Svobodný software

Last month I wrote about the V3D kernel graphics driver preparing for 1MB "super pages" support to help boost the performance for this open-source Broadcom DRM driver most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi single board computers. The latest iteration of these patches have now been posted for supporting both super pages and big pages...

With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there's been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic...

In addition to KDE's busy week of development work, GNOME developers have also been busy working on features like improving the systemd-homed integration and beginning to work on mock-ups for an OS installer...

KDE developers have had another busy week working on fixes for Plasma 6.0 while simultaneously preparing new features for Plasma 6.1...

Back in 2022 Cloudflare began talking about replacing Nginx with their own in-house, Rust-written code called Pingora, talked about Pingora more in 2023, and then this past February made this Pingora framework open-source for creating reliable and fast networked systems. Today marks the first official release of Pingora with the v0.1 tag...

Wine 9.6 has just been issued as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Veteran Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra is working to wrap-up feature work around the EEVDF kernel scheduler code...

The OpenZFS file-system has merged support for using multiple task queues (TaskQs) to enhance performance for multi-core systems...

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 is out as the newest version of this prominent open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has published Fwupd 1.9.16 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy firmware redistribution...

The very exciting FFmpeg 7.0 multimedia library has been released! FFmpeg 7.0 rolls out most notably the new native VVC decoder that is currently experimental for supporting Versatile Video Coding as well as introducing the multi-threaded FFmpeg CLI tool...

Following the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver patches last month adding two new DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs that when digging through the Intel Compute Runtime sources were confirmed as the Arc Graphics A580E and A750E, the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have now added support for these new graphics processors...

Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.5 as the newest version of this security-focused BSD operating system. With OpenBSD 7.5 there is a number of improvements for ARM (AArch64) hardware, never-ending kernel optimizations and other tuning work, countless package updates, and other adjustments to this popular BSD platform...

OpenCL 3.0 debuted back in 2020 and while we haven't heard talks of any major revision on the horizon, it does continue to see new point releases. Released on Thursday was OpenCL 3.0.16 that adds one new extension while finalizing eight formerly provisional extensions...

Following up on their tweet earlier this week that they would be working to open-source more of their GPU software stack and hardware documentation, AMD now says they will be releasing documentation followed by the source code for their Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) IP block found within Radeon GPUs...

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops...

Earlier this week Wine developer Gabriel Ivăncescu with CodeWeavers laid out a great proposal: leveraging AI for assisting with the code review process for more punctual review and upstreaming of patches into the Wine codebase for this software that allows Windows games and apps to run on Linux and other platforms. While great in theory, at this stage just amounted to an April Fools' gag for Wine...

Last week being surprised to see a number of AMD EPYC performance gains with Linux 6.9 using that in-development kernel, I was curious about what other platforms may be benefiting from better performance on this kernel that will debut as stable in May. This week I turned to running some fresh benchmarks of Intel Xeon Max using the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR. More than 230 benchmarks were carried out of Linux 6.8 stable versus Linux 6.9-rc2 in looking for any performance differences.

For years the PostgreSQL database server has been adding various JSON features while now the latest addition for dealing with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structured data is the JSON_TABLE() SQL function...

The Power Profiles Daemon software under the UPower project has released version 0.21 which now is automatically battery-state aware for adjusting the CPU power/performance behavior depending upon whether your Linux laptop is connected to AC or battery power...