Longtime Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has written an interesting blog post providing an analogy to types of developers compared to road builders and hotels.

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS has been released as the first point release of the current Long Term Support series that began in April with the "Noble Numbat" debut.

Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window in mid-September is optional support for displaying a QR code within the DRM Panic handler infrastructure when a Linux kernel panic occurs.

Earlier this week I began with AmpereOne A192-32X benchmarks and will continue for the next several weeks in finally having hands-on with the 192-core AArch64 server processor using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD 2U server platform. In today's next phase of AmpereOne performance benchmarking is looking at how AmpereOne scales across 32, 64, 96, 128, 160, and 192 core counts plus seeing core-for-core at 128 cores how AmpereOne compares to the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 processor. Plus these AmpereOne benchmarks at varying core counts against the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition.

It's happening! The upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be enabling the Xe2 graphics in Lunar Lake and Battlemage out-of-the-box / by-default. The Xe2 support within the open-source "Xe" kernel graphics driver appears to be stable enough now for enabling the support by default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware with the next kernel version. The patches have been submitted.

Following the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 driver release from earlier in the month, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.2 is now available as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

With the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) and Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) introduced first with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, they can be a big performance win for some workloads but can be a pain to setup and with limited software support. It also turns out that since a security advisory issued earlier in the year, current Intel IAA and DSA accelerators aren't safe for use within virtual machines (VMs) and that issue doesn't appear to be resolved until Diamond Rapids and Granite Rapids D processors.

It's crazy that Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to sunset Gallium Nine.

Mesa 24.2.1 was released today as the first bi-weekly point release to the newly-minted Mesa 24.2 stable series. This also marks the Mesa 24.1 series from last quarter drawing to a close with one last point release.

The very useful GNU Screen program for multiplexing terminals between processes is out with a shiny new feature release.

One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased "nontechnical nonsense" raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.

Wireshark 4.4 has been released as the newest version of this leading network protocol analyzer. Wireshark 4.4 brings many new and improved features.

While AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops have begun appearing with Zen 5 CPU cores, to date the launched laptops have revolved around having either the integrated Radeon 890M RDNA3.5 graphics and/or NVIDIA GeForce discrete graphics. For those wanting a Linux-friendly laptop with Radeon discrete graphics for more gaming and GPU/compute potential, that still leaves the still very powerful Zen 4 laptop options. Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers recently launched the Sirius 16 Gen 2 as a nice workstation/gaming laptop featuring the Ryzen 7 8845HS with Radeon RX 7600M XT discrete graphics.

Back in 2019 Microsoft announced Cascadia Code as an open-source font designed for terminals and code editors. This monospaced font they view is great for developers like those using Visual Studio Code. Over the years Microsoft has further improved upon Cascadia Code with subtle revisions while now they are working to roll-out "Cascadia Next" as their next big step forward.

Thanks to the Canonical decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream Linux kernels in Ubuntu releases moving forward, Ubuntu 24.10 shipping in October will have the Linux 6.11 kernel that is debuting as stable in mid-September. Canonical's kernel engineers are currently preparing for rolling out that new kernel version in the Oracular Oriole archive.

The LLVM Fortran "Flang" compiler effort has been a long time coming over the years with this programming language continuing to be popular among some HPC codebases and other applications. The "Flang-New" compiler code has been maturing nicely and is looking like soon it could be possibly be renamed to Flang.

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the Xe Direct Rendering Manager that is becoming the default kernel graphics driver beginning with Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware (it currently works as an experimental option with existing Intel graphics hardware going back to Tigerlake). The latest work coming out of Intel is their latest push on enabling GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

The AMD PMC driver used for the SoC power management controller already supports the initial AMD Zen 5 SoCs but new patches coming in as "fixes" for the Linux 6.11 kernel extend the coverage for some upcoming AMD platforms.

Being merged for Mesa 24.3 to the Freedreno open-source Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs is now supporting the Adreno 621 and 505 graphics processors.