Svobodný software

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed...

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job...

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director...

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17...

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices...

For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.

Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs...

Version 25.08 of the Genode OS Framework has been released for this open-source operating system framework designed for software safety and security...

Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices...

Released overnight in beta form is OBS Studio 32.0, the next feature release for this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform application for desktop streaming/recording...

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.15 LTS through Linux 6.17 Git kernel performance using the latest stable and development kernels compared to the Long Term Support (LTS) kernels over the past four years. For having hardware support back to Linux 5.15 I was using an AMD EPYC Milan-X server. In those benchmarks there were some nice gains and even from Linux 6.16 to 6.17 Git was around a 3% geo mean improvement. So I was curious to run some benchmarks on the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors to see if there was similar uplift there...

The engineers over at iXsystems announced today the beta release of TrueNAS 25.10 "Goldeneye" as the latest iteration of this formerly BSD-based OS that has transitioned to making use of the Linux kernel while unifying both the TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offerings...

While the Asahi Linux project has faced some setbacks, such as most recently with Alyssa Rosenzweig leaving the project and still working to bring-up M3/M4 support, the upstreaming effort by Asahi Linux developers to get their changes to the upstream Linux kernel continues...

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list was the patch series for introducing the AMD ISP4 driver to the mainline kernel. This supports the image signal processor IP that to date is found with HP's Strix Halo powered ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. With time, future AMD Ryzen laptops will also likely be leveraging this ISP technology for offloading more webcamera work from the CPU, but for now the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is the main beneficiary of this open-source driver...

The newest monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 25.10 is now available for testing and is the final planned monthly snapshot prior to the October release of the Questing Quokka...

The newest feature addition for Mesa 25.3 is enabling support 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) within the LLVMpipe software rasterizer...

While Linus Torvalds doesn't too often like new kernel options being enabled by default, one area where it has proven beneficial and otherwise an oversight by those configuring their own kernel builds is the architecture-optimized crypto algorithm implementations. Some will enable support for different kernel crypto algorithms only to forget or be unaware that there are CPU architecture specific implementations that can also typically be enabled for much better performance over the common code. Google engineer Eric Biggers has been cleaning this up and BLAKE2s is the latest receiving treatment...

Ahead of the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 16.0 release, SUSE engineers are busy finishing up work on their new "Agama" operating system installer. Agama 17 is now available as what will be the installer powering SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 installations or a version very similar to this latest milestone...

This week's drm-misc-next pull of feature updates to the small Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver bring a few updates worth pointing out ahead of the Linux 6.18 cycle...