Last year AMD and Intel as part of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group announced ChkTag for x86 memory tagging across processors to better fight buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. In preparing for ChkTag with future processors, Intel has begun adapting their Linear Address Masking (LAM) support to more nicely jive with it.

Intel yesterday sent out their first "drm-xe-next" pull request to DRM-Next of new Xe kernel graphics driver improvements they have readied for their eventual upstreaming into the Linux 7.1 kernel.

AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder "rocprof-trace-decoder", a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack.

A Linux driver has been published for the ARCTIC Fan Controller to be able to read fan speeds under Linux as well as setting the PWM fan speed for each of the ten fans supported by this controller. Making this driver all the more exciting is that ARCTIC Cooling is directly working on this driver rather than just being a community/third-party creation. Furthermore, ARCTIC Cooling is working on getting this driver to the upstream Linux kernel.

Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing.

The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with "full fat" cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows for a 400 Watt TDP compared to the 500 Watt EPYC 9755. Today's benchmarking is comparing the EPYC 9745 and EPYC 9755 performance and power difference.

An important default kernel behavior change worth noting in advance for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is that the system will attempt to power-off automatically if encountering any fatal ACPI errors. Up to now the Linux kernel has just logged ACPI fatal errors.

Last week with my ongoing testing of the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel I found nice performance improvements for PostgreSQL and other workloads when testing on a 128-core AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" server. Curious if those wins were due to optimizations focused on better scalability with today's "big" servers, I also ran some comparison Linux 7.0 benchmarks on the smaller AMD EPYC 4005 class servers too. Some nice wins carried over.

Work is underway by 9elements on porting Coreboot plus AMD openSIL to the first-generation Ryzen 7000 series Framework 16 laptop and is expected to be followed by a similar port to the Framework 13 Gen1 laptop too.

Zlib-rs as the Rust programming language implementation of Zlib from the Trifetca Tech Foundation is out with a shiny new release (actually, releases) today.

ASUS desktop motherboards have been seeing broader sensor monitoring support on Linux in recent years. ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors have been seeing more support added thanks to the open-source community with new additions to the likes of the ASUS-EC-Sensors driver and other hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver code. This is continuing for Linux 7.1.

Armbian 26.02 has been released released for this Debian-derived Linux distribution primarily focused on supporting a range of Arm and RISC-V platforms. With Armbian 26.02 there is yet more new boards added while moving to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and also adding a RISC-V Xfce desktop install option.

Intel kicked off the new month by releasing the latest version of LLM Scaler vLLM (llm-scaler-vllm) as their Docker-based solution for running vLLM on Intel Battlemage GPUs for AI inferencing.

Valve just published the latest Steam Survey monthly figures to provide insight on various software and hardware trends across this dominant gaming ecosystem. One of the most interesting measurements is the monthly changes in the size of the Linux gaming marketshare.

AMD is using Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week to announce new Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series products, including Ryzen AI PRO 400 desktop processors.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.0 is now available for testing.

A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default.

There's been a recent lull in activity around the open-source Linux driver for ASUS devices with the HID interface used for supporting various features. But developer Denis Benato who has worked on the ASUS Armoury Linux driver and the like is working on advancing the ASUS HID driver for Linux systems.

Last July Intel sadly ended their Clear Linux distribution amid cost-cutting measures at the company. Clear Linux for a decade served at the forefront of Linux performance innovations and was consistently the fastest out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 distribution until Intel ended the Linux distribution without any advanced notice for its users. Intel had kept up the ClearLinux.org website online to download the final releases and access other technical content and forum discussions, etc. Sadly, that too was recently taken offline.

During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing.