ROCm 7.0.0 vs. ROCm 7.2.3 Performance On The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700
With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the use … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.7 Beta Released With Plasma Big Screen, Union Modules
In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more
I’m pleased to announce that express-twtkpr (my ExpressJS library for hosting, editing, and posting to a twtxt.txt file) continues to crawl towards a full release with another (pre-alpha) update published to NPM. This update includes a whole new plugin system, and even a (little) more documentation. Check it out, if you dare (and use it at your own risk): https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr
And speaking of plugins, here’s where the fun’s at: announcing express-twtkpr-core-plugins, a set of 3 plugins for your TwtKpr install: emojiButton, uploadButton, and postToMastodon. Like express-twtkpr, this set of plugins is still in pre-alpha, and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish (so also use them at your own risk). Other than that, they work great: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr-core-plugins
Stay tuned for more! 🤘
GCC 16 Produces Faster Binaries Than GCC 15, Competitive Race With LLVM Clang 22
GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM … ⌘ Read more
Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more
NetBSD 11.0-RC4 Comes As Hopefully The Last Release Candidate
In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate… ⌘ Read more
OpenZFS 2.4.2 Released With Linux 7.0 Kernel Support, Many Bug Fixes
For those making use of OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD, OpenZFS 2.4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation… ⌘ Read more
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 Further Improves NVIDIA Integration For Steam Play Linux Gaming
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA’s NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support… ⌘ Read more
Fwupd 2.1.3 Brings Firmware Updating To Modular Smartphones
Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Radeon Driver For R300 Through R500 GPUs Sees Big Code Cleanup In 2026
The open-source Radeon “R300g” driver living within the Mesa codebase for supporting the aging ATI (AMD) Radeon 9500 “R300” through Radeon X1000 “R500” series graphics processors is going through a big code restructuring as part of a big undertaking in 2026… Yes, 24 years after the ATI R300 GPUs first released, thanks to a devoted open-source developer fan, there is a significant improvement in the works… ⌘ Read more
Vulkan 1.4.351 Brings Six New Extensions, Including A Ray-Tracing Improvement
Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more
Google Says Hackers Used AI To Create Zero Day Security Flaw For the First Time
Google says it has seen the first evidence of cybercriminals using AI to create a zero-day vulnerability. “Google reported its findings to the unnamed firm affected by the vulnerability before releasing its report,” reports Politico. “The company then issued a patch to fix the issue.” From the report: Google Threat I … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic Says ‘Evil’ Portrayals of AI Were Responsible For Claude’s Blackmail Attempts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avo … ⌘ Read more
GNOME’s Help Viewer Updated Due To Flatpak Sandbox Escape Vulnerability
GNOME’s help viewer, Yelp, last year was impacted by a serious security issue for arbitrary file reads. There’s a new vulnerability affecting the GNOME help viewer that led to the Yelp 49.1 release to address a possible Flatpak sandbox escape vector… ⌘ Read more
Stenberg: Mythos finds a curl vulnerability
Daniel Stenberg has published a lengthy\
article on his thoughts on Anthropic’s Mythos, which the company
decided was too dangerous for wide public release.
My personal conclusion can however not end up with anything else
than that the big hype around this model so far was primarily
marketing. I see no evidence that this setup finds issues to any
particular higher or more advanced degree than the other too … ⌘ Read more
Two stable kernels with Dirty Frag fixes
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.0.6 and 6.18.29 stable kernels with Hyunwoo
Kim’s patch
for the second vulnerability ( CVE-2026-43500)
reported with Dirty Frag
an … ⌘ Read more
Debian to require reproducible builds
Paul Gevers has slipped an interesting bit of news into a “ bits from the release\
team” message:
Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve
decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible
packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software
to block migration of new packages that can’t be reproduced or
existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.
As Gioe … ⌘ Read more
Intel IGC 2.34.4 Compiler Brings Many Improvements
The Intel Graphics Compiler “IGC” 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows… ⌘ Read more
Sculpt OS 26.04 Can Finally Be Used To Self-Host For Developing/Building Genode
Sculpt OS as the general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS Framework is out with a new feature release… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.0.6 Released To Finish Mitigating the Dirty Frag Vulnerability
Linux 7.0.6 is out as stable this morning to finish mitigating the Dirty Frag vulnerability that was made public last week… ⌘ Read more
Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc3
Linus has released 7.1-rc3 for testing.
“I think this answers the ‘is 7.1 continuing the larger size pattern
that we saw with 7.0?’ question, and the answer is yes: that wasn’t a fluke
brought on by a .0 release - it simply seems to be the new normal.” ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1-rc3 Released With Many Networking Changes
Linus Torvalds just issued the third weekly test candidate of the Linux 7.1 kernel with around a third of the patches being for the networking subsystem… ⌘ Read more
FreshRSS 1.29.0 ⌘ Read more
Debian Release Team: Debian Must Now Ship Reproducible Packages
With half-way through the Debian 14 “Forky” development cycle, the Debian release team is out with an update this weekend and some big news… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Releases Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 With Many Security Fixes
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects… ⌘ Read more
Cisco Releases Open-Source ‘DNA Test for AI Models’
Cisco has released an open-source tool “to trace the origins of AI models,” reports SC World, “and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain.”
[Cisco’s Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a “fingerprint” for AI models that can then be compared to … ⌘ Read more
Hyprland 0.55 Released With Lua-Based Configuration, User-Defined Layouts
Hyprland 0.55 is out today as a big feature update for this Wayland-based compositor… ⌘ Read more
FEX 2605 Brings Performance Improvements, Initial Snapdragon X2 Elite Fixes
FEX 2605 is out this weekend as the newest monthly feature release to this emulator for running Linux x86_64 binaries on ARM64 (AArch64) devices. This is the open-source project sponsored by Valve and planned for use with the upcoming Steam Frame as well as being relevant to Linux gaming on other 64-bit ARM laptops and other devices… ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 Improves Handling Of Desktop Apps, Other Fixes
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution… ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.17 Fixes Support For GB10 Powered Systems
The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA’s NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that’s motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA’s packaged Linux driver… ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2 Brings Updated Zstd, Bug Fixes
FreeBSD 15.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in June. Out today is FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 2… ⌘ Read more
More stable kernels with partial Dirty Frag fixes
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.171, 5.15.205, and 5.10.255 stable kernels, quickly
followed by 6.1.172 and 5.15.206 kernels. This is another round
of stable kernels to provide fixes for one of the CVEs ( CVE-2026-43284)
assigned following the [ … ⌘ Read more
Pentagon Begins Releasing New Files On UFOs
The Pentagon has begun releasing new UFO/UAP files through a newly launched public website, starting with 162 documents from agencies including the FBI, State Department, NASA, and others. Officials say more files will be released on a rolling basis. The Associated Press reports: The Pentagon has begun releasing new files on UFOs, saying members of the public can draw their own c … ⌘ Read more
The Pentagon Releases New Trove of Declassified UFO Files
The Defense Department has released a new trove of declassified documents about government UFO sitings. ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA Releases CUDA-Oxide 0.1 For Experimental Rust-To-CUDA Compiler
A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more
Qt Creator 20 Beta Expands AI Integration
The Qt Group released the Qt Creator 20 Beta today for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE). In building off the trends of recent releases of Qt Creator and development tools at large, AI integration continues to be a big area of focus… ⌘ Read more
OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more
AMD’s Local, Open-Source AI Can Now Easily Interact With Your Gmail
AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account… ⌘ Read more
Four stable kernels with partial fixes for Dirty Frag
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.5, 6.18.28, 6.12.87, and 6.6.138 stable kernels. These kernels
contain a partial fix for the Dirty\
Frag and Copy Fail 2
security flaws. Kroah-Hartman … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.7 To Provide A Much Better Experience For CPU-Based Rendering
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory “wl_shm” usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland… ⌘ Read more
Three stable kernel updates
The
7.0.4,
6.18.27, and
6.12.86
stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important
fixes. ⌘ Read more
D7VK 1.9 Brings Some Hefty Performance Improvements
D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more
Valve Releases Steam Controller CAD Files Under Creative Commons License
Valve has released CAD files for the new Steam Controller and its Puck under a Creative Commons license. “The idea is to let enterprising modders create their own Steam Controller add-ons, like skins, charging stands, grip extenders or smartphone mounts,” reports Digital Foundry. From the report: The Valve release includes file … ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.1 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Vulkan Drivers
Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more… ⌘ Read more
PCIe 8.0 Spec Draft 0.5 Released For 1TB/s Bi-Directional x16 Bandwidth
The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June… ⌘ Read more
Incus 7.0 LTS released
Version\
7.0 of the Incus container and
virtual-machine management system has been released. Notable changes in this
release include the inclusion of a low-level backup API, the addition\
of basic S3 operations directly in Incus to replace the now-unmaintained
MinIO project, as well as the removal of support … ⌘ Read more
Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute
Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications… ⌘ Read more
VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more
AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware
Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware… ⌘ Read more
GCC Git Lands Fix For Missing AVX-512 Optimizations On AMD Zen 6
Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it’s not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged… ⌘ Read more