Open-source News

Linux Fixing A "Hilarious/Revolting Performance Regression" Around Intel KVM Virtualization  Phoronix

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today...

The upcoming Lenovo Legion Go S may come with a SteamOS Linux version  GamingOnLinux

Xfce 4.20 Desktop Environment Released with Experimental Wayland Support  9to5Linux

Xfce vs. LXQt: Lightweight Linux Environments Compared  How-To Geek

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays...

Btrfs Working On RAID1 Round-Robin Read Balancing  Phoronix

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing...

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel...

Running Fusion 360 On Linux With Wine  Hackaday

Gear Lever: An Open Source Tool To Manage AppImage Apps on Linux  It's FOSS News

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions...

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order...

As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel...

Intel P-State Energy Aware Scheduling Patches Updated For Lunar Lake  Phoronix

An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code...

Mesa 25.0 Introduces Standard Library For Driver OpenCL C  Phoronix

After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those "v6" patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver...

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release...