A patch series sent out for review this weekend can significantly improve the system hibernation performance under Linux. Particularly for those with slower SSDs, the patches can make Linux hibernate up to several times faster. Linux kernel developer Kairui Song is working on improving hibernation performance with the new swap allocator that originally didn’t provide … Read more
Announced last year by consulting firm LunarG was KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan-on-Metal driver for efficiently leveraging the Vulkan API on Apple macOS systems as an alternative to the MoltenVK project. KosmicKrisp was upstreamed for Mesa 26.0 and continues making great progress for opening up more Vulkan possibilities in Apple’s world. KosmicKrisp delivers Vulkan 1.3 compliance … Read more
The power sequencing subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 cycle. Typically not an area of the kernel too exciting but one new driver addition is the “pwrseq-pcie-m2” to provide power sequencing for PCIe M.2 connectors. This power sequencing driver for PCIe M.2 connectors is part of the effort for being able to … Read more
The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) has multiple performance improvements to provide its users with on the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel. As a lovely Valentine’s Day for users of this flash-optimized file-system are some nice performance improvements merged. The merge notes: “In this development cycle, we focused on several key performance optimizations: – introducing large folio … Read more
Vim 9.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this robust and comprehensive text editor. This Valentine’s Day release for Vim lovers brings experimental Wayland support, XDG Base Directory specification support, modernized defaults for HiDPI displays, new completion features, and an improved diff mode. Vim 9.2 features “full support” for Wayland with its … Read more
This Valentine’s Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior “master” codebase. The effort noted in January of X.Org Server May Create A … Read more
The HID subsystem changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Among the Human Interface Devices (HID) work this cycle were supporting more guitars while also adding more device IDs and different laptop quirks. Linux 7.0 now has mainline kernel support for the Rock Band 4 guitars designed for the … Read more
In addition to this week’s GNOME 50 beta release, there were also other exciting developments in the GNOME ecosystem. This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue to highlight the interesting GNOME developments for the week. GNOME OS is moving system configuration handling in /etc to using systemd-context. The hope in using … Read more
The GNOME 50 beta release is now available ahead of the official GNOME 50 desktop due out in March. GNOME 50 beta highlights include: – The Epiphany browser has addressed crashes, remote denial of service, and other issues. – GDM has added support for a “unified” authentication mechanism in using a single PAM conversation that … Read more
Among the pull requests merged today on this first day of the Linux 7.0 merge window are the many Btrfs file-system feature updates. David Sterba sent in the Btrfs feature pull in advance of the Linux 6.19 stable release and thus among the early merges for kicking off the Linux 7.0 cycle. There aren’t any … Read more