XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 is now available for testing with the latest features for this portal frontend service to Flatpak.

New XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 features include a new reduced motion setting in the Settings Portal, to express your desire for apps to minimize non-essential motion in animations.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 also adds support for Linyaps applications. Linyaps "Linyaps Is Not Yet Another Packaging System" is a cross-distribution Linux package format spearheaded by the

Ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle kicking off next month, the Apple Silicon Device Tree updates have been sent out for queuing ahead of that next merge window. Notable this round are the Device Tree additions for rounding out the USB 2.0/3.x support with the USB-C ports.

Sven Peter sent out the Apple SoC DT updates this week for the Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle and most notable is radding all the needed pieces around USB3

A new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list aims to address the high wake-up latency experienced on modern Intel Xeon server platforms. With Sapphire Rapids and newer, "excessive" wakeup latencies with the Linux menu governor and NOHZ_FULL configuration can negatively impair Xeon CPUs for latency-sensitive workloads but a 16 line patch aims to better improve the situation. That is, changing one line of actual code and the rest being code comments.

Cloud engineer Ionut Nechita of Wind River has been working to address the

Prominent Intel Linux engineer H. Peter Anvin has posted a new patch series working to clean-up the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel boot code. Besides cleaning up the code, the kernel configuration would drop options around EFI stub mode and relocatable kernels in making those features now always enabled.

CONFIG_EFI_STUB is for allowing the compressed kernel executable to be loaded directly by the EFI firmware without the use of a bootloader. While many Linux users still rely on a bootloader like GRUB

For those using the powerful PHPStan tool for static analysis on PHP code, this week's PHPStan 2.1.34 is promoting optimized performance with projects seeing around 25% to 40% faster analysis times.

PHPStan 2.1.34 delivers on much greater performance via caching of reflection objects and many raw performance optimizations to the analyzer code. There are dozens of different performance optimizations in this new release for making this static analyzer much faster in trying to catch any issues with PHP code. It

Mesa 26.0 was due to be branched last week and in turn start its feature freeze but ended up being pushed back to tomorrow (21 January) to allow some lingering features to land. It's been beneficial for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with several interesting merge requests having landed in time for Mesa 26.0.

First up, the merge request made it for using function calls to separate out any-hit/intersection shader compilation. This is the merge that delivers up to

Intel Linux engineers have been working on enhancing the NVMe storage performance with today's high core count processors. Due to situations where multiple CPUs could end up sharing the same NVMe IRQ(s), performance penalties can arise if the IRQ affinity and the CPU's cluster do not align. There is a pending patch to address this situation. A 15% performance improvement was reported with the pending patch.

The code working its way to the Linux kernel is making the lib/group_cpus.c code

It's typically rare these days for the ATA subsystem updates in the Linux kernel to contain anything really noteworthy. But today some important fixes were merged for the ATA code to deal with a reported power management regression affecting the past number of Linux kernel releases over the last year. ATAPI devices with dummy ports weren't hitting their low-power state and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states but thankfully that is now resolved with this code.

Merged today were a few ATA patches to