Open-source News

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage...

The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization...

Bochs DRM Linux Driver Being Modernized - Better Performance For QEMU Display  Phoronix

Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust adoption, and why the Linux kernel is 'the only thing that matters'  ZDNet

5 lightweight operating systems I run on my old laptops  Pocket-lint

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary...

Proton VPN Finally Adds WireGuard Support for Linux Users  It's FOSS News

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window...

Intel Preps More Xe2 Lunar Lake & Battlemage Driver Code For Linux 6.12  Phoronix

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding...

As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support...

AMD Prepares Sound Open Firmware Driver For ACP7.0 Hardware  Phoronix

KubeCon China - at 33-and-a-third, Linux is a long player. So, why does Linus Torvalds hate AI?  diginomica

Linux hits new heights as desktop market share climbs  Computing

In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS...

August Windows patch breaks some dual-boot systems: how to fix  Notebookcheck.net

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back  The Register

NILFS2 File-System Seeing More Fixes, Additional Ioctls Wired Up Ahead Of Linux 6.12  Phoronix

While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled...

The upstream Linux "oxp-sensors" driver began as a driver for supporting the sensors on the OneXPlayer handheld. With time this driver has been extended to support more handheld gaming consoles and a new patch enables support for several more devices...