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 The change proposal has been withdrawn prior to being voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...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...
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session...
Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year...
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop...
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape...
A number of AMD firmware/microcode updates were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository, including introducing the AMD Instinct MI350 series files that are necessary for the open-source Linux compute driver stack to function for those newly-announced Instinct accelerators...
Going back to January of 2023 there were the initial Intel patches for the Linux kernel introducing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). Two and a half years later, these Intel LASS patches remain in-development with today the sixth iteration of these patches having been posted...
Over the past week a number of Apple device support additions have been queued up into the HID subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle...
Thirty-one years after Creative Technology introduced the Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA-based sound card, the open-source driver support within the Linux kernel continues to be worked on... Submitted today for Linux 6.16 is fixing support for this once mighty ISA sound card from the mid 90's...
There is some tension on the Linux kernel mailing list with some late Bcachefs feature work sent in as part of "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Established rules aim for only new feature code to be introduced during the kernel merge windows, which ended nearly two weeks ago for Linux 6.16, but Bcachefs wanting to be exempt to continue to allow new feature code to still land for the cycle in the name of data safety...
Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project...
AMD originally released a ROCm 7.0 preview build back in May as it works to align their HIP API more closely with NVIDIA's CUDA. Last month was the big ROCm 7.0 preview announcement form AMD's Advancing AI Day in San Jose while this week is another new 7.0 preview build focused on further testing of the ROCm 7.0 HIP changes...
Code compilers like the prominent GCC and LLVM/Clang have been advertising support for the Cache Line Demote "CLDEMOTE" instruction on Arrow Lake processors as well as Lunar Lake and upcoming Panther Lake hybrid processors. Intel engineers added that compiler plumbing but was inaccurate and inadvertently missed until now with this prominent instruction not being supported there...
Following last week's release of OpenZFS 2.2.8, OpenZFS 2.3.3 is now available as the newest point release of this current stable series for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems...
While the results shouldn't be too surprising given the recent AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Windows 11 vs. Linux testing, when the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by the step-down AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 arrived with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, I also took the opportunity to run some Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks on that AMD Strix Halo SoC.
Phoronix