Serpent OS Hopes To Ship Pre-Alpha ISOs In The Coming Weeks

Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution project is hoping to be able to ship their pre-Alpha ISOs in a matter of weeks as they continue bringing up the initial desktop experience and getting more of their operating system's build tools into good shape...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Serpent-OS-Pre-Alpha-Soon

Fedora 42 Change Proposal Wants To Make KDE Plasma The Default Over GNOME

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Change-KDE-Default-Prop

PCIe 7.0 Specification v0.5 Published - Full Spec Next Year

The PCI-SIG announced today that they have published their newest revision "version 0.5" of the forthcoming PCI Express 7.0 specification...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/PCIe-7.0-Version-0.5-Spec

GCC 14 Boasts Nice ASCII Art For Visualizing Buffer Overflows

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-14-fanalyzer-Enhancements

NovaCustom Announces "Fastest Coreboot Laptops In The World" Built On Intel Core Ultra

The Netherlands-based PC vendor NovaCustom that specializes in privacy/security minded hardware and user freedoms has announced their V54 and V56 laptops. These new laptops powered by Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoCs are self-proclaimed as the fastest Coreboot laptops in the world...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NovaCustom-V54-V56-Laptops

Google's Jpegli Offers ~35% Compression Improvement For High Quality JPEGs

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-Jpegli-Library

Qt Creator 13 Released For Enhancing Qt/C++ Development

Following the release of the Qt 6.7 toolkit earlier this week, released today is the Qt Creator 13 integrated development environment. Qt Creator is the Qt/C++ tailored IDE aimed to help accelerate developer productivity with tight Qt integration and supporting a variety of features...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Creator-13-IDE

AMD Working To Release MES Documentation & Source Code

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...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-MES-Docs-And-Source-Code

OpenBSD 7.5 Released - Faster Performance For Many-Core ARM Servers

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...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBSD-7.5-Released

FFmpeg 7.0 Released With Native VVC Decoding & Multi-Threaded CLI

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...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-7.0-Released

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 Adds C-SKY Arch, Improved GEMM For AMD Zen & Sapphire Rapids Fixes

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 is out as the newest version of this prominent open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenBLAS-0.3.27-Released

OpenZFS Merges Support For Using Multiple Task Queues To Increase Performance

The OpenZFS file-system has merged support for using multiple task queues (TaskQs) to enhance performance for multi-core systems...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-Lands-Multi-Taskqs

New EEVDF Linux Scheduler Patches Make It Functionally "Complete"

Veteran Linux kernel developer Peter Zijlstra is working to wrap-up feature work around the EEVDF kernel scheduler code...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Completing-EEVDF-Sched

KDE Plasma 6 Can Now Sync Your RGB-Backlit Keyboard With Your Desktop's Accent Color

KDE developers have had another busy week working on fixes for Plasma 6.0 while simultaneously preparing new features for Plasma 6.1...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6-RGB-Backlit-Accent

GNOME Improving Integration With systemd-homed, Mockups For An OS Installer

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...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Better-Homed

CoCo VMs On Linux Will Now Panic If RdRand Is Broken To Avoid Catastrophic Conditions

For confidential computing "CoCo" virtual machines where the VM host is assumed to be un-trusted and aims to be as isolated as possible, RdRand hardware random number generator instructions are one of the limited sources of entropy for guest VMs. Right now RdRand can fail and the CoCo guest VMs will continue to boot albeit with limited or no entropy to s…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/CoCo-Linux-Require-RdRand

Framework Hiring For Open-Source Firmware Development

Framework Computer as the company behind the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 upgradeable/modular laptops is hiring for an open-source firmware developer...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Framework-OSS-Firmware-Hiring

Oracle Releases DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 For Linux Systems

DTrace used to be one of the Solaris features long sought after by Linux developers but over time the Linux kernel tracing capabilities have improved and Oracle has been supporting DTrace on Linux now for years without too much fanfare. DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 was released this past week as the latest iteration of this user-space implementation that builds off the Linux kernel tracing functionality l…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/D-Trace-2.0.0-1.14

SolidRun Launches Bedrock R8000 As First Industrial PCs With Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series

Following the launch last week of the AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, SolidRun today announced the Bedrock R8000 as the first industrial PCs designed around these new Ryzen Embedded 8000 series SoCs...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SolidRun-Bedrock-R8000

OpenSSL 3.3 Released With Many Additions For QUIC, CPU Performance Optimizations

OpenSSL 3.3 is out today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used SSL library...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenSSL-3.3-Released

Ubuntu Maker Canonical Announces New Collaboration With Qualcomm

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Qualcomm-2024-Partners

KDE's KWin Merges Wayland Explicit Sync Support

A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME's Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE's KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!..
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-KWin-Lands-Explicit-Sync

XWayland 24.1 RC Released With Explicit Sync, Improved Rootful & GLAMOR Optimizations

As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-24.1-RC

Rust-Written LAVD Kernel Scheduler Shows Promising Results For Linux Gaming

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LAVD-Scheduler-Linux-Gaming

Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements

Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.7-Released

Open-Source "Terakan" Vulkan Driver For Radeon HD 6000 Series Shown On Windows

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and ha…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Terakan-HD-6000-VLK-Windows

udev-hid-bpf To Help Enable HID-BPF Use Rather Than Kernel Drivers To Fix HID Hardware

Right now for buggy HID hardware or other input devices not exactly aligning to specs or having known hardware workarounds required, a new Linux kernel driver tends to be needed or at least quirks to be added to existing kernel driver code. There's no shortage of wonky HID hardware/drivers out there to deal with such odd cases. Due to the lengthy kernel cycles and o…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/udev-hid-bpf

Fedora Linux 40 Available For Download As A Wonderful Upgrade

It's Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Available

Intel Has Many Improvements For The Xe Graphics Driver In Linux 6.10

Intel today sent out more than one hundred new feature patches to DRM-Next of new "Xe" kernel graphics driver material they have readied for the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel merge window...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Intel-Xe-DRM-Patches

QEMU 9.0 Released WIth True Multi-Queue Support For VirtIO Block Driver

QEMU 9.0 is out tonight as the latest feature release for this prominent component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/QEMU-9.0-Released

RadeonSI Squeezes "Many Improvements Around The Whole Driver" Into Mesa 24.1

Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-Whole-Improvements

Etnaviv NPU Optimizations Make It Into Mesa 24.1

In addition to many RadeonSI driver optimizations that were merged just prior to yesterday's code branching and Mesa 24.1-rc1 release, a number of Etnaviv driver improvements were also merged for benefiting that recent Vivante NPU IP open-source driver work...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Etnaviv-NPU-Optimize-Mesa-24.1

NVIDIA Developer Opens Feature Pull Request For Open-Source NVK Driver

If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-NVK-Conservative

Systemd 256-rc1 Brings A Huge Number Of New Features

Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It's a big one...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-256-rc1

Servo Web Engine Now Passing Acid2 Layout Engine Test

The Servo web engine developers have enjoyed a busy April with a number of new features added to this Rust creation...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Passing-Acid2

GCC 14 Adds "GFX90C" For OpenMP Offloading To APUs With GFX9/Vega Graphics

As the last feature patch prior to the GCC 14 compiler code being branched today and GCC 15 opening up on the mainline codebase, AMD GFX90C support was merged for enabling GPU OpenMP device offloading to the numerous AMD SoCs/APUs with the GFX9/Vega graphics...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-14-Adds-GFX90C-GPU

KDE Fixes Adaptive-Sync Issues & Less Glitches During GPU Resets

KDE developer Nate Graham is back from the latest KDE sprint in Germany and out with his new weekly status report to highlight all of the interesting KDE changes that landed this week...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Less-Bugs-Adaptive-Sync

Zrythm 1.0 RC1 Available For Testing As Great Open-Source Digital Audio Workstation

Since going beta in 2020, the Zrythm open-source digital audio workstation software has been inching its way toward a v1.0 release. On Saturday marked the release of v1.0.0-rc.1 as a release candidate for the upcoming v1.0 release of this GTK-based digital audio workstation (DAW) software...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zrythm-1.0-RC1

Git 2.45 Released With Initial SHA1/SHA256 Interoperability & Reftable Support

Git 2.45 is out today as an important step forward for this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Git-2.45-Released

KDE's Amarok 3.0 Music Player Released After Six Year Hiatus - Now Ported To Qt5

Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Amarok-3.0-Released

systemd Rolling Out "run0" As sudo Alternative

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-run0