Werner Koch announced today the release of Libgcrypt 1.12.3 with various bug fixes and more exciting are the performance improvements.

Merged back in 2023 was Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for H.265 decoding. But it's been slightly out of compliant with the Vulkan spec, which is now fixed with the newest code for Mesa 26.3 by engaging the HuC firmware.

The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies.

The LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain merged overnight better support for the nearly decade-old AMD Zen 1 processors and also helps with Zen+ and Zen 2 processors too. This latest work thanks to the open-source community is for providing more informed instruction scheduling around PDEP and PEXT that end up being quite costly for these original Zen processors.

The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window.

The Asahi Linux crew working to bring Linux support to Apple Silicon hardware is out today with a new status update on their initiatives, largely around Apple M3 bring-up as well as some M4/M5 achievements.

Patches sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today can provide much more efficient Zstd compression and decompression by addressing a very unfortunate oversight in the existing code.

KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

Last week I provided a look at the Intel Xeon 600 series Hyper Threading performance with the Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor for HT/SMT on and off. That was interesting while another reader request was to look at the CPU core scaling performance for this high-end workstation processor. Here are those benchmarks for showing the performance, power, and frequency/thermal impact of the Xeon 678X when limited to 6 cores, 12 cores, 24 cores, 48 cores, and then the 48 cores + HT default configuration.

Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2024 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary.

AMD's compiler team is proposing a new LLVM Clang compiler option, -fenable-readonly-thp for implementing instruction Transparent Huge Pages "iTHP" at compile and link-time. With -fenable-readonly-thp, they are finding more performance out of SPEC CPU, Geekbench, and other workloads from the arranging of 2MB segment alignment at link time and allowing the executable text range can be promoted to huge pages.

Earlier this month when benchmarking six Linux distributions on the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", the performance was strangely slow on Fedora Workstation 44. When digging further into it, the performance loss was with Fedora 44 using Tuned-PPD by default where as other Linux distributions default to Power Profiles Daemon. Ultimately, after Red Hat engineers got involved, was found to be a bug within the Intel P-State kernel driver exhibited by Tuned-PPD. The latest Linux kernel already has a fix in place and will be back-ported to Fedora 44.

Intel is preparing to introduce a new Linux driver named "BFF" for dealing with aging processor silicon where bits may become stuck over time.

Armbian as the Debian/Ubuntu-derived distribution that provides an optimized platform for ARM and RISC-V single board computers is out today with a major update.

The Linux kernel's FUSE code for enabling file-systems in user-space is enjoying some nice speed boosts with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

LibreOffice 26.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature update to this leading open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

The AMD GFX1250 IP is what's used by the new Instinct MI450 series accelerators. That's been around within the Linux kernel, AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, and related codebases the past year. Interestingly merged yesterday is a new "gfx1250-strict" target.

A SiFive engineer posted patches today for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adding -mtune=native -mcpu=native support for the compiler on RISC-V.

All of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel were merged this week.

Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren't yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option.