Svobodný software

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code...

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered...

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2...

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15...

Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl...

An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends...

There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases...

What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today those GNU Compiler Collection patches have been merged to prepare for AVX10.2 always having 512-bit support available...

Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)...

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors...

While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors...

Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads...

Raspberry Pi's brisk pace of new hardware and software the past few months continues today... The Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector was announced today at the $25 USD price point...

The EROFS open-source, read-only Linux file-system is set to be extended with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle to support massive amounts of data to support AI model training...

Just days after marking the third birthday of the open-source project, Hyprland 0.48 released today as the newest version of this popular Wayland compositor...

The Endeavour OS enthusiast Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux is out with its March 2025 ISO refresh under the codename "Mercury Neo" for this spin featuring the latest software packages...

Coming out this week was an updated AVX10 whitepaper from Intel with the surprising decision that 512-bit floating point and integer support is no longer considered optional for AVX10.2. AVX10.2 now mandates 128 / 256 / 512-bit support and in turn also dropped the 256-bit embedded rounding support with the focus on 512-bit. The LLVM/Clang compiler had seen its AVX10 support designed around Intel's original AVX10 design assumptions and thus now is being modified to address these changes...

Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common "uvcvideo" web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel...

This past week a lot of new code for the Rust "gccrs" front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release... The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features...