As expected after noting this morning that ROCm 7.1 release preparations were underway, ROCm 7.1 is now officially released as the newest step-forward for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware...
This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that goes hand-in-hand with the Fwupd open-source firmware updating utility celebrated the milestone on Wednesday of crossing 135 million firmware updates...
AMD Linux engineers continue to be quite busy working on enabling next-generation Zen 6 processors that will begin shipping next year. The newest patch working its way to the Linux kernel is expanding the range of Zen 6 CPU models detected by the kernel...
Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware...
AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1...
Following last week's initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.19, another round of new AMDGPU / Radeon / AMDKFD material was sent out today to DRM-Next. Notable with this pull is the Display Core "DC" work for analog video connectors as the initiative from one of Valve's contractors for improving the Radeon GCN 1.0 era GPU support with the AMDGPU driver...
Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used on Linux systems for 3D support...
Following last month's Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS beta and COSMIC desktop beta, System76 has now shared their stable release plans for this long-awaited LInux distribution release with their Rust-written custom desktop...
Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olak just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads...
On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have since sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.
In addition to talking up the openSFI firmware collaboration between AMD and Intel at the OCP Global Summit 2025, AMD engineer Raj Kapoor provided a status update on the company's much anticipated openSIL effort for working to ultimately replace AGESA with a new open-source CPU silicon initialization codebase...
Intel Compute Runtime 25.40.35563.4 is out today as the newest update to their open-source GPU compute stack for Level Zero and OpenCL on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware...
Yesterday the GitHub-hosted AMD XDNA driver code saw a new tagged release as version 202610.2.21.17. That itself wasn't too interesting but while diving into there is new yet-to-be-merged code for a new "NPU3A" revision to their NPU3 IP in Ryzen AI...
An engineer on Apple's static security tools team announced publicly that they have prototyped a tool to apply security hardening across entire C++ codebases. Ultimately their plan is to open-source and upstream this static analysis based tool into LLVM...
AMD this week uploaded new Family 19h CPU microcode for Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors to the linux-firmware.git repoository that in turn is pulled by the Linux distributions for offering the latest firmware/microcode to users...
SUSE today formally announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16. Given we are in the year 2025, SUSE is heavy on hyping up AI capabilities with SLES 16...
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is now expected to introduce the new "ethosu" accelerator driver for supporting the Arm Ethos U65/U85 neural processing unit IP...
Following Canonical announcing plans to better support NVIDIA CUDA on Ubuntu Linux and make it easier to install as well as SUSE better supporting CUDA along similar lines, Red Hat today affirmed their plans to do the same. Red Hat will be making it easier to use the NVIDIA CUDA stack across RHEL, Red Hat AI, and OpenShift products...
TrueNAS 25.10 was released by iX systems today as the newest feature release of this Linux-based platform for network attached storage (NAS) devices and other storage appliances...
The Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative has uncovered three more security vulnerabilities affecting the X.Org Server and the derived XWayland source code...
An improvement to Intel SGX slated for Linux 6.18 is supporting the EUPDATESVN found on Intel CPUs since the Ice Lake generation. EUPDATESVN allows for updating the security SVN version after run-time patching for addressing any Intel SGX vulnerabilities to avoid having to carry out a platform reboot...
Earlier this month Intel announced Crescent Island as a Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM optimized for AI inferencing at the enterprise scale. Crescent Island isn't expected to begin sampling until H2'2026, but already for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel initial Crescent Island support is being submitted for the Xe kernel graphics driver...
It's Fedora 43 release day! This latest installment of Fedora Linux is now available for download with Fedora Workstation 43 using the GNOME 49 desktop, the modern Linux 6.17 kernel powering this distribution release, and many exciting improvements and other leading-edge software updates powering this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...
For those making use of Device Mapper's DM-VERITY target for transparent integrity checking of block devices, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel has an enticing performance optimization en route that for some processors can lead to nearly doubling the hashing performance...
Linaro engineer Adhemerval Zanella recently sent out a set of 59 patches to allow building the GNU C Library "glibc" with the LLVM Clang compiler as an alternative to GCC...
Stride 4.2.1.2485 is now available as the latest feature release for this open-source and cross-platform game engine written in C# while still having first-rate Linux support. Stride is formerly known as Xenko and offers realistic rendering and virtual reality (VR) support...
OpenRazer 3.11 is out as the newest version of these out-of-tree but open-source and community-maintained drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Plus OpenRazer also provides a user-space daemon for controlling Razer RGB lighting and other features. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic app, OpenRazer makes for a pleasant Razer device experience for gamers and enthusiasts under Linux...
A big focus for the FreeBSD 15.0 development was on supporting reproducible builds as has been a growing trend in the open-source ecosystem in recent years. One month out from the official FreeBSD 15.0 release, the FreeBSD project is today celebrating having crossed the milestone of being able to be built reproducibly and as well now building FreeBSD without requiring root privileges...
The Ubuntu Unity community flavor of Ubuntu Linux built around the Unity desktop is in a difficult position and at risk for its survival given the lack of developers involved. A call-out has been made in seeking more community developers to contribute to Ubuntu Unity...
Beyond packing many exciting new features and changes, Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Assuming the Linux 6.18 LTS designation, this next kernel version will see lots of use in enterprise environments and thus recently carried out some AMD EPYC 9965 2P "Turin" benchmarks between Linux 6.17 stable and the Linux 6.18 development kernel state...
Today the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is officially shipping as the company's new RDNA4-based offering designed for AI workloads and priced at $1299+ USD. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 offers 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and features 128 AI accelerators and rated for 96 TFLOPs peak half-precision compute, up to 1531 TOPS INT4 sparse, and has a 300 Watt TDP. Here are the initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 under Linux with ROCm 7.0 and testing both in single and dual R9700 graphics card configurations.
Turbosqueeze 1.0 was announced today as a new real-time, multi-threaded compression solution designed for C/C++ programs and aiming to compete with the likes of Zstd, LZ4, and Snappy compression...
Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution...
The PanVK driver for modern Arm Mali Vulkan driver support within Mesa has tapped into Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality as well as an in-memory cache to provide for a better experience with this open-source driver...
In addition to the patches sent out this weekend by Intel for Xe driver preparations for multi-device Shared Virtual Machine (multi-device SVM), another notable patch series making it out this weekend for the Intel Xe open-source kernel graphics driver is support for mapping DMA-BUFs via IOV interconnects...
The Linux 6.18-rc3 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release in just about one month. Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel...
Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place...
The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content...
Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size. Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes...
As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...
Derek Clark who has been leading the efforts around Lenovo Legion gaming drivers for Linux and ensuring good support for the Lenovo Legion Go handheld on Linux sent out a new Linux patch series this weekend...
AMD on Friday sent in their first patch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes they are ready to begin queuing in the DRM-Next tree until the Linux 6.19 merge window kicks off in December and leading to a stable release around February...
Resources is the open-source app aligned with GNOME/GTK for system resource monitoring. Resources has proven to be quite versatile with a nice UI and able to display CPU, GPU, NPU, disk, and other metrics. Out today is Resources 1.9 with the latest capabilities for this app...
NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs...
The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation...
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