section
FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
Intel Enables Buffer Compression For Better Gaming Performance With DXVK
Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...
XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3
The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES...
Ubuntu’s App Center doesn’t know what went wrong
I recently re-encountered my favourite ‘error’ dialog in Ubuntu, which is thrown by the distro’s App Center (snap-store), which is the default GUI software management tool. I don’t see it often, but when I do it (un)helpfully informs me: “Something went wrong. We’re sorry, but we’re not sure what the error is.” While I sympathise with its honesty and the general sense of unease in imparts – I say something similar, looking at the state of the world right now – isn’t it the software’s job to know what’s wrong? You can see the dialog in question here, in situ […] You're reading Ubuntu’s App Center doesn’t know what went wrong , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3
Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...
Wordbook is a modern offline dictionary for GNOME
They say never judge a book by its cover, and few do if said book is a dictionary, but what about desktop dictionary apps? I recently came across Wordbook, a modern English-English dictionary powered by OpenEnglish WordNet and eSpeak for pronunciations. Wordbook is in GNOME Circle, and its GTK4/libadwaita UI is a good fit for the desktop. Wordbook uses a lexical database, with words grouped into ‘synsets’ based on their meaning. It makes it easier to explore related words, distinguish between words that look similar (but have different meanings) and find different precise alternatives. A random word option, favourites and […] You're reading Wordbook is a modern offline dictionary for GNOME , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Linux 7.3 To Land Initial Code Improving vRAM Management, More Improvements Coming
Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory management behavior...
FFmpeg Lands H.265 Vulkan Encode Performance Optimizations
The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed...
Offloading Rust To GPUs Proves Capable Of High Performance With Memory Safety
A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP...
ARCTIC Fan Controller: The Best Fan Controller For Linux Desktops, Less Than $10 USD
Back in March were patches posted by ARCTIC Cooling for an ARCTIC fan controller driver for Linux. Typically we aren't used to seeing desktop/enthusiast focused vendors providing such Linux drivers for peripherals directly but the sad fact is most often it's left up to the open-source community to reverse engineer and create such drivers for Linux. Making it all the more surprising besides it coming from ARCTIC Cooling directly was that at the time they didn't even have a fan controller product with USB interface. Well, now it's launched and in turn is a great USB fan controller for Linux systems and retails for just $9 USD.
[$] Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel
Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still " bigger than I would have wished for ". In fact, 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.
Ubuntu is Growing Faster on Windows Than on Linux
The company's VP of Engineering expects WSL users to outnumber native Ubuntu desktop users within months.
[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why
This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference , better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds , which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds , though LWN did look at the topic just over two years ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.
AMD Working On A New Backend For Improving ROCm Compute In QEMU/VMs
AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU...
Linux 7.3 SMP Improvement To Help Reduce Latency, Improve Real-Time Performance
Among the pull requests sent out today now that the Linux 7.3 merge window is open are the SMP improvements for this next kernel version. Standing out among the SMP code are some enhancements for helping reduce latency and ultimately enhancing real-time Linux performance...
GNU poke 5.0 released
Version 5.0 of GNU Poke , a binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes a number of improvements to the Poke compiler, additions to the Poke language, as well as runtime and standard library updates. See below for the full list of changes.
Mark J. Wielaard receives Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom
The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Mark J. Wielaard has been honored with the second annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom for his many years of service to software freedom. Mark is one of many key FOSS developers who has designed his career so that his employers have funded much of his FOSS work. Nevertheless, Mark continues his volunteer work after hours as a key contributor who maintains Sourceware — the oldest FOSS collaboration and developer infrastructure hosting site in history. In addition to his work on Sourceware, Wielaard is a member of the DWARF Debugging Standard Committee , the maintainer for Valgrind and elfutils , as well as a contributor to various other GNU projects.
Firefox 154 Now Available With "Manage AI" Quick Action
Firefox 154 is now available as the newest monthly update bringing a few new features, enhancements, and other alterations to this open-source web browser...
Intel & AMD Power Management Driver Improvements Ready For Linux 7.3
In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3...
KTransformers 0.7 Expands AVX-512 Support To Benefit AMD EPYC Servers
KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release...
Con Kolivas Revives "-ck" Patches & MuQSS To Improve Linux Desktop Responsiveness
Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work, out of the blue he announced a new -ck patch series today with updated MuQSS code...
Linux 7.3 On PowerPC Now Supports In-Kernel Rust, Initial Power12 Enablement Begins
The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures...
ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready With Linux 7.3, NVIDIA Olympus Workarounds
AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features...
GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu Released Following More Driver Cleaning
Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom...
Linux 7.2 Arrives With Cache Aware Scheduling After More Than a Year of Work
AMD's Radeon driver also picks up HDMI 2.1 support, and Apple M3 MacBooks can now boot the kernel.