New RC tonight

Over the weekend I wrote about AMD beginning to post new graphics driver patches for a new GPU. As pointed out in that earlier article, it looks to be a new AMD Instinct MI300 / "Aldebaran" GPU model and today more patches were posted that further confirm this target...

We give you a summary of the new features and enhancements of the Debian 12 Bookworm (upcoming) release.

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver...

Google or GrapheneOS

It’s only been a few weeks since we last talked about Librem-EC, but here we are again! This time instead of power management, we’re looking at the headset jack

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

An OS such as Linux can prove to be a fantastic addition, but you’ll have to take the time to figure out the ins and outs of the system

FBCNN (flexible blind convolutional neural network) is software which seeks to remove artifacts from JPEGs while preserving the integrity of the images

The final stable version of LibreELEC 11.0.1 has been released, bringing Kodi (Nexus) v20.1.

The Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" interim release gives us a sneak peek of what's to come in the next LTS version of Ubuntu

Tomasz Jokiel announced today the general availability of Porteus Kiosk 5.5 as the latest stable update to this Gentoo-based GNU/Linux distribution for kiosks, digital signage, and public computers.

Back in October Google announced their Compute Engine C3 instances in private preview that featured 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors as well as making use of Google's custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Since then, back in January, was the big Sapphire Rapids launch with the likes of the Xeon Platinum 8490H being released. Last month meanwhile Google promoted the C3 VMs to public preview state. The Sapphire Rapids C3 VMs remain in "public preview" from Google Cloud during which time there are no charges involved for the CPU costs. For those wondering about the core-for-core performance of Sapphire Rapids in Google Cloud, here are my initial benchmarks of the C3 series.

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table...

The open() system call offers a number of flags that modify its behavior; not all combinations of those flags make sense in a single call. It turns out, though, that the kernel has responded in a surprising way to the combination of O_CREAT and O_DIRECTORY for a long time. After a 2020 change made that response even more surprising, it seems likely that this behavior will soon be fixed, resulting in a rare user-visible semantic change to a core system call.

Version 5.0 of the GnuCash accounting tool is out. Changes include a number of investment-tracking improvements, better completion in the register window, a reworked report-generation system, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice and xen), Fedora (chromium, curl, and xen), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), Slackware (tar), SUSE (apache2, ceph, curl, dpdk, helm, libgit2, and php7), and Ubuntu (firefox and thunderbird).

Thanks to forthcoming work out of Red Hat, the Linux 6.4 Device Mapper (DM) code is expected to see some optimization work that can significantly benefit concurrent I/O performance... In one case at least acquiring buffers now about 25 times faster...

The Android Police podcast makes Google Bard say the silliest things

LibrePCB is a free/open source electronic design automation (EDA) software