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FOSS
Kernel, distros, and the wider free and open source software world.
663 stories archived
Comma.ai Launches A PCIe Gen4 x4 To USB4 Dock With Open-Source Firmware
George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware...
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : BPF and binfmt_misc; CrossPoint ebook firmware; KVM planes; BPF formal verification; shadow-utils; new storage-code testing features. Briefs : Django releases; GNOME shell; LightDM 1.33.0; QEMU 11.1; uutils 0.10; Software Stewardship Lab; Quotes; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
Tenstrorrent Posts GCC Compiler Patches For Ascalon XG Core
While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core...
GCC 17 Compiler Adding "-m128bit-atomic" For 128-bit Atomic Memory Operations
Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release...
[$] Block-layer error injection
Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail, pick the status code to return, or target a disk directly without employing a stacked device on top. Use of a stacked device means the test runs against the mapper device, not the disk it was meant to exercise. A patch series from Christoph Hellwig adds a configurable error-injection interface that does all three things that the current error-injection code lacks, controlled by a per-disk debugfs file.
Manjaro Linux 26.1 Released With GNOME 50 & KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktops
Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base...
Intel AMX Performance With The Xeon 678X Workstation CPU
One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end workstation.
LightDM returns from the dark with first release in 4 years
LightDM, Ubuntu’s former display manager, has had its first new release in four years – and the first under a new set of maintainers. LightDM v1.33.0 is a ‘catch up’ release that adds Qt6 support (Qt5 still works, don’t worry) and clears a backlog of fixes that had built up since the previous release in 2022. There shouldn’t be any breaking changes either, per the release notes. While it might sound like a sudden revival of a legacy effort, LightDM is still widely used by Linux distributions and desktops. LightDM: what is it? LightDM is a backend that handles logging […] You're reading LightDM returns from the dark with first release in 4 years , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
[$] A look at CrossPoint e-reader firmware
There are a number of small, inexpensive, low-powered e-reader or e-paper devices that have promise as ebook readers with one minor problem: the firmware they ship with does not realize their full potential. To solve that problem, the CrossPoint Reader project looks to provide replacement firmware that offers necessary features, better performance, and a more pleasant reading experience. On August 7, the project released version 1.5.0 , which opens large EPUBs more quickly, provides offline dictionary lookups, and has reworked settings for changing layout and font options. The release also improves support for right-to-left text as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) text rendering.
QEMU 11.1 released
Version 11.1 of the QEMU emulator has been released. The release contains more than 3,200 commits from 285 authors and includes a long list of improvements; see the announcement and changelog for the details.
Linux Finally Seeing Patches For Better Hybrid Graphics On 2018~2019 Era MacBook Pros
Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed...
Intel ANV Driver Enables Vulkan Video AV1 Encoding For DG2/Alchemist GPUs
Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware...
SimpleX Chat Wants Its 400K+ Users to Become Investors Too
The funds will go towards keeping the project up and running.
Linux 7.2 To Revert Back To The FIFO DRM Scheduler Policy Due To "Fair" Regressions
One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2...
Mold 2.42 Delivering Greater Performance For This High Speed Linker
It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker...
Intel LLM-Scaler Ready With Muse Glimmer Support, Other LLMs & Features
Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements...
LACT 0.10 Released With New NVIDIA Overclocking Controls, Blackwell Hotspot Sensor
LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet more features in tow...
QEMU 11.1 Released With Numerous Improvements
For those using QEMU as part of the open-source virtualization stack, QEMU 11.1 is now available with a number of new feature enhancements and fixes...
Redox OS Enjoys installer Improvements, Performance Enhancements
A new blog post out today from the Redox OS crew highlights all of the interesting improvements made to this Rust-based, open-source operating system over the course of July...
GNOME Shell’s redesigned search experience uses a floating overlay
The next version of GNOME Shell, out in September, is ‘likely’ to include a redesigned search experience. In current versions of the desktop, when you start a search from the GNOME Shell overview, a dedicated search results screen replaces the one you’re looking at, i.e., the workspace row and dash (aka dock) are obscured. GNOME’s design team has long wanted to adopt a ‘semantic’ layout for search, where elements visibly enter and exit from a specific place, so users know how one screen relates to the next. For search, results would appear in an overlay that ‘spawns out of the […] You're reading GNOME Shell’s redesigned search experience uses a floating overlay , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
ChatGPT desktop app is now available for Linux (in preview)
OpenAI has announced a preview release of the official ChatGPT Desktop app for Linux. Compared to using ChatGPT in a browser tab, the GUI desktop app can run Codex in your local repos, hook into your other apps (via extensions) for ChatGPT Work related tasks and probe your local files without you having to upload anything elsewhere first. ChatGPT desktop for Linux joins Anthropic’s Claude desktop app for Linux, which entered beta last month. This announcement is about an official version of its full-fat desktop GUI app. You’ve no doubt seen plenty of unofficial wrappers around ChatGPT before now, and command-line […] You're reading ChatGPT desktop app is now available for Linux (in preview) , a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu . Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Intel CPU Microcode 20260811 Release Fixes Eight Security Issues
Intel today published their 20260811 CPU microcode updates to fix a variety of issues for exciting processors, including shipping the first new microcode images for Bartlett Lake and Wildcat Lake. The new microcode updates stretch back to Intel Core Gen10 processors...
OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux
OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form...
These Open Source Devs Are Reverse-Engineering Xbox Game Pass for Linux
They have already cracked Xbox game downloads, and macOS support is also being worked on.