Building off the Xe2 foundation in place for the Lunar Lake integrated graphics, more recently Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have begun pushing out code focused on enabling the Xe2-based Battlemage discrete GPUs as the successor to the DG2/Alchemist hardware. That enablement work remains ongoing and with the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle the important fundamental milestone is being crossed of actually being able to drive a connected display/monitor by a Battlemage GPU...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has issued a proposal for creating a new legacy branch for older/less-maintained Gallium3D drivers...

While it looked like all of the Intel Lunar Lake support was wrapped up with the first of these next-gen Core Ultra laptops set to debut next quarter and the Panther Lake bring-up for Linux has begun, it looks like there may be some stragglers still around Lunar Lake. Sent out today was the patch series enabling DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator) support for these upcoming mobile SoCs...

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors...

AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements...

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions...

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory...

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion...

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins...

Framework Computer Inc announced today that they have been working with DeepComputing on a partner-developed RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13...

Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February...

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey...

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has shown no signs of hitting the end of the road for optimizing OpenGL support within the Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack. More than one decade since joining AMD and more than a decade and a half of being involved with Mesa since beginning as a student developer, Marek still isn't slowing down with his performance optimizations and new features to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers...

A set of patches for the Linux kernel's Intel P-State driver aim to ensure Intel Xeon servers can hit their highest clock frequencies following changes in the server's performance profile. It turns out some special handling is needed to update the highest frequencies of a CPU after boot to ensure the performance profile is properly reflected...

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41...

A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems...

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too...