Svobodný software

Cairo 1.18.2 released this week nearly one year after Cairo 1.18's debut for this cross-platform 2D vector graphics library -- in turn that was the project's first stable release in five years. Cairo is important for the GTK toolkit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, and dozens of other software projects. With Cairo 1.18.2 there are many fixes that have accumulated over the past year for bettering this graphics library...

Wine 9.17 is out today as quite an exciting update for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and other platforms...

Intel has submitted more kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. Following the pull requests to DRM-Next last week to enable Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default, some more lingering feature patches were merged today. Most exciting with this last round of patches before Linux 6.12? Intel graphics card fan speed reporting is finally wired up for their Linux driver...

One of the security changes with AMD Zen 5 processors that I haven't seen AMD publicly mention at least not prominently is that the new cores are not vulnerable to Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Unlike Zen 4 and prior, under Linux I noticed that Zen 5 is no longer affected by the SRSO "INCEPTION" vulnerability. But of course there does remain other CPU security mitigations in place carried over from Zen 4. For those wondering about the mitigation costs or if it's worthwhile running Zen 5 with the "mitigations=off" insane mode, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2022 were a set of patches that allowed compiling the ARM64 Linux kernel from Apple macOS hosts. The intent was for developers just wanting to do some build/smoke testing from under an Apple Silicon device running macOS to see at least any kernel changes are successfully compiling on macOS with its LLVM/Clang-based toolchain. An updated form of those patches were posted today for review...

With this week's announcement of the Intel Core Ultra 200V Series "Lunar Lake" processors, I've been very eager to try out the Meteor Lake successor for Linux testing. As sadly is usually the case, for delivering Linux support details and performance benchmarks around launch-time I'm typically left buying a laptop retail for Linux testing. In this case after seeing the Lunar Lake laptops announced this week and their availability, I ended up settling on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) for the initial Core Ultra 200V series Linux review...

We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support...

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels...

It's taken until now to add FreeBSD to the X.Org Continuous Integration (CI) automated testing so that all proposed changes to the X.Org Server can now be build-tested on FreeBSD rather than just Linux...

FEX 2409 has been released for this open-source project that's known for allowing x86_64 Linux binaries -- including both games and applications -- to run rather well on AArch64. It's also been working on enabling x86_64 programs on RISC-V but there due to architectural differences it's more of a challenge than with ARM...

Back in 2018 Oracle introduced Libresource as a standardized API for accessing system resource information around memory / network / device statistics and other metrics. Libresource v2 was announced this week as largely a rewrite of the project...

Following the recently covered patches on Phoronix that enabled Intel Xe2 graphics out-of-the-box / by-default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage with the Mesa 24.3-devel Git code, Mesa 24.2.2 is out today in stable form that back-ports these Xe2 support changes...

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise...

Continuing on with the AmpereOne performance benchmarking while having the AmpereOne A192-32X in the lab within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server, the next set of benchmarks is looking at the performance when using the near-final Linux 6.11 kernel. Additionally, quantifying the performance impact of using the ARM64 64K page size kernel as an alternative to the default 4K page size.

Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year...

Ah the memories of old AGP graphics cards... But it's largely just that these days: distant memories. For anyone by chance still running an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) graphics card in production, FreeBSD is looking at deprecating its generic AGP driver and then potentially removing it in FreeBSD 15.0...

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit...

With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware...

Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support...

Succeeding OpenZFS 2.2.5 from early August is now OpenZFS 2.2.6 that brings various fixes plus newer Linux kernel compatibility...