Michael Larabel

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay.

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release.

Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format.

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux.

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution.

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm.

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.

With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there's been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic.

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear.

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops.

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter.

A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME's Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE's KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!

Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic.

It's Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution.

After publishing open-source versions of MS-DOS years ago for versions 1.25 and 2.0, Microsoft and IBM have now announced that MS-DOS 4.0 has been open-sourced under an MIT license.

Similar to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Fedora 39, and other recent Linux distributions increasing its vm.max_map_count default in order to satisfy some Windows games running under Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other memory-intensive software, Arch Linux is also increasing its default value.

Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It's a big one.

If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver.

After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend.

While the Gentoo Foundation has long existed, to reduce the organizational complexity and overhead as well as becoming effectively a tax deductible non-profit at the US federal level, Gentoo Linux has become an associated project with Software in the Public Interest (SPI).

Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel's more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It's been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23.

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system.