LLVM Dealing With Slower Performance On AMD CPUs When Targeting AMD Zen Optimizations
Recently there was an LLVM bug report of “Worse runtime performance on Zen CPU when optimizing for Zen.” Well, that’s not good… Fortunately, that bug is now fixed with the latest LLVM Clang compiler code but other deficiencies in the AMD CPU optimization targeting remain… ⌘ Read more

LLVM Dealing With Slower Performance On AMD CPUs When Targeting AMD Zen Optimizations
Recently there was an LLVM bug report of “Worse runtime performance on Zen CPU when optimizing for Zen.” Well, that’s not good… Fortunately, that bug is now fixed with the latest LLVM Clang compiler code but other deficiencies in the AMD CPU optimization targeting remain… ⌘ Read more

SLUB Updates Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.10 Merge Window
If all goes well the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will be released on Sunday and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window. In hoping for an on-time release, some Linux kernel subsystem maintainers have been already submitting early pull requests of their feature material for v6.10. Among those early pulls are the SLAB (SLUB) updates… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preparing PCIe TPH Support For Upcoming CPUs
A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with “upcoming AMD hardware” as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS & Fedora 40 Continue To Trail Intel’s Linux Performance Optimizations
While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it’s still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there’s still more performance left on the table as sho … ⌘ Read more

AMD Publishes Micro Engine Scheduler “MES” Firmware Documentation
As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler “MES” firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack… ⌘ Read more

ChromeOS EC Hardware Monitoring Driver Being Revived For Framework Laptops
In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Intel NPU Driver Preparing Hardware Scheduler & Profiling Support
The Intel iVPU accelerator driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window have been submitted for advancing the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) support found since the launch of Meteor Lake with Intel Core Ultra notebook CPUs. For this iVPU/NPU driver in Linux 6.10 are a few notable new features… ⌘ Read more

AMD Linux Graphics Driver Plumbs Integration With New ISP Hardware Block
The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP… ⌘ Read more

Limbo Is An SQLite-Compatible OLTP DBMS Leveraging IO_uring & Rust
For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux’s IO_uring for async I/O… ⌘ Read more

Python 3.13 Beta Out For Testing With Experimental JIT, Better Interactive Interpreter
The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year… ⌘ Read more

Pop!_OS’ COSMIC Desktop Finishing Up Work On App Store
The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 6.1.1 Brings Fixes, Preps For Upcoming Changes & cuDNN 9.0 Support
Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.0.7 & Mesa 24.1-rc3 Provide Latest Open-Source OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers
Ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom continues carrying out a splendid job with the on-time releases of new bi-weekly Mesa point releases and the weekly release candidates heading toward the next feature release of these open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Zed Code Editor Making Progress On Linux Support
Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together… ⌘ Read more

Intel Revises PCIe Cooling Driver To Reduce Link Speed When Running Too Hot
Since last year Intel’s open-source software engineers have been working on a PCIe bandwidth controller driver for the Linux kernel to avoid thermal issues by being able to automatically reduce the PCIe link speed when needed. This driver still isn’t over the finish line but today brought the fifth iteration of these patches… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V Performance On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS With Scaleway’s EM-RV1
Recently I’ve been testing out the Scaleway’s Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks. ⌘ Read more

Fedora Asahi Remix 40 Now Available For Apple Silicon Devices, KDE Plasma 6 By Default
Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that’s optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems… ⌘ Read more

SHIFTphone 8 Preparing Mainline Linux Support Ahead Of Launch
SHIFTphone 8 is the upcoming modular and easy-to-repair smartphone from Germany’s SHIFT GmbH. This is the first major SHIFTphone update in four years and there are pending patches providing mainline Linux kernel support for this forthcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon powered modular/upgradeable smartphone… ⌘ Read more

AMD Linux Engineers Introduce New “schedstat” Tool
AMD Linux engineers have introduced a new perf tool called “schedstat” that aims to be less resource intensive and convenient than the existing “perf sched” tool for profiling kernel scheduler behavior… ⌘ Read more

GCC 15 Bids Farewell To Solaris 11.3 Support
With GCC 14 stable released and GCC 15 now in development on trunk, new feature code is landing for the GNU Compiler Collection. Among the early features is Microsoft contributing the “Windows on ARM64” target with aarch64-w64-mingw32. The start of the new cycle also brings code removal for features deprecated in prior cycles. Among the old code being cleared out in GCC 15 is saying goodbye to Oracle Solaris 11.3… ⌘ Read more

Zstd Compression For EROFS Published: Better Than LZ4 But Higher CPU Costs
As noted recently, EROFS has been exploring Zstd compression support for this open-source read-only Linux file-system. Today the patch was posted for enabling Zstandard use… ⌘ Read more

Merged For Mesa 24.2: Faster Startups For Zink, Rusticl Now Handles Bigger Workloads
Two different merges today for Mesa 24.2 are worth calling out for the open-source Linux graphics stack… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Took In $556k Last Year While Spending $675.9k
The GNOME Foundation today published their 2023 annual report that outlines their accomplishments as well as a look at the finances… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Contributes Windows On ARM64 “aarch64-w64-mingw32” Support To GCC 15
Microsoft engineers have contributed Windows On ARM64 support to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the new “aarch64-w64-mingw32” target… ⌘ Read more

Apple Announces The M4 Chip With Up To 10 CPU Cores
While rolling out the new iPad Pro tablets today, Apple announced the M4 as their newest in-house silicon design… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Announces RHEL AI
Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado… Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Connect Reaches Beta For Remote Raspberry Pi Access
The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced the beta availability of Raspberry Pi Connect as a means of securely having remote GUI access to your Remote Pi from a web browser… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.3.284 Released With Another Extension To Help Zink
Vulkan 1.3.284 was published on Monday with only a few changes but bearing one notable new extension… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Patches For Improving Heterogeneous Core Type CPUs On Linux
AMD engineers posted a new set of Linux driver patches on Tuesday that “addresses critical issues and enhances performance settings for CPUs with heterogeneous core types” while using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 41 Approved To Make Package Builds More Reproducible
In addition to approving -O3 optimized Python builds, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESC)) this week unanimously approved a Fedora 41 change proposal for making RPM package builds more reproducible… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Goes Ahead In Removing Sysctl Sentinel Bloat
Over the past year there’s been much work happening within the Linux kernel’s sysctl code for clearing up ~64 bytes of bloat per array throughout the kernel by dropping the last sysctl “sentinel” entry at the end of each array. This also helps in reducing the build time of the kernel and is a nice improvement. With Linux 6.10, the sysctl sentinel clearing throughout different subsystems is set to happen… ⌘ Read more

AMD Core Performance Boost For Linux Getting Per-CPU Core Controls
For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it’s now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis… ⌘ Read more

GCC 14.1 Compiler Released - Intel APX & AVX10.1 Support, AMD Zen 5 Target & -fhardened
GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions… ⌘ Read more

ECC DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-5200 Memory Performance For AMD Ryzen Zen 4
Back when looking at the AMD Ryzen 7000 series budget server performance last year, DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMMs were used with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T Ryzen server given that’s what was broadly available at the time. Since then there’s been more ECC UDIMMs coming to market above DDR5-4800 speeds. Recently I bought a pair of Kingston Server Premier 32GB 5600MT/s DDR5 ECC CL46 UDIMMs (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) and that’s the focus of today’s tests. For … ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux 9.4 Released With Support For Hardware Deprecated By RHEL
Following last week’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 stable, the AlmaLinux crew today announced AlmaLinux 9.4… ⌘ Read more

PowerPC 40x Processor Support To Be Dropped From The Linux Kernel
In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Cleared To Build Python Package With “-O3” Optimizations
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the “-O3” compiler optimization level rather than the “-O2” default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 To Drop Support For Very Old DEC Alpha Hardware
The Linux 6.10 kernel is poised to remove support for old DEC Alpha EV5 platforms and earlier… ⌘ Read more

Framework Laptop EC Driver Being Prepared For Linux
The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google’s Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.1 Beta Released For Testing
The first beta of FreeBSD 14.1 is now available for testing in kicking off what will be the first point release building off last November’s FreeBSD 14.0 release… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.12 Brings Fixes, Chrome Compatibility Work
There’s a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA’s NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more

Dillo 3.1 Lightweight Web Browser Released After Nine Years
Dillo 3.1 has been released to succeed the Dillo 3.0.5 release all the way back from 2015… Dillo is a lightweight web browser making use of the FLTK toolkit and is cross-platform, maintains few dependencies, and implements its own rendering engine… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 2.10.38 Released As What Might Be The Last Of GIMP 2
GIMP 2.10.38 was released on Sunday as what might be the “possibly last” GIMP 2 stable release ahead of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. GIMP 2.10.38 back-ports more features from the GIMP 3.0 / GTK3 codebase plus other improvements and fixes… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc7 Released: The Kernel Is Looking Good
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.9-rc7 and it’s looking good like the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will hopefully be out next Sunday… ⌘ Read more

New Intel P-State Linux Driver Patches To Better Handle Hybrid Core CPUs
Intel’s power management lead Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches recently for working out asymmetic CPU capacity on hybrid Core x86 systems… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 To Support Sound On ASUS ROG 2024 Laptops, Lenovo ThinkPad 13X
Cirrus engineers have seen a number of patches queued into the Linux sound subsystem’s “for-next” branch for enabling audio support on some new laptops with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Synaptics Releases DisplayLink 6.0 USB Graphics Driver Package For Linux
Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics… ⌘ Read more

Synaptics Releases DisplayLink 6.0 USB Graphics Driver Package For Linux
Synaptics this week published a big update to their out-of-tree graphics driver package for DisplayLink USB graphics… ⌘ Read more

Mesa’s Venus Vulkan Driver Updated To Allow QEMU Support
Mesa’s Venus Vulkan driver has made cross-device functionality optional in order to enable QEMU support for this open-source driver for virtualized environments… ⌘ Read more