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)

FastFlowLM Developers Join AMD To Help Push Open-Source NPU Software

([AMD] 17 July 01:20 PM EDT FastFlowLM + AMD)

On top of releasing ROCm 7.14 as the new production release of ROCm now built offTheRock, rolling out the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, and GAIA 0.22, AMD has some more open-source news in the lead up to next week's AMD Advancing AI event.



Experimental Build Of Holo Core Published: Arch Linux AArch64 For Valve's Steam Frame

([Valve] 17 July 11:59 AM EDT Valve's Arch Linux ARM64 Base)

As part of Valve's upcoming Qualcomm-powered Steam Frame headset, Valve has been collaborating with Collabora on the Arch Linux AArch64 base for their platform. Published today are the initial sources and binaries of this "Holo Core" base of Arch Linux AArch64 to be used by the Steam Frame.



Linux WMI Driver Gets Ready To Support ACPI-Based ARM64 Laptops

([Arm] 17 July 09:45 AM EDT ACPI WMI Driver)

Linux developer Armin Wolf sent out a set of patches today for enabling AArch64 support for the ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver to work on AArch64 in no longer being bound to x86/x86_64. This is a step toward the long goal of being able to support modern Windows on ARM laptops via ACPI on Linux.



Arm Core Local Accelerator Driver Posted For Linux As Agnostic Interface For Accelerators

([Arm] 17 July 08:35 AM EDT Arm Core Local Accelerator)

A new open-source Linux driver announced today by Arm is the Arm Core Local Accelerator "CLA" driver as a CPU-local interface for programming attached accelerators. This is an agnostic interface for attached accelerators with the initial target focusing on an attached compute engine.



AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Improvements For Linux 7.3

([Radeon] 17 July 06:21 AM EDT AMDGPU + Linux 7.3)

Since earlier this month AMD has begun staging graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3 ahead of the merge window opening in late July. That's brought some interesting changes so far while there still are a few weeks to land any additional features in DRM-Next. This week another batch of AMDGPU graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver feature code was sent out for this next kernel version.



Mozilla AI Releases Llamafile 0.10.4 With New Transcribefile Built On Transcribe.cpp

([Mozilla] 17 July 06:07 AM EDT Llamafile 0.10.4)

Mozilla AI developers have released a new version of Llamafile, their solution for easy-to-use LLMs as a single file that work across hardware and operating systems. With Llamafile 0.10.4 is now Transcribefile, as a new piece built off their recently announced Transcribe.cpp project.



OpenBLAS 0.3.34 Improves Multi-Threading, Support For A Memory-Safe C Toolchain

([Programming] 17 July 05:58 AM EDT OpenBLAS 0.3.34)

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 released on Thursday as this popular, open-source BLAS library providing optimized support for a variety of CPUs/architectures. OpenBLAS 0.3.34 continues working on squeezing more performance out of today's processors as well as delivering other new features.



Frame: A New X11 Server Implementation Written Entirely In x86_64 Assembly

([X.Org] 16 July 08:50 PM EDT X11 Server In Assembly)

Previously we covered YSERVER as an X11 server written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code. A Phoronix reader wrote in today to share an even more esoteric X11 server implementation that has come about and again written in large part by AI/LLM usage: Frame is an X11 server written in pure x86_64 Assembly.



KDE KWin Introduces Support For Server-Side Drop Shadows

([KDE] 16 July 05:10 PM EDT Server-Side Drop Shadows)

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin.



AMD's GAIA Continues Striving To Be Your Ultimate AI Companion For Emails

([AMD] 16 July 04:46 PM EDT AMD GAIA 0.22)

Yesterday saw the release of AMD's Lemonade 11.0 local AI server as well as ROCm 7.14 as the first production release built using TheRock. Out today is AMD's GAIA 0.22 software as their latest AI software release in working toward the AMD Advancing AI event next week in California.



FreeBSD Intern Working On Porting AMD ROCm To The BSD World

([BSD] 16 July 02:00 PM EDT FreeBSD + AMD ROCm)

An intern with the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting AMD's ROCm compute stack to run on this popular BSD environment.



Wayland 1.26 Released With New Pointer Warp Event

([Wayland] 16 July 11:58 AM EDT Wayland 1.26)

Simon Ser just announced the stable release of the Wayland 1.26 release.



Microsoft Goes Nostalgic In Newest Open-Source Drop: Comic Chat Open-Sourced After 30 Years

([Microsoft] 16 July 11:16 AM EDT Microsoft Comic Chat)

Introduced in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft Comic Chat provided comic-like avatars driven IRC chat client. After 30 years, this proprietary IRC chat client that was removed in Internet Explorer 6.0, is now open-source software.



AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Linux Performance

([Processors] 16 July 09:00 AM EDT 19 Comments)

Today the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D goes on sale as the lowest-price AMD 3D V-Cache processor being marketed for gamers. This 8-core / 16-thread processor features a 4.5GHz boost clock and a total of 104MB of cache while being based on the older Zen 4 architecture and coming in at about $329 USD. Here is a look at how the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D is performing on Linux.



Linux Floppy Driver For Apple's Super Woz Integrated Machine "SWIM" In Old Macs Improved

([Apple] 16 July 08:46 AM EDT 2026 Work)

This is quite unexpected and was not on my bingo card for this year or even decade... The Linux driver for the floppy disk controller in Apple's legacy Super Woz Integrated Machine (SWIM) saw a large set of patches today for improving its performance and delivering various fixes.



New Linux Driver Improving Support For GETAC Rugged Laptops

([Hardware] 16 July 06:16 AM EDT GETAC Minimal ACPI Driver)

GETAC manufactures a line of rugged/semi-rugged laptops for use in the public safety, defense, industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, and other industries. While shipping with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new driver has been proposed as GETAC MPMD as a minimal ACPI driver for improving support for these GETAC rugged laptops. In particular, the driver will allow the various programmable buttons on these laptops to work under Linux.



Ubuntu Kernel Team Warns Of Temporary AMD GPU Performance Regression Up To 42x

([Ubuntu] 16 July 06:05 AM EDT Ubuntu AMDGPU Regression)

The Ubuntu Kernel Team issued a statement this morning to proactively warn Ubuntu Linux users on Ubuntu 26.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS HWE users that the next kernel point release will contain a performance regression for AMD GPUs in compute-heavy workloads with up to a 42x performance hit. The positive news is that due to this being an upstream regression in a Linux 7.0 point release, upstream stakeholders and other Linux distributions that more quickly shipped the problematic code already have a fix coming down the pipe.



Imagination PowerVR BXM-4-64 GPU Firmware Upstreamed For The T-Head TH1520

([Hardware] 16 July 05:51 AM EDT PowerVR Rogue BXM-4-64)

Now in the upstream linux-firmware.git centralized repository is the firmware binary needed for enabling the Imagination Tech PowerVR BXM-4-64 Rogue GPU found with the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC.



AMD ROCm 7.14 Announced As New Production Release, Ryzen AI 400 Series Support

([AMD] 15 July 10:49 PM EDT AMD ROCm 7.14)

As a follow-up to the article over ROCm 7.14 being tagged, AMD has formally announced the availability of ROCm 7.14 and it's their new production release rather than being a tech preview.



AMD ROCm 7.14 "TheRock" Tech Preview Tagged For Latest AMD GPU Compute Stack

([AMD] 15 July 08:21 PM EDT AMD ROCm 7.14)

AMD's software team appears to be busy getting ready for next week's Advancing AI event happening next week in San Francisco. In addition to the release today of the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, TheRock 7.14 was also tagged as the modern build system for ROCm working on the latest tech preview releases of this open-source AMD GPU compute stack.



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Whenever people agree with me, I always think I must be wrong.
-- Oscar Wilde