Svobodný software

KDE Plasma 6.4 is out today with many fantastic improvements for this open-source desktop...

Merged recently for the Linux 6.16 kernel was initial support for Intel QAT Gen6 hardware. A new qat_6xxx driver was added for supporting the next-gen QuickAssist Technology accelerator IP being found with upcoming Intel Xeon processors. Patches being prepared now for the Linux 6.17 kernel are building out a new decompression service for that next-generation hardware...

Merged for Linux 6.14 at the beginning of the year were the Intel THC drivers for supporting the Touch Host Controller IP found in modern Intel Core Ultra laptops for dealing with the touchpad, touchscreen, and related touch-control functionality. This open-source driver is still being built-out ahead of next-generation Core Ultra laptops hitting the market...

The Dbus-Broker project from the BUS1/systemd developers is out with its first update in more than one year for this D-Bus implementation that aims to be more reliable and higher performing than D-Bus itself...

Posted by Intel engineers a few days ago were a Mesa patch to begin recognizing some Intel Battlemage graphics cards as being the larger "BMG G31" variant. This evening those patches were merged for Mesa 25.2 for what's rumored to be potentially the Arc B770 graphics cards to launch later in the year...

Last week alongside announcing the AMD Instinct MI350X/MI355X and the ROCm 7.0 software preview, AMD also introduced the AMD Developer Cloud as a new means for developers to easy try out Instinct accelerators with their own software and with the ROCm compute stack already setup. Having tried out prior AMD cloud compute environments, as soon as my email invite for the AMD Developer Cloud arrived I decided to give it a try.

Rust developers acknowledge lengthy compiler times can be a significant issue that limits the productivity of developers working with this programming language. For helping in determining different combinations of issues around compiler performance, the Rust team has started a survey to collect more information on the issues...

For those interested in a high-end motherboard for AMD Ryzen 9000 / 8000 / 7000 series processors that is marketed for creators and equipped with high-end features, the ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard that retails for $500+ USD will soon see hardware monitoring support under Linux...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" project providing an operating system with binary compatibility for Windows software and drivers can finally properly handle full-screen games/apps...

For those with a laptop from Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer Uniwill, two new drivers are being proposed to enhance the mainline Linux kernel support for Uniwill laptops by enabling additional functionality to work under Linux...

FreeRDP 3.16 is out today as the newest update to this open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) library and client implementation. This Apache-licensed project continues to be one of the leading implementations of the Microsoft RDP protocol for use outside the confines of Windows...

The Intel Observation Architecture "OA" performance counters support has been upstreamed to Mesa for upcoming Xe3 Panther Lake integrated graphics...

Following the release of Linux 6.16-rc1 last Sunday that capped off the Linux 6.16 merge window, Linux 6.16-rc2 is now available with an initial week's worth of bug/regression fixes. Linux 6.16 development continues in aiming toward a stable release around the end of July...

Back in May a big patch series was published for reworking the Linux kernel to make the SMP support unconditional. Right now those that happen to be running Linux in a uniprocessor (1 CPU core) configuration can build with "CONFIG_SMP" disabled but the proposed patches would make symmetric multi-processing support always present. Those patches took a step forward this week and could be merged for the Linux 6.17 cycle later in the summer...

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code...

While the Linux 6.16 merge window just passed one week ago, already there are new feature changes beginning to queue for the Linux 6.17 kernel later in the summer...

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver...

Linux 6.15 mistakenly shipped with a nasty power regression for some systems, such as those relying on the "nosmt" option to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading / Hyper Threading. That idle power regression was fixed for Linux 6.15.2 and Linux 6.16 Git by reverting the troubled patch that introduced the regression. Now merged ahead of Linux 6.16-rc2 is a proper fix for that problematic patch so it could be re-merged without the power fallout...

Sasha Levin just sent out an initial "request for comments" patch series for the Linux kernel in aiming to establish a Kernel API Specification Framework...

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland...