Intel has published SVT-AV1 2.0 as the newest major feature release to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video encoder. Along with various API changes, SVT-AV1 2.0 has yet more encode performance optimizations...

All of the ARM64 (AArch64) feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Besides the new SoC and platform hardware support, there are a few ARM64 architecture updates worth pointing out...

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical has released LXD 5.21 as the newest feature update to this container and VM manager. LXD 5.21 now ships with a production-grade graphical user interface by default, brings AMD SEV support for memory encryption of VMs on EPYC CPUs, object storage support, and other features...

Earlier this week on Patch Tuesday was the disclosure by Intel of the Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) vulnerability and mitigation via updated CPU microcode and a kernel patch. RFDS is around malicious user-space software potentially being able to infer stale register values from kernel space. Register File Data Sampling affects recent Intel Atom / E-core bearing processors including the latest Raptor Lake Refresh processors. In this article are some initial benchmarks of the RFDS performance impact under Linux when using the Core i9 14900K processor.

VKD3D-Proton 2.12 is out today as the newest version of this software used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for implementing Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API. With VKD3D-proton 2.12 is initial support for NVIDIA Reflex technology along with various other features...

Earlier this week with the original Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.9 Linus Torvalds wasn't happy with some of the code pertaining to spinning out a new library code so that it could be re-used by at least the XFS file-system. A revised pull request was since submitted without that library spin-out and Torvalds today went ahead and merged that updated file-system driver...

The FUSE passthrough mode that's been years in the making for better performance was merged upstream today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel!..

A slew of new Linux stable kernel point releases were issued today, driven in part for getting out the Intel Register File Data Sampling "RFDS" mitigations for the kernel code as part of this week's disclosure and microcode updates and kernel patches...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his latest weekly development summary to outline all of the new KDE features and bug fixes that have come about for the KDE desktop and apps over the past week...

If you were feeling adventurous and began using the Bcachefs file-system upon its introduction in Linux 6.7 mainline and using it for a multi-device setup, you are best off upgrading to Linux 6.8 as soon as possible due to known issues with the code in v6.7...

Tomeu Vizoso who recently has been working on extending the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver to also support the Vivante NPU IP has made great progress on that with competitive performance to the proprietary NPU driver and upstreaming the Teflon framework into Mesa for handling the Neural Processing Unit. Tomeu Vizoso has now shifted his attention to working on an open-source, reverse-engineered NPU driver for the AI hardware found in various Rockchip SoCs...

As noted a month ago that IBM was starting on Power11 CPU/platform enablement for the mainline Linux kernel, indeed the first batch of Power11 code has now been merged for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Mold 2.30 is out this weekend as the newest version of this open-source high speed linker alternative to GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD...

While the GNOME 46 desktop is being released next week, one of the very last minute feature items being merged hit the Mutter codebase on Friday...

Going back years but documented in 2022 has been a desire for the SDL hardware/software abstraction layer popular with cross-platform games to offer an abstracted file-system API. That's finally come to reality with the new SDL_Storage interface added for SDL 3.0...

The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.9 kernel. Among the changes are the usual code churn around device-specific quirks and tuning of the power management code...

The Hyprland customizable Wayland compositor with dynamic tiling is celebrating its two year milestone by issuing v0.37 (and a v0.37.1 paper bag release)...

Joining the other file-systems seeing notable updates for Linux 6.9, the XFS file-system is seeing continued work around online repair support and other improvements...