Svobodný software

Going back to 2020 has been work by Intel's open-source engineers on implementing Key Locker support for Linux. Intel Key Locker allows for encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw/actual key. AES keys are converted into handles with Intel Key Locker that can then be used for carrying out encryption/decryption on that system until revoked or system state changes. Intel engineers on Wednesday posted their seventh iteration of the patches for supporting Key Locker on Linux...

In addition to Microsoft's Build 2023 conference this week where they announced expanded archive/compression format support, Windows Terminal improvements, more AI tech, and other initiatives, they also happened to release CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution...

Since the early bits of Wine Wayland support were merged back in March for building up a native Wayland display driver, Alexandros Frantzis has continued submitting more of the code for review and upstreaming. Wednesday marked the third chunk of Wine Wayland code to be merged...

Among Intel's dozens of terrific open-source components -- including the many components making up their oneAPI software suite -- is Open Image Denoise. Open Image Denoise for years has been a terrific, high-performance denoising library for ray-tracing use The software has long been CPU-based while being highly performant thanks to leveraging modern instruction set extensions. Today though Open Image Denoise 2.0 is released and brings GPU acceleration across Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics processors...

Following the release at the start of the month of ROCm 5.5, today it's been succeeded by the ROCm 5.5.1 point release...

The Intel IPU6 web camera tech found in Alder Lake laptops and newer has unfortunately no upstream Linux driver yet and has resulted in kernel developers avoiding these laptops where web camera support is needed. Intel maintains an out-of-tree IPU6 Linux driver while they have been making progress toward ultimately getting it upstreamed. To ease the situation for Fedora Linux users, an experimental IPU6 software stack has now been added to the RPM Fusion repository...

For those that have been interested in the Radeon RX 7900 series for the great open-source driver support on Linux but have been wanting a cheaper graphics card and perhaps are a 1080p gamer, today's launch of the Radeon RX 7600 will surely be of interest to you. The Radeon RX 7600 is a nice lower-end graphics card for 1080p gamers and has upstream open-source Linux support already -- including the ability to run out-of-the-box already on Ubuntu 23.04 and other newer distributions. Here is my Linux performance review of the AMD Radeon RX 7600.

With some basic additions to the amd64_edac Linux kernel driver, the Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors are being treated like the EPYC 9004 series for EDAC reporting, including ECC error reporting on supported RAM/motherboard configurations...

Melissa Wen of Igalia along with developers from AMD and Valve have been working on improved AMD color management support with a particular focus on the Steam Deck but will also benefit other AMD Radeon Linux users as well...

Following the recent removal of the SLOB allocator, SLAB is the latest on the chopping block. In order to push users to the SLUB allocator as the preferred solution, SLAB is now going through its deprecation and eventual removal process...

Mageia 9 beta 2 has been released with this Mandriva/Mandrake-lineage Linux distribution nearing its next major release...

The AMD k10temp Linux driver is used for CPU temperature reporting with all modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors plus going back all the way to many earlier FX / Athlon / Sempron / Opteron / Phenom CPUs starting with the Family 10h line-up. While this driver has been in the Linux kernel for years, it's carried a limitation until now that it can't handle reporting negative temperatures. That is changing thanks to new patches from AMD...

The Radeon Software for Linux driver was quietly updated earlier this month with one noted fix...

Released this week from the Red Hat Summit is Podman Desktop 1.0 as a container management tool akin to Docker Desktop...

The embedded Linux experts at Bootlin have released Snagboot as a new open-source project aiming to make it easy to recover and re-flash embedded platforms...

AMD today announced the Ryzen 7020 C-series processors. These processors are interesting for at least having integrated RDNA2 graphics but are based on the aging Zen 2 architecture...

There's been a proposal for Fedora Linux to become a new Fedora immutable variant and now it's been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) to happen for the Fedora 39 cycle...

Last year Fedora and Red Hat developers began discussing the idea of dropping legacy BIOS support and to then only focus on UEFI platforms. There was a plan to deprecate BIOS support in Fedora 37 but ultimately it didn't go through due to some cloud providers still booting VMs in BIOS mode and some systems having broken UEFI implementations. An idea has now been raised over the possibility of using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to provide a UEFI-like experience from the Fedora perspective...

For those feeling adventurous and wanting to see how things are coming along for KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks Qt 6 porting, the KDE Neon Linux distribution with its "unstable" edition has begun building against the Qt6 components...

The bug I wrote about this weekend where Intel is now disabling PCID for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake under Linux until updated CPU microcode is issued for addressing an issue with the INVLPG instruction when Process Context Identifiers are enabled, has now been merged to Linux 6.4...