Svobodný software

If all goes according to plan Debian 13.0 will be released this weekend. Already in its effectively final state aside from any last minute fixes, I've begun running Debian 13 testing builds on various systems in the lab to great success. With two years since Debian 12, the new software packages of Debian 13 help in delivering better performance especially on modern systems. Here is a look at Debian 12 versus Debian 13 performance on an AMD EPYC server across 130 benchmarks. Coincidentally, Debian 13 is coming in at 13% faster than Debian 12.

Following yesterday's F2FS pull request, the exFAT file-system updates were sent out and since merged for the ongoing Linux 6.17 kernel merge window...

For several years now Intel has been working on SYCL support within LLVM and various related efforts like the LLVM SPIR-V back-end as part of their oneAPI ambitions and Data Parallel C++ across their spectrum of hardware. The latest hitting upstream LLVM is libsycl as a SYCL run-time library...

Oxmiq Labs exited stealth mode today as a new startup led by Raja Koduri of AMD / Apple / Intel fame to focus on GPU software and licenseable graphics IP. Oxmiq Labs is a new GPU software and IP startup that has been in development for two years already and built a team of talented GPU and AI architects...

For Linux gamers relying on the X.Org Server, the SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed support for precision/pixel scrolling...

FFmpeg developers are known for delivering some really wild performance gains from hand-optimized Assembly code especially around Intel/AMD AVX-512 optimizations for various features of this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Merged this week was enhancing the Bwdif deinterlacing video filter with a 23~28x speed-up over the basic C code path when using AVX-512...

Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...

Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms...

Working toward the stable openSUSE Leap 16.0 release in late 2025, the release candidate period has begun for this Linux distribution aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 sources...

Sent out today for the Linux 6.17 merge window and already merged hours later were the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) feature updates...

Junio Hamano announced the release of Git 2.51-rc0 to kick off the new week and the first step toward Git 2.51 as the next milestone for this open-source distributed version control system...

Over the past three months we have been excitedly testing AMD's Strix Halo SoC with the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 flagship model as well as the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 as one step below. Strix Halo offers excellent CPU and GPU performance capabilities at the top-end if your budget allows. But at the opposite end and a step below the Strix Point SoCs that have been available the past year is Krackan Point. Krackan Point is for the mid-range offerings in the Ryzen AI 300 series. Recently I've been testing an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 laptop that offers pretty impressive performance/value when considering it can be found brand new for as little as $449 USD with the HP OmniBook 5.

Along with today's NVIDIA R580 Linux driver beta, the CUDA 13.0 toolkit is now available to download and depends upon the new R580 Linux driver series...

Merged a short time ago to Mesa 25.3-devel Git and marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 series is advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs...

NVIDIA today published the v580.65.06 as their first beta driver version in the new NVIDIA 580 Linux driver series...

Canonical engineer John Johansen sent out the AppArmor pull request today for the Linux 6.17 merge window that is heavy on changes for this Linux kernel security module...

Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland...

In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability...

Along with the release of the Mutter 49 beta, GNOME Shell 49 beta was released on Sunday in preparation for the imminent GNOME 49 beta release. Notable here is long sought after support for having the ability to restart or shutdown the computer from GNOME's lock screen...

NetBSD 11.0 release preparations have begun. The NetBSD developers are hoping to officially release NetBSD 11.0 in October and for that to happen the release candidate would be out in September and daily beta builds can already be tested...