A merge request was opened this week for plumbing fractional scaling support for XWayland clients running on the GNOME Mutter compositor...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner with Intel-owned Linutronix has been spending much time over the past several months reworking the Linux kernel's x86 CPU topology evaluation code. This is to clean-up a mess of aging kernel code as well as some areas of the code being incorrect in today's era of hybrid Intel Core processors with a mix of P / E cores with the E cores lacking SMT/HT and thus throwing off prior kernel assumptions. With the code now queued up in a TIP branch today, it looks like that CPU topology rework could be good to go with Linux 6.9...

The FreeBSD project today issued their Q4'2023 status report that highlights all of their interesting work accomplished last quarter on this open-source platform. Among the interesting achievements were the FreeBSD Foundation sponsoring AMD64 SIMD improvements for FreeBSD 15 that will also be back-ported to FreeBSD 14.1...

Merged to the LLVM compiler stack two years ago was the BOLT tool for optimizing the layout of generated binaries for offering even greater performance than the likes of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) alone. BOLT had been in development for years by Facebook/Meta engineers and has continued to be improved upon for enhancing the code layout of binaries to yield enhanced performance. Recently there's been renewed work on using BOLT to optimize Linux kernel images...

Ahead of the SUSE/openSUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) their engineers have been working on a new web-based OS installer. Originally known as the "D-Installer" and now going by the "Agama" name, this new installer architecture has plans for many architectural improvements this calendar year...

Intel engineers working on their open-source Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code currently replay captured error state / GPU hangs using a simulator, but a new patch proposal allows for replaying GPU hangs on the actual hardware. In turn this will hopefully help Intel driver developers better address some real-world issues...

Iced is the Rust GUI library that's been gaining quite a lot of interest by Rust developers for creating cross-platform user interfaces. Iced is also what's being used by the Pop!_OS COSMIC desktop environment. Iced v0.12 released yesterday as the first new release for this GUI toolkit since last July...

Valve's Linux graphics driver team has fixed the Vulkan mesh shader support for those using RDNA3 integrated graphics with Phoenix APUs on the latest Mesa RADV driver code...

Vulkan 1.3.278 was published this morning and in addition to the usual documentation corrections/clarifications, there are also two new Vulkan extensions in tow...

AMD on Valentine's Day released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver stack for enterprise Linux operating systems that targets the Radeon RX 7900 series and Radeon PRO W6800 / W7800 / W7900 graphics cards...

GhostBSD as one of the few actively maintained desktop-focused BSD distributions is out with a new release this week...

Following the Linux reviews of the Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and Ryzen 5 8500G Zen 4 + RDNA3 desktop APUs, here is another look at these parts when making use of the lower configurable TDP options for these AM5 chips. All three of these new parts were re-tested at both 35 and 45 Watt cTDPs for seeing the impact on performance and power efficiency.

As part of the AMD color management and HDR efforts worked on by AMD Linux engineers along with Valve and other stakeholders like Igalia developers, Intel engineers have posted their plane color pipeline implementation that follows the cross-vendor API proposal...

AMD made a Valentine's Day announcement of expanding the graphics cards they are officially supporting with ROCm 6.0 as well as adding ONNX Runtime alongside PyTorch to the AI/ML frameworks they are supporting with their open-source software stack...

The folks at iXsystems and Klara are contributing Fast Dedup support to upstream OpenZFS and beginning to roll out this improved deduplication support within TrueNAS SCALE starting next month...

The Qt Creator 13 Beta is now available for testing for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE) that also supports a growing number of other programming languages too...

Power-Profiles-Daemon 0.20 has been released as the newest version of this project now living under the UPower umbrella. The Power-Profiles-Daemon allows for exposing power profiles over D-Bus and in turn integrates nicely with the likes of the GNOME Settings...

For those that prefer to wait for the first Mesa point release in a new series before upgrading, Mesa 24.0.1 was released on Wednesday evening with the first batch of fixes for the feature-packed Mesa 24.0...

In recent weeks there have been a lot of open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver patches flying around for the GFX12 graphics engine, Video Core Next 5, and other new graphics intellectual property (IP) blocks that appear to be for next-generation "RDNA4" Radeon graphics. This week yet more patches have been posted publicly...

Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx...