ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer

([Radeon] 7 February 11:28 AM EST AMD RDNA4 Improvements)

Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity.



GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5

([Software] 7 February 10:13 AM EST 6 Comments)

With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.



Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer

([Apple] 7 February 08:32 AM EST Asahi Linux)

Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.



Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs

([Linux Storage] 7 February 06:33 AM EST Bcachefs)

With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs.



Serpent OS Working Toward Second Alpha, More Immutable OS Features

([Operating Systems] 7 February 06:42 AM EST Serpent OS)

Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.



NVIDIA Publishes RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTXNTC" Beta

([NVIDIA] 7 February 06:22 AM EST NVIDIA RTXNTC)

NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit.



AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 Brings New Performance Tuning & Fixes

([Radeon] 7 February 05:54 AM EST AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1)

AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year to this official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems.



Ubuntu's crypto-config Continues Being Developed For Gradual Roll-Out

([Ubuntu] 6 February 08:47 PM EST crypto-config)

A year ago I raised attention about crypto-config as a new Ubuntu project for system-wide cryptography configuration. That crypto config tool continues being developed by Canonical engineers for a gradual roll-out into the Ubuntu Linux landscape.



VirtIO Media Driver Upstreaming Pursued For Relaying V4L2 Media Devices To Guests

([Multimedia] 6 February 02:42 PM EST VirtIO Media Driver)

Android and Chrome OS already are carrying the VirtIO Media driver as a means of enabling virtualization of host media devices into a guest while now patch review is underway in trying to get VirtIO Media upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel.



SMT Remains Very Advantageous For 5th Gen AMD EPYC Performance

([Processors] 6 February 10:50 AM EST 81 Comments)

After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.



AMD Talks Up IREE/MLIR Programming For Ryzen AI NPUs

([AMD] 6 February 10:00 AM EST Ryzen AI NPU Programming)

While the AMDXDNA driver was merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs atop a mainline kernel build, there's still the user-space software needed for making use of the neural processing units found in Ryzen AI SoCs. AMD talked more about programming Ryzen AI NPUs last weekend in Belgium at the FOSDEM 2025 developer conference.



Intel's OpenVINO 2025.0 Brings Support For Deepseek Models, Better AI Performance

([Intel] 6 February 08:34 AM EST OpenVINO 2025.0)

Intel's software engineers working on the OpenVINO AI toolkit today released OpenVINO 2025.0 that brings support for the much talked about Deepseek models along with other large language models (LLMs), performance improvements to some of the existing model support, and other changes.



LibreOffice 25.2 Open-Source Office Suite Released With Many Improvements

([LibreOffice] 6 February 08:13 AM EST LibreOffice 25.2)

LibreOffice 25.2 is out this morning as the newest half-year update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite.



Mesa 25.0 Is Trending Well For Release Later This Month

([Mesa] 6 February 06:56 AM EST Mesa 25.0)

Mesa 25.0-rc2 was released yesterday and it's rather boring on the changes, but that's a good thing during this bug fixing phase.



GNU Gold Linker Is Deprecated & Will Be Gone For Good Without New Developers

([GNU] 6 February 06:39 AM EST GNU Gold Linker)

With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker.



PipeWire Is Doing An Excellent Job Handling Audio/Video Streams On The Linux Desktop

([PipeWire] 6 February 06:24 AM EST PipeWire 2025)

Red Hat engineer and PipeWire lead developer Wim Taymans presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend around the state of the PipeWire project for this integral component to the modern Linux desktop.



Google Interested In The Modern Intel Xe Linux Kernel Driver On Alder Lake

([Intel] 5 February 08:40 PM EST Xe Driver Rather Than i915)

The modern Intel "Xe" Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver as the clean successor to the i915 driver has been an experimental option for Tigerlake and newer but only for Xe2 graphics (Lunar Lake / Battlemage) and newer is it used by default. But Google at least for their Chromebook use-cases is entertaining the idea of switching over to the Xe driver rather than the long-used i915 kernel driver for Alder Lake era hardware.



Bisecting The Linux 6.14 Performance Regression With System76 Thelio + AMD Threadripper

([Linux Kernel] 5 February 04:30 PM EST Power Management Woes)

Yesterday I showcased Linux 6.14 Git performance worse than Linux 6.13 and 6.12 in a number of multi-threaded workloads. Due to that initial discover being on the lone AMD EPYC Turin 2P server that is always busy running through new benchmarks for future content as well as I am being persistently short on time and constantly under pressure due to the state of the web/ad industry, I didn't expect to get around to digging deeper into the problem in the near-term. But as I ended up being able to reproduce some of the regressions on a System76 Thelio Major workstation at my desk with the still mighty powerful Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, I was able to turn around a quick bisect.



NVIDIA Engineer Talks Up sched_ext Linux Scheduler Possibilities At FOSDEM

([NVIDIA] 5 February 02:00 PM EST sched_ext)

Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities.



AMD Announces Open-Source "Schola" Library For Reinforcement Learning

([AMD] 5 February 11:57 AM EST AMD Schola)

AMD announced today the release of Schola 1.0 as an open-source reinforcement learning library that is being made available under an MIT license and as part of their GPUOpen software collection for helping game developers.



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I don't suffer from stallmanellosis

- Al Viro on linux-kernel