Linux

Steven Deobald has been in the post of GNOME Foundation Executive Director for the past four months, during which time he has made major contributions to both the Foundation and the wider GNOME project. Sadly, Steven will be leaving the Foundation this week. The Foundation Board is extremely grateful to Steven and wish him the very best for his future endeavors.

The Executive Director role is extremely diverse and it is hard to list all of Steven’s contributions since he has been in post. However, particular highlights include:

• energetic engagement with the GNOME community, including weekly updates focused on the Foundation’s support of GNOME development, and attention to topics of importance to our contributors, such as Pride Month and Disability Pride

• the creation of a new donations platform, which included both a new website, detailed evaluation of payment processors, and a strategy for distributing donations to GNOME development

• a focus on partner outreach, including attending UN Open Source Week, adding postmarketOS to our Advisory board, and the creation of a new Advisory Board Matrix channel, alongside many conversations with partner organisations

• internal policy and documentation work, particularly around spending and finances

• the addition of new tooling to augment policies and documentation, such as an internal Foundation Handbook and vault.gnome.org

• assistance with the board, including recruiting a new treasurer and vice-treasurer

We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.

I know that some members of the GNOME community will be disappointed by this decision. I can assure everyone that it wasn’t one that we took lightly, and had to consider from different perspectives.

The good news is that Steven has left the Foundation with a strong platform on which to build, and we have an energetic and engaged board which is already working to fill in the gaps left by his departure. I’m confident that the Foundation can continue on the positive trajectory started by Steven, with a strong community-based executive taking the reins.

To this end, the board held its regular annual meeting this week, and appointed new directors to key positions. I’ve taken over the president’s role from Rob McQueen, who has now joined Arun Raghavan as one of two Vice-Presidents. The Executive Committee has been expanded with the inclusion of Arun and Maria Majadas (who is our new Chair). We have also bolstered the Finance Committee, and are looking to create new groups for fundraising and communications.

Steven has been very helpful in working on a smooth transition, and our staff are continuing to work as normal, so Foundation operations won’t be affected by these management changes. In the near future we’ll be pushing forward with the fundraising plans that Steven has set out, and are hopeful about being able to provide more financial support for the GNOME project as a result. If you want to help us with that, please get in touch.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to president@gnome.org.

On behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors,

– Allan

In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.

Our story begins in December 2020, when Hector Martin kicked off Asahi Linux. I was working for Collabora working on Panfrost, the open source Mesa3D driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Hector put out a public call for guidance from upstream open source maintainers, and I bit. I just intended to give some quick pointers. Instead, I bought myself a Christmas present and got to work. In between my university coursework and Collabora work, I poked at the shader instruction set.

One thing led to another. Within a few weeks, I drew a triangle.

In 3D graphics, once you can draw a triangle, you can do anything.

Pretty soon, I started work on a shader compiler. After my final exams that semester, I took a few days off from Collabora to bring up an OpenGL driver capable of spinning gears with my new compiler.

Over the next year, I kept reverse-engineering and improving the driver until it could run 3D games on macOS.

Meanwhile, Asahi Lina wrote a kernel driver for the Apple GPU. My userspace OpenGL driver ran on macOS, leaving her kernel driver as the missing piece for an open source graphics stack. In December 2022, we shipped graphics acceleration in Asahi Linux.

In January 2023, I started my final semester in my Computer Science program at the University of Toronto. For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver. I faced the same question as my peers: what will I do after graduation?

Maybe Panfrost? I started reverse-engineering of the Mali Midgard GPU back in 2017, when I was still in high school. That led to an internship at Collabora in 2019 once I graduated, turning into my job throughout four years of university. During that time, Panfrost grew from a kid’s pet project based on blackbox reverse-engineering, to a professional driver engineered by a team with Arm’s backing and hardware documentation. I did what I set out to do, and the project succeeded beyond my dreams. It was time to move on.

What did I want to do next?

• Finish what I started with the M1. Ship a great driver.
• Bring full, conformant OpenGL drivers to the M1. Apple’s drivers are not conformant, but we should strive for the industry standard.
• Bring full, conformant Vulkan to Apple platforms, disproving the myth that Vulkan isn’t suitable for Apple hardware.
• Bring Proton gaming to Asahi Linux. Thanks to Valve’s work for the Steam Deck, Windows games can run better on Linux than even on Windows. Why not reap those benefits on the M1?

Panfrost was my challenge until we “won”. My next challenge? Gaming on Linux on M1.

Once I finished my coursework, I started full-time on gaming on Linux. Within a month, we shipped OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux. A few weeks later, we passed official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1. That put us at feature parity with Panfrost. I wanted to go further.

OpenGL (ES) 3.2 requires geometry shaders, a legacy feature not supported by either Arm or Apple hardware. The proprietary OpenGL drivers emulate geometry shaders with compute, but there was no open source prior art to borrow. Even though multiple Mesa drivers need geometry/tessellation emulation, nobody did the work to get there.

My early progress on OpenGL was fast thanks to the mature common code in Mesa. It was time to pay it forward. Over the rest of the year, I implemented geometry/tessellation shader emulation. And also the rest of the owl. In January 2024, I passed conformance for the full OpenGL 4.6 specification, finishing up OpenGL.

Vulkan wasn’t too bad, either. I polished the OpenGL driver for a few months, but once I started typing a Vulkan driver, I passed 1.3 conformance in a few weeks.

What remained was wiring up the geometry/tessellation emulation to my shiny new Vulkan driver, since those are required for Direct3D. Et voilà, Proton games.

Along the way, Karol Herbst passed OpenCL 3.0 conformance on the M1, running my compiler atop his “rusticl” frontend.

Meanwhile, when the Vulkan 1.4 specification was published, we were ready and shipped a conformant implementation on the same day.

After that, I implemented sparse texture support, unlocking Direct3D 12 via Proton.

…Now what?

• Ship a great driver? Check.
• Conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0? Check.
• Conformant Vulkan 1.4? Check.
• Proton gaming? Check.

That’s a wrap.

We’ve succeeded beyond my dreams. The challenges I chased, I have tackled. The drivers are fully upstream in Mesa. Performance isn’t too bad. With the Vulkan on Apple myth busted, conformant Vulkan is now coming to macOS via LunarG’s KosmicKrisp project building on my work.

Satisfied, I am now stepping away from the Apple ecosystem. My friends in the Asahi Linux orbit will carry the torch from here. As for me?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/50459056

[Edit: this question came out of my confusion. I thought Unbound could somehow substitute DNS servers (like CloudFlare), but it can't. Apologies for my ignorance.]

I've often heard about Unbound, and the possibility of using it as a DNS resolver on my laptop. So, to be clear, not as a DNS resolver in a local network; just in a single machine, also because I'd like to use it no matter where I bring my laptop.

The instructions given in the second link above seem quite complete. Does anyone here have other tips or experiences to share? I'm with Ubuntu on a Thinkpad.

Cheers!

Subject: [PATCH RFC 21/22] phy: apple: Add Apple Type-C PHY
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:39:13 +0000[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-21-172beda182b8@kernel.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-0-172beda182b8@kernel.org>

The Apple Type-C PHY (ATCPHY) is a PHY for USB 2.0, USB 3.x,
USB4/Thunderbolt, and DisplayPort connectivity found in Apple Silicon SoCs.
The PHY handles muxing between these different protocols and also provides
the reset controller for the attached dwc3 USB controller.

There is no documentation available for this PHY and the entire sequence
of MMIO pokes has been figured out by tracing all MMIO access of Apple's
driver under a thin hypervisor and correlating the register reads/writes
to their kernel's debug output to find their names. Deviations from this
sequence generally results in the port not working or, especially when
the mode is switched to USB4 or Thunderbolt, to some watchdog resetting
the entire SoC.

This initial commit already introduces support for Display Port and
USB4/Thunderbolt but the drivers for these are not ready. We cannot
control the alternate mode negotiation and are stuck with whatever Apple's
firmware decides such that any DisplayPort or USB4/Thunderbolt device will
result in a correctly setup PHY but not be usable until the other drivers
are upstreamed as well.

Co-developed-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Co-developed-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Sven Peter <sven@kernel.org>

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/50059421

I'm looking around for a laptop with these characteristics in particular:

• Screen with stylus / pen (and pressure levels), but it doesn't need to be "2-in-1".

• Good or above-average computing capabilities.

• Long support for some Linux distribution. I emphasize "long", because for example Lenovo for its laptops supports only one specific distribution version. Recently I upgraded my Thinkpad X1C9 to Kubuntu 24.04, but OEM drivers are only available for 20.04.

Do you have any suggestions of good vendors of a laptop like that? And experiences to share?

The Thinkpad X1 Extreme was a good example of what I have in mind. But Lenovo don't produce stuff like that anymore – and again, it doesn't really support Linux long-term.

Thank you for sharing!

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Vulkan-AV1-Encoding

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Lands-Whisper

From the blog post:

Hello everyone!

As it’s been not much of a secret anymore, Hyprperks has been a few months in the making, and now it’s all come together.

Hyprperks is now open to purchase to everyone!

If you want to support the development for 5€ + tax a month, and also get a few goodies from us, please check out the pricing page

You will get:

• Member-only forum access, with dev Q&A, support from me, and more
• Premium desktop experience, which is a set of preconfigured dotfiles with a one-click install and update
• And of course, support the continued development.

If you don’t have a Hyprland Account yet, consider making one! It’s free, and gives you access to our public forums, where you can find answers, ask questions, and interact with the community.

Also, thank you for all the support, guys. You are awesome!

Cheers, vax.

https://philiplaine.com/posts/getting-forked-by-microsoft/