NetBSD 9.4 Released With Security & Stability Fixes
NetBSD 10.0 debuted last month with a long list of improvements and other enhancements that built up over the past several years. For those not yet taking the leap to this big NetBSD update, NetBSD 9.4 is out today for those relying on the stable NetBSD 9 series...
Steam On Linux Changes The Default Scaling Factor For 4K Displays
With tonight's Steam client beta update they have reduced the default scaling factor for those running it on Linux with a 4K display...
Linux AMDGPU Control Application Adds vBIOS Dumping, Fan Control Hysteresis
LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD...
Fwupd 1.9.17 Adds Firmware Updating For ASUS DC201 & Realtek RTS541x
Richard Hughes of Red Hat has announced the released of Fwupd 1.9.17, the newest update to this open-source solution for system and device firmware updating under Linux that is paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a streamlined user experience...
Reverse Engineered MSI WMI Platform Driver Being Worked On For Linux
Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features...
Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R & KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5.0 SSDs
While there is a growing number of PCIe 5.0 consumer NVMe SSDs available through Internet retailers, when it comes to PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD data center / enterprise grade solid-state drives there aren't as many yet and even for announced ones they have been relatively in short supply. In preparing for some upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS tests and ahead of next-gen servers arriving, I was recently searching for some new PCIe 5.0 data center solid state drives. Arriving so far are the Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R and Kioxia KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5 SSDs. Here are a few benchmarks of those drives for those curious about the performance.
Audacity 3.5 Brings Cloud Project Saving, Improved BSD Support
The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out today with a big feature update in the form of Audacity 3.5...
Steam Deck Motion Sensors Being Worked On For Linux's HID-Steam Driver
A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller...
Intel Enabling Linux Driver Display Support For Upcoming "Battlemage" GPUs
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist...
AMD: "Additional Parts Of The Radeon Stack To Be Open Sourced Throughout The Year"
After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend...
AMD SEV-SNP Hypervisor Support Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel
AMD's upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision...
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 other factors involved, leveraging (e)BPF has long been talked about as one of the areas where it may make sense for being able to more quickly send out hardware support fixes in the form of eBPF problems. The Rust-written udev-hid-bpf project is ready to help in that enabling effort...
Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 Brings Arrow Lake H Support
The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company's modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware...
Linux 6.9-rc5 Released: The Diffstat "Looks A Bit Wonky" But Not Bad
The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May...
AMD Posts RDNA3+ Firmware Files For Linux Users
This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs...
GNOME Mutter 46.1 Brings Explicit Sync, Better NVIDIA Hybrid GPU Acceleration
GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series...
GNU Portability Library's Tool Rewritten In Python For 8~100x Better Performance
The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation...
Acer Aspire One ARM Laptop To Have "Almost Full" Support With Linux 6.10
The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will feature "almost full" support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered laptop. The downside though it's now a three year old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to the market this year...
EROFS Eyes Zstd Compression, Intel QAT/IAA Accelerator Support, & Experimental Rust Code
The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system...
Linux 6.9-rc5 Picking Up Fixes For Intel FRED, BHI & GFNI/VAES Checks
Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week's batch of "x86/urgent" fixes were sent out this morning...