2025-04-13

Amarok 3.3 Beta Released For Qt6-Powered KDE Music Player

Last year work on KDE's Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support.

Amarok 3.3 beta is now available for testing and most notable is exclusively supporting Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6. The Qt5 support has been removed with focusing just on the modern KDE desktop.

Amarok 3.3 is also bringing a database scheme update as its first changes there going back to 2012. Various bugs and other issues have been resolved with this database update.

Amarok music player

Fans of the Amarok music player for the KDE desktop can learn more about today's 3.3 beta release via the KDE.org blogs.

2025-04-13

Intel TDX Support For KVM Finally Expected To Debut In Mainline Linux 6.16

While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a "next" branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined.

Like with some elements of AMD SEV support taking a long time to work their way into the mainline kernel, it's also been a drawn out process getting all aspects of the Trust Domain Extensions to the mainline tree. An important one looks like it's now ready for merging the next cycle: Intel TDX for KVM.

Intel TDX KVM code queued

This week Paolo Bonzini of Red Hat queued the Intel TDX for KVM support into the KVM kernel code's "next" branch. With this merge, the Intel TDX support is now positioned for submission when the Linux 6.16 merge window opens in late May or early June. Bonzini explains in that merge message:

"This large commit contains the initial support for TDX in KVM. All x86 parts enable the host-side hypercalls that KVM uses to talk to the TDX module, a software component that runs in a special CPU mode called SEAM (Secure Arbitration Mode).

The series is in turn split into multiple sub-series, each with a separate merge commit:

- Initialization: basic setup for using the TDX module from KVM, plus ioctls to create TDX VMs and vCPUs.

- MMU: in TDX, private and shared halves of the address space are mapped by different EPT roots, and the private half is managed by the TDX module. Using the support that was added to the generic MMU code in 6.14, add support for TDX's secure page tables to the Intel side of KVM. Generic KVM code takes care of maintaining a mirror of the secure page tables so that they can be queried efficiently, and ensuring that changes are applied to both the mirror and the secure EPT.

- vCPU enter/exit: implement the callbacks that handle the entry of a TDX vCPU (via the SEAMCALL TDH.VP.ENTER) and the corresponding save/restore of host state.

- Userspace exits: introduce support for guest TDVMCALLs that KVM forwards to userspace. These correspond to the usual KVM_EXIT_* "heavyweight vmexits" but are triggered through a different mechanism, similar to VMGEXIT for SEV-ES and SEV-SNP.

- Interrupt handling: support for virtual interrupt injection as well as handling VM-Exits that are caused by vectored events. Exclusive to TDX are machine-check SMIs, which the kernel already knows how to handle through the kernel machine check handler (commit 7911f145de5f, "x86/mce: Implement recovery for errors in TDX/SEAM non-root mode")

- Loose ends: handling of the remaining exits from the TDX module, including EPT violation/misconfig and several TDVMCALL leaves that are handled in the kernel (CPUID, HLT, RDMSR/WRMSR, GetTdVmCallInfo); plus returning an error or ignoring operations that are not supported by TDX guests"

Intel TDX is used for creating Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for hardware isolation of VMs from the host environment. There is also remote attestation support with TDX.

Intel TDX diagram

Intel TDX was introduced with select SKUs for Sapphire Rapids for cloud providers and reached broader availability with Xeon Emerald Rapids.

2025-04-13

Pinta 3.0 Image Editing Program Released With Port To GTK4

One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita.

Pinta is a relatively simple image editor that takes inspiration from the Paint.NET Windows program. The big change with Pinta 3.0 is porting over to the GTK4 toolkit and making use of libadwaita. Pinta remains written in the C# programming language.

Pinta 3.0 also brings an ARM64 installer for macOS, various new image effects, support for exporting to PPM files, support for nearest-neighbor resampling when resizing images, support for WebP image files on Windows, and many other changes.

Downloads and more details on the Pinta 3.0 release via Pinta-Project.com.

2025-04-13

Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.16 After Going Through 38 Revisions

Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support.

Queued up on Friday via the USB subsystem's usb-next branch were all of the v38 patches for the Qualcomm USB SND audio offloading support.

Qualcomm sound diagram with offloading

For Qualcomm chipsets where the USB audio can be offloaded to a dedicated audio DSP for handling the transfers to the USB host controller, this lessens the work of the main CPU cores and can help with power management so those CPU cores can hit lower power states if otherwise untaxed.

Qualcomm sound offloading patches

Nice seeing this work finally queued up into a "-next" branch and barring any issues from coming up it looks like this capability will be introduced for Linux 6.16 in the middle of the year.

2025-04-13