The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February.

LibreOffice 26.2 is shaping up to be another incremental step forward for this popular free software alternative to Microsoft Office. The LibreOffice Writer word processor has improvements to its spell checking dialog, various tracking improvements to document changes, Start and End paragraph alignment, and other changes.

Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

Sound Open Firmware 2.14 is out today as the newest feature release of SOF. Sound Open Firmware brings initial platform support for Intel Wildcat Lake "WCL", updates to its Zephyr base OS, initial support for NXP Essential Audio Processing, power management policy updates,

Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner pursued this scoped user access functionality for the Linux kernel in an effort to avoid the need for some speculation barriers to cut-down on the performance overhead in the kernel'

Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work.

This Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) work has squeezed some nice performance gains out of various Intel and AMD processors for Linux 6.19. For example

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

These four security issues originate from within code originally inside the libxkbcommon library and back in 2018 was flagged with four CVEs. Those security issues included endless recursion resulting in a crash and three null pointer dereference issues leading to possible crashes.

Those 201

In addition to new AMD CPU features being merged today for Linux 6.19 , there are also some new Intel CPU features that hit Linux Git today that are worth highlighting.

The EDAC changes were merged today for the Error Detection And Correction drivers. Notable there is introducing "imh_edac" as a new EDAC driver for supporting next-generation Intel Diamond Rapids processors plus other future Intel CPUs making use of this new memory controller architecture. More details on that new EDAC driver for Diamond Rapids and other details within

Linus Torvalds just merged another set of pull requests to Git for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. With the latest round of merges, there are two separate AMD changes worth highlighting.

First up, the early preparations for AMD Zen 6 continues. On the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) front, the RAS core merge adds support for two new Machine Check Architecture (MCA) bank bits to be found with AMD Zen 6 processors. These new bits denote whether the error address logged is a

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors.

Thanks to work by student engineers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, upstream Coreboot already has a basic port to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T . 3mdeb brought the code over to their Dasharo downstream