Svobodný software

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo...

ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack...

With this past weekend's release of Linux 6.11-rc7, the kernel changes for the week were larger than prior RCs and Torvalds was a bit hesitant on releasing v6.11 this coming Sunday due to the upcoming that takes place next week in Vienna, Austria. But after a bit of time and feedback from other kernel developers, Torvalds is now more inclined to release Linux 6.11 this coming Sunday rather than dragging it out for an extra week...

The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant...

WolfSSL is an embedded SSl/TLS library designed for a range of use-cases and available as open-source under the GNU GPLv2. WolfSSL was recently packaged and added to Fedora Linux since Netatalk began building against wolfSSL and in the longer-term plans to require its use. So the Fedora packager of Netatalk went ahead with packaging up wolfSSL. But this in turn has led to issues and as of today is now being "immediately retired from Fedora."..

As part of the ongoing AmpereOne testing at Phoronix with the 192-core AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor, I've been working on several different Linux distribution benchmarks with this Supermicro AmpereOne server. That comparison in full should be published next week while worth highlighting on its own are some of the gains seen with the in-development CentOS Stream 10 that serves as the upstream to what will be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. There are some nice performance gains seen on AArch64 with CentOS Stream 10 compared to CentOS Stream 9.

Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues...

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core...

With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs...

AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program...

While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu...

Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release...

Intel engineers have been working on enabling NPEM for Linux: Native PCIe Enclosure Management as a means of standardized storage LED indicators...

Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof...

Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension...

The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers...

Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update...

Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago...

Last month I wrote about Intel Linux engineers working on a new Efficiency Latency Control feature for their uncore driver. This ELC option allows for adjusting the behavior of the Intel uncore for efficiency versus latency characteristics. Those Intel ELC patches to the TPMI uncore driver are now queued up for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle...

Excitement is building that the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support might finally be ready for the mainline kernel as soon as the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. It will be interesting to see if that long-awaited day finally comes this month but recently noted patches have now been queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/rt" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window...