Open-source News

Turbostat Utility Lands New Features With Linux 6.13  Phoronix

November was filled with interesting Linux benchmarks ranging from the Apple M4 testing kicking off to ongoing AMD Zen 5 benchmarks both for desktops and servers, a lot of exciting upstream kernel activity (and some drama...), and more. Even with the end of year holidays around, there remains new and original content on Phoronix each and every day. During November there were 250 original news articles on Phoronix along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length benchmark articles...

NVIDIA engineer Yonatan Maman posted a set of "request for comments" patches this Sunday to implement GPU Direct RDMA "P2P DMA" for device private pages. This is the latest in the effort by multiple vendors to allow more efficient data sharing between GPUs/accelerators and other devices like network adapters...

NVIDIA's New Linux Patches For GPU Direct RDMA For Device-Private Pages  Phoronix

Submitted today for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc1 release as part of the "x86/urgent" material is a fix for aging Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors where for the past year and a half they could potentially find very slow boot times...

Linux Fixes Issue Where Applying AMD Zen1/Zen2 Microcode Updates Could Slow Boot Times  Phoronix

The Linux Concept Journey — Kconfig | by Shlomi Boutnaru, Ph.D. | Nov, 2024  Medium

Last night when writing about the Clang AutoFDO and Propeller optimization patches sent in for Linux 6.13 I had wondered whether Linus Torvalds would go through with the pull request given some of his past commentary around aggressive compiler optimizations... But to much delight, this evening Linus Torvalds has merged the Kbuild pull request that introduces Clang-based AutoFDO and Propeller compiler optimization support for allowing greater kernel performance out of tailored (profiled) workloads...

Clang AutoFDO + Propeller Optimization Support Merged For Linux 6.13  Phoronix

NixOS 24.11 Released with GNOME 47 and KDE Plasma 6.2, PipeWire by Default  9to5Linux

Chill With Tux: 16 Relaxing Games That Run on Linux  How-To Geek

In what could be a wonderful holiday for the Linux desktop, it looks like the Wayland color management protocol might finally be close to merging after four years in discussion...

I Installed Ubuntu on My Old MacBook Air and I Wish I'd Done it Sooner  How-To Geek

Save your computer from Microsoft's Windows 10 end-of-life planned obsolescence  Neowin

As an alternative to the GNOME System Monitor application for system monitoring, Resources has been in development as a currently unofficial, GNOME-aligned resource/hardware monitoring application written in the Rust programming language. Resources v1.7 was released on Friday and now has the ability to monitor NPU usage and other enhancements...

Linux 6.13 Hits A "Tipping Point" With More Rust Drivers Expected Soon  Phoronix

In addition to the USB updates and big staging flush merged yesterday for the Linux 6.13 kernel merge window, the "char/misc" pull was also honored for that catch-all of various kernel changes. With the char/misc pull there are some notable additions for those wanting to write kernel drivers within the Rust programming language...

The Rust Hypervisor Firmware is a project out of the Cloud Hypervisor umbrella for developing open-source, Rust-based firmware that can be launched from any environment able to load ELF binaries and run them via the PVH booting standard. Rust Hypervisor Firmware v0.5 is out this weekend with the newest capabilities...

KDE developers have wrapped up a busy November with many fixes and other refinements landing this last week of the month...

Elementary OS 8: Interesting Ideas, Tough Ecosystem  Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet