It turns out the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" has a strict mandate that packages must be able to be built for the x86_64 CPU architecture. Software not supporting x86_64 like ARM-only software is not permitted for the common Arch Linux AUR repository.

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages.

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option.

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards.

After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced.

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their December 2024 development recap. The developers involved did a great job ending out 2024 with a lot of exciting improvements for this scratch-based open-source operating system.

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V.

A set of patches posted this week for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is beginning to expose additional i2c buses that are used by some OEM/AIB partners for implementing RGB lighting controls and other extra functionality with Radeon graphics cards.

Intel software engineers this week sent out two pull requests landing more of their final kernel graphics driver feature changes destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel.

For those with an Intel Core Ultra system bearing the company's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), some nice driver enhancements are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

FEX 2501 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts.

KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post on his quest of providing optimal High Dynamic Range (HDR) display experience with the KDE desktop. The latest focus by Xaver has been on fixing the "night light" mode support under KDE Plasma on HDR displays.

Open3D v0.19 is out as the newest feature release to this open-source library for 3D data processing in C++ and Python. Open3D provides various 3D data structures, processing algorithms, 3D visualizations, physically based GPU rendering, and machine learning integration with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow to offer powerful 3D data processing capabilities.

It turns out the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" has a strict mandate that packages must be able to be built for the x86_64 CPU architecture. Software not supporting x86_64 like ARM-only software is not permitted for the common Arch Linux AUR repository.