Showing headlines posted by bob

The X.Org Foundation has announced that this year's X.Org Developers Conference will be taking place in Toronto, Canada and hosted by Arm...

Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China's Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.

Upstreamed for the Linux 6.19 kernel is the Uniwill laptop platform driver for exposing more features/settings for laptops made by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM, including the laptops from TUXEDO Computers. Coming for the next kernel cycle is further extending the Uniwill platform driver for now having support for adjusting the custom total graphics power "cTGP" for those laptops with a dedicated GPU...

Variscite has introduced its first SMARC compatible SoM family with the VAR-SMARC-MX8M-PLUS, built around NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus processor. The module is designed for compact embedded and industrial systems that combine AI and vision processing with extended connectivity and integrated security. The module is built around the NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor, featuring a quad-core […]

Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year's was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd...

The January 25, 2026 release of DietPi v10.0 introduces new self-hosted services, drops legacy platform support, and raises the minimum supported Debian version to Bookworm. The update adds Uptime Kuma and ownCloud Infinite Scale to the DietPi software catalog, with a focus on long-term maintainability and SBC compatibility.   DietPi: DietPi is a lightweight, Debian-based […]

While typically the stable Linux kernel would come after the -rc7 release a week prior, for Linux 6.19 the release is being dragged out by an extra week not due to any scary bugs but rather due to the holiday downtime at the end of the year. As such Linux 6.19-rc8 is out today with the stable v6.19 release expected next Sunday...

A new BSD distribution I only learned about for the first time this weekend is smolBSD, a project built atop the netbsd-MICROVM kernel coming with NetBSD 11 for providing insanely fast booting micro-VMs intended for micro-services and similar environments...

Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon...

Introduced to the mainline Linux kernel last year was "sheaves" as an opt-in per-CPU array-based caching layer. Sheaves was merged back in Linux 6.18 and while it started as an opt-in caching layer, the plan is to replace more CPU slabs / caches with sheaves. Queued up for slated introduction in the upcoming Linux 7.0 cycle is replacing more of those caches with sheaves...

Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature...

Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD...

For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired...

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings...

Intel today released the LLM-Scaler-vLLM 1.3 update with expanding the array of large language models that can run on Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards with this Docker-based stack for deploying vLLM...

Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments...

Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several months. Since then I have ratcheted up the benchmarks with nearly 500 benchmarks between the AMD EPYC 9755 and Intel Xeon 6980P processors for an even more comprehensive look at these CPUs atop Linux 6.18 LTS.

Big Red promises 'new era' as long-frustrated contributors weigh whether to believe it Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs.…

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April...

Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make certain that changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started. There are two test periods […]