Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 9.0-4 as the newest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running an incredible number of modern Windows games on Linux.

With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel one of the biggest features for those using new AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors is using the AMD P-State driver by default for servers/motherboards with ACPI CPPC support enabled. But even for platforms without that where ACPI CPUFreq remains the default, the Linux 6.13 kernel is still showing some nice incremental uplift at large on these new AMD server processors. Here are some Linux 6.11 vs. 6.12 vs. 6.13 Git kernel benchmarks using an AMD EPYC 9575F 64-core server.

Going back to April 2024, SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as an interesting RISC-V developer board to succeed their HiFive Unleashed that was a nice little RISC-V board. There were delays in shipping the HiFive Premier P550 but they have been making progress and are now ready to ship Ubuntu 24.04 LTS pre-installed on this RISC-V board. They have also lowered the pricing on these RISC-V boards.

For fans of OpenMandriva or just wanting to reminisce over the former Mandrake Linux days, OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 is out today as the newest update to this Linux distribution.

It was just a little more than one month ago that AlmaLinux Kitten 10 became available for testing for this new OS release derived from the CentOS Stream 10 sources that is upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Today the AlmaLinux crew announced the first beta release of AlmaLinux 10.

Miracle-WM is the Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager that is inspired in part by the likes of i3 and Sway. Miracle-WM also has a goal to be a flagship example of a Mir-based full featured window manager with this project being led by a Canonical engineer. Out today is Miracle-WM 0.4 to deliver the latest features.

Back at the 2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting was an interesting presentation by AMD engineer Joseph Huber for how they have been exploring running common, standard C/C++ code directly on GPUs without having to be adapted for any GPU language / programming dialects or other adaptations.

QEMU 9.2 is out today for this processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project is out with a new monthly status update to detail their latest efforts.

Complementing yesterday's fresh Linux gaming benchmarks of mid-range Intel Arc Graphics "Alchemist" vs. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 vs. AMD Radeon RX 7000 series cards ahead of the upcoming Battlemage availability, today's article is providing a fresh look at the latest Intel Compute Runtime performance for Level Zero / OpenCL on current-gen Intel discrete graphics compared to mid-range AMD Radeon GPUs on ROCm 6.3 and similar NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Ada graphics cards on the R565 driver.

Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.

While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.

Last week I wrote about Linux patches cleaning up x86 32-bit kernel builds for x86_64 CPUs. The new iteration of those patches were sent out today, including the addition of a patch adding the CONFIG_X86_64_NATIVE Kconfig tunable for enabling "-march=native" kernel builds to cater your optimized kernel compilation for the CPU on which you are building the kernel.

Currently the Linux kernel's "perf" performance monitoring subsystem has a limit on 2,048 CPU cores for its CPU map that is set by the MAX_NR_CPUS value. But that's becoming not enough in today's high core count era that patches are looking to raise it to a 4,096 CPU core limit by default.

For those wanting to run Coreboot or Coreboot-derived firmware on a modern desktop motherboard with good performance and features, the main contender currently is 3mdeb's Dasharo downstream that can be flashed on the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z790-P motherboards for using with Intel Core Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Firmware consulting firm 3mdeb today published a new Dasharo firmware update for the MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI motherboard.

NVIDIA published EGL-Wayland 1.1.17 on Monday as the newest update to this Wayland EGL external platform library to provide client-side Wayland support to EGL atop the EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions.

IBM engineers announced they are deprecating the upstream CXL and CXLFLASH Linux kernel drivers with plans to then remove the drivers from the mainline kernel the following cycle. Before getting too worked up when seeing the "cxl: Deprecate driver" patch, this is about the Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) that predates the Compute Express Link.

A promising patch for the Linux kernel is optimizing the locking contention and scattered address space for the MD bitmap code to improve both the storage throughput and latency.

The Servo browser engine project is out with their latest monthly status update to outline improvements made to this Rust-based open-source engine.

Back in May for the Linux 6.10 kernel the initial bits of the NTSYNC driver was upstreamed for helping to emulate the Windows NT synchronization primitives so Windows games running under Wine/Proton (such as Valve's Steam Play) can enjoy a very nice performance boost. That NTSYNC code for Linux 6.10 wasn't yet in functioning shape and now a half-year later the newest NTSYNC patch series has been sent out for review.