The latest in our ongoing testing of AMD Strix Halo performance using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is analyzing the Vulkan API performance between Mesa's RADV driver and the AMDVLK official open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems. More than one hundred benchmarks were run looking at the performance from Steam Play games to Vulkan compute workloads.
Similar to the Ubuntu 24.10 concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, Canonical has begun publishing new "concept" images of Ubuntu 25.04 ISOs optimized for use on the growing number of Qualcomm Snpadragon X Elite laptops. This week marks the release of the new ISOs for enhancing Ubuntu Linux on various ARM laptops...
Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source...
Merged for the current Linux 6.16 cycle was initial NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support with the Nouveau open-source driver. NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support was tacked onto the existing Nouveau kernel driver rather than having to wait for the new "NOVA" driver and like prior generations continuing to leverage the GSP firmware. For going along with that Nouveau support, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver support for Blackwell continues being put together too...
Last week was a Bcachefs pull request consisting of fixes and a new "journal_rewind" feature to aide as a disaster recovery tool for the file-system. But with that code being submitted as part of the ongoing Linux 6.16 release candidates, it drew criticism from Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers. However, one week later and that discussion having subsided a few days ago, Linus Torvalds ended up merging all of the code. But there is a concerning warning for the future of Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel...
The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France...
In addition to releasing Oracle Linux 10 today, Oracle also released the second beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 cross-platform virtualization software...
A decade ago Canonical did around $81 million in revenue (2014) with a head count of around 337 at the company behind Ubuntu Linux while their Linux desktop efforts were still gaining a footing with OEMs/ODMs pre-loads, within enterprise desktop environments, and the lucrative server/cloud space. Canonical recently filed their 2024 annual report and they are now up to almost $300 million USD in revenue and a headcount of more than 1,100...
Last month saw the release of Rust 1.87 that celebrated ten years of the Rust programming language while out today is Rust 1.88 that continues iterating the language with new features...
Published last November as part of Vulkan 1.3.302 was the VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension for adding AV1 video encoding to the Vulkan Video API. Ahead of next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its AV1 encode support...
Mir 2.21 is out today for this Ubuntu/Canonical project to serve as a set of libraries used to simplify the development of Wayland-based shells/environments...
Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10.0) just over one month ago, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 10.0...
Following this week's release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month's Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I've been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.
Last month Canonical announced plans for releasing monthly Ubuntu Linux development snapshots and was followed by the Questing Snapshot 1 release in the road toward Ubuntu 25.10. Out today is the Questing Snapshot 2 release for incorporating the latest Ubuntu 25.10 development changes...
As a follow-up to the article a few weeks ago about AMD enabling User CPUID Faulting support for Linux, that code looks like it's ready to go for being introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel...
Maxime Ripard at Red Hat sent out the latest weekly pull of "drm-misc-next" changes to DRM-Next for queuing of these kernel graphics/display driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening up in about one month's time...
The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator...
The NOVA-Core driver as the basis for a modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for the upstream Linux kernel and eventual successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau DRM driver has a new co-maintainer...
The AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado"" processors launched by AMD in May for entry-level servers offer downright amazing value, performance, and power efficiency over the Intel Xeon 6300 / Xeon E-2400 series competition. Intel's top-of-stack Xeon 6300 (Xeon 6369P) / Xeon E processors fail to compete with even the mid-tier EPYC 4005 series processors in either performance, power, or cost effectiveness. Among the many advantages to these budget-friendly EPYC processors is having AVX-512 support with a full 512-bit data path compared to the Xeon 6300 series only having AVX2. For providing more insight into the AVX-512 performance impact with the AMD EPYC 4005 series, here are some enabled/disabled comparison benchmarks and how they are positioned relative to the Xeon 6369P server processor.
The controversial proposal to replace the upstream X.Org X11 server packages on Fedora Linux with XLibre is not going to happen... At least not for now. The change proposal has been withdrawn prior to being voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...
One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project...
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support for the VK_NV_cooperative_matrix2 NVIDIA Vulkan extension but it's hidden by default and only partially supported with a focus on helping FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 and VKD3D-Proton...
With the Linux 6.16 kernel Intel enabled the new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) interface as part of their int340x thermal driver. Now ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel Intel PTC is being extended to support a Throttling Control Interface for those that may prefer running their system(s) hotter in order to enjoy better performance...
Dutch electronics company Fairphone today announced their Fairphone Gen 6 smartphone as the successor to the Fairphone 5. Fairphone 6 continues to be repair-friendly and was just announced this morning while already the Linux support patches have hit the Linux kernel mailing list...
Intel open-source software projects are beginning to relay notices that they may have been developed with support from Intel-operated generative AI solutions...
While WebP and AVIF generate much of the interest these days from a tech perspective for modern image formats, the PNG image format was just updated with new features...
Open-source Linux developer Chris Mason who is known for being the original lead developer of the Btrfs file-system recently began hacking on a new tool that he announced today, rsched...
While the GIMP image editor received a bad rap for the amount of time it took to see a stable release based on the GTK3 toolkit rather than GTK2, only today patches have emerged for taking the Linux kernel's gconfig graphical kernel configuration utility from GTK2 to GTK3...
In addition to the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) having to decide on whether i686 support should end for Fedora Linux (including multilib), another contentious proposal is on replacing the X.Org X11 Server with the controversial XLibre fork...
It has been one month since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 was officially announced and it's proving to be a nice upgrade for enterprise Linux use. Jiving with what I had seen out of RHEL 10 beta performance and general expectations considering the plethora of software upgrades from RHEL 9 to RHEL 10, the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 release is helping tap additional performance out of modern servers.
Building off this morning's release of the Intel Graphics Compiler 2.12.5 is now the updated Intel Compute Runtime 25.22.33944.8 as their June 2025 feature release...
Fedora Linux for a while already stopped building i686 kernel releases and dropped their dedicated i686 repositories while now for the Fedora 44 release there is a proposal to take things further: finish gutting the i686 support. The new change proposal seeks to no longer include packages built for the i686 architecture and thereby dropping multi-lib support for 32-bit packages on 64-bit hosts. There wouldn't be any packages built any longer for i686 under this F44 proposal...
Cryptsetup 2.8 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used utility used to setup disk encryption under Linux around the DM-CRYPT kernel functionality for LUKS volumes and more...
Adding to the many graphics driver features to look forward to with next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is now Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
The Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.12.5 release just occurred as the next feature release to this open-source graphics compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime and also by various graphics APIs under Microsoft Windows with the Intel graphics driver...
The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa supports GFX9/Vega graphics cards but not the later CDNA-based Instinct accelerators. However, some patches merged today for Mesa 25.2-devel did introduce some "random bits and pieces" for CDNA but not a full implementation...
While we await the formal IBM Power11 launch in 2025, IBM engineers are already working on compiler support for "future" post-Power11 processors with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...
While the latest Intel Core Ultra processors have done away with Hyper Threading (HT), Intel Xeon CPUs continue supporting HT/SMT, including with their latest Xeon 6300 series budget server processors. As the new AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors also support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and can be found at the same core/thread count count as the flagship Xeon 6369P processor, it makes for an interesting look at comparing the SMT/HT performance impact and power efficiency. Here are some benchmarks showing the Xeon 6300 against the AMD EPYC 4005 in SMT performance.
Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version...
Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources...
The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension...
Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...
For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity...
Merged minutes ago ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release due out shortly was this week's batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates. Beyond the usual KVM fixes merged for the week, a bit of feature code was pulled in by Linus Torvalds for this post-merge-window phase...
While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance...
The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors...
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