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Ubuntu flash-kernel Package Looks To Drop Support For Old ARM Hardware
Ubuntu flash-kernel Package Looks To Drop Support For Old ARM Hardware
6 Hours Ago - Ubuntu - flash-kernel - 2 Comments

The flash-kernel package is used for putting the Linux kernel image and initramfs in the boot location for embedded devices that aren't able to boot directly from /boot. The flash-kernel package is particularly important for older ARM hardware while now Ubuntu maintainers are looking at dropping patches they currently carry for a number of aging ARM platforms.

7 December

More Kernel Bitrot: Old & Busted UltraSPARC T2 "Niagara 2" SPU Driver Slated For Removal
More Kernel Bitrot: Old & Busted UltraSPARC T2 "Niagara 2" SPU Driver Slated For Removal
7 December 04:09 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Sun Niagara 2 Days... - 17 Comments

Following 107k lines of old driver code within the staging area of the kernel removed for Linux 6.13, over in the crypto space they are looking at some cleaning as well with plans raised to remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) driver for the old Sun Niagara 2, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 and this SPU was also found in the UltraSPARC T3 as well.

UMD Direct Submission "Proof Of Concept" For The Intel Xe Linux Driver
UMD Direct Submission "Proof Of Concept" For The Intel Xe Linux Driver
7 December 06:58 AM EST - Intel - User-Space Direct Submission - 3 Comments

One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.

AMD Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
AMD Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
7 December 06:31 AM EST - AMD - AMD HFI v7 For Linux - 2 Comments

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

6 December

OBS Studio 31.0 Released With New Features For Screen Recording & Screencasting
OBS Studio 31.0 Released With New Features For Screen Recording & Screencasting
6 December 08:32 PM EST - Multimedia - OBS Studio 31.0 - 12 Comments

OBS Studio 31.0 was released this evening as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform software for live streaming and desktop screen recording purposes. OBS Studio remains a leading choice across operating systems for screen recording, game livestreaming, and similar purposes while the new v31.0 release tacks on even more features.

MGLRU Sees New Performance Optimizations For Linux
MGLRU Sees New Performance Optimizations For Linux
6 December 06:19 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Multi-Gen LRU - 1 Comment

It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.

5 December

NVIDIA 565.77 Linux Driver Released As First Stable R565 Build
NVIDIA 565.77 Linux Driver Released As First Stable R565 Build
5 December 10:13 AM EST - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 565.77 - 19 Comments

For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.

Linus Torvalds Comes Out Against "Completely Broken" x86_64 Feature Levels
Linus Torvalds Comes Out Against "Completely Broken" x86_64 Feature Levels
5 December 06:54 AM EST - Linux Kernel - No Feature Levels In The Kernel - 65 Comments

With the new Linux kernel patches posted yesterday for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernels on x86_64 CPUs as part of that patch series was introducing new Kconfig build options around the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. It turns out though that Torvalds is completely against how the x86_64 feature levels are handled by the compiler toolchain folks and doesn't want to see it invading the kernel.

Imagination PowerVR Driver Being Extended To Work On RISC-V
Imagination PowerVR Driver Being Extended To Work On RISC-V
5 December 06:34 AM EST - RISC-V - RISC-V + Imagination PowerVR - 14 Comments

The Linux 6.8 kernel merged the Imagination PowerVR driver as a new open-source driver for supporting the PowerVR "Rogue" graphics architecture and being developed in tandem by Imagination Tech with their upstream Mesa Vulkan driver. Initially this PowerVR driver was catering to ARM SoCs with the Rogue graphics while now the open-source driver is being extended to work on RISC-V too.

4 December

OpenVPN DCO Looks Like It Might Be Ready For Linux 6.14 To Speed-Up VPN Performance
4 December 11:09 AM EST - Linux Networking - OpenVPN Data Channel Offload - 12 Comments

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

VTE-Based Linux Terminals Now Support A Nice Feature Led By Windows Terminal
4 December 06:03 AM EST - Desktop - Better Progress Indicators - 34 Comments

VTE-based terminals on Linux like Ptyxis are now seeing support introduced to better display progress state for long-running processes with a more visually pleasing progress bar. Microsoft's Windows Terminal has already supported this feature while now with systemd beginning to support using these Operating System Command escape sequences, Linux terminal support is on the rise.

3 December

AMD ROCm 6.3 Tags Begin Appearing On GitHub
3 December 08:50 PM EST - Radeon - ROCm 6.3 - 15 Comments

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.

Rustls Multi-Threaded Performance Is Battering OpenSSL
3 December 06:14 AM EST - Programming - Rustls Benchmarks - 166 Comments

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

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