Community Edition is now available for testing...

Merged yesterday into the code for Mesa 24.3 is initial support within the PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali v10 graphics hardware. The v10 architecture is for second-gen Valhall GPUs and goes along with the ongoing Linux kernel driver work for the Panthor CSF-based driver support...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has recently been devoting some time to enhancing their GitLab deployment with new features and also in welcoming the Mono project to their GitLab instance. In case you missed it, Microsoft recently shifted stewardship of Mono over to Wine...

While Gentoo Linux recently ended their support for Itanium (IA-64) hardware, this popular source-based Linux distribution continues to support other aging platforms... Today they sent out an announcement highlighting their improved support for MIPS and Alpha based hardware...

Oracle today released version 7.1 of their VirtualBox virtualization software with an improved GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing support, OCI integration improvements, and other enhancements...

Early in the year we enjoyed seeing AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support upstreamed for the GCC 14 compiler in making it into that annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release. It was great seeing AMD Zen 5 support make it into this open-source compiler well ahead of any Zen 5 products being announced. Since then the GCC support for the new Znver5 target has continued to be improve upon meanwhile we've been waiting to see similar treatment for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Finally this week that AMD Zen 5 (znver5) support has been submitted for review in upstreaming it for LLVM...

Motherboard vendors have begun rolling out updated BIOS versions for AMD AM5 platforms that allow a configurable TDP on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors to allow a 105 Watt cTDP compared to the base 65 Watt TDP. For those wondering about the Linux performance and power efficiency impact from running these mid-tier Zen 5 desktop processors at the higher cTDP value, here is the full set of benchmarks compared to my original review data on Linux.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, Canonical is introducing permission prompting for more control over Snap access to systems to enhance security...

With Linux 6.11 expected for release on Sunday that in turn will mark the start of the two-week merge window for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 cycle will get underway and work towards its stable release in mid to late November. Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window here is a look at some of the material anticipated for merging during this next cycle...

Device Tree patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for review and possible upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel for booting Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods that use the A7 to A11 SoCs...