Vulkan 1.3.291 was published this morning and with this specification update comes one prominent new extension: VK_AMD_anti_lag.

The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that started out a decade ago providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has now enabled support for the X1-85 GPU that is found within the Snapdragon X1 Elite and Snapdragon X1 Plus laptop SoCs.

The Fedora change proposal was approved this week by their engineering and steering committee to support AMD SEV-SNP virtualization host support to allow easily launching confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with Fedora 41.

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.

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches.

The Intel-initiated Sound Open Firmware project for open-source audio DSP firmware and related tooling is out with a new v2.10 release. SOF continues to be backed not only by Intel but also Google, AMD, Realtek, NXK, Mediatek, and other organizations.

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64.

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release.

With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.

Microsoft today published a new version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in pre-release form.

While Rust is viewed as a memory safe and robust programming language, there is the "unsafe" keyword within Rust that can be used for unsafe code that grants "unsafe superpowers" for the language. As dealing with Rust at low-levels as the Linux kernel can lead to needing to use "unsafe" Rust at times, a documentation standard has been proposed for dealing with such code inside the kernel.

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it.

Last week with delivering a number of AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks under Linux with the current drivers and using the new "Breaking Limit" benchmark, the question was raised how well does AMD's official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver handle ray-tracing these days compared to the more popular Mesa RADV Vulkan driver used commonly by Linux gamers and as the default driver on most Linux distributions. Here is a fresh look at the RADV versus AMDVLK Vulkan performance on Linux with a focus on ray-tracing performance.

The power management updates have been merged for Linux 6.11 that include some nice improvements for Intel and AMD processors.

The "x86/bugs" code has been merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel that is just three patches this go around but includes a new Spectre BHI mitigation option.

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel with support for a variety of new wireless and wired networking hardware.

The EFI changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel. Notable this cycle on the EFI side is removing support for EFI fake memory maps and then a workaround to get dual GPU support working for some of the older x86-based Apple MacBook Pros by pretending that Apple macOS is booting rather than Linux.

All of the media subsystem feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel were sent out overnight. Arguably most notable with the media driver changes for the new kernel is introducing the Raspberry Pi "PiSP" driver for the image signal processor (ISP) found with the Raspberry Pi 5 for powering its camera system.