With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled.

In preparation for upcoming CPU launches I have been spending the past month re-testing the various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen current generation processors on the very latest Linux software stack and latest system BIOS along with some updated and new benchmarks. For those wanting a fresh look at how the current AMD Ryzen 7000 and 8000 series processors are competing with 14th Gen Intel Core (Raptor Lake Refresh) processors, this article is for you with 18 processors and 443 benchmarks being carried out while using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upgrading to the Linux 6.10 development kernel.

Canonical today released LXD 6.1 as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused solution for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers.

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line.

For those with an ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard or thinking of getting one for this high-end AMD Ryzen 7000 series platform, the Linux support is taking another small step forward.

Back in February I wrote about Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers working on a new adaptive sharpening filter capability to be found with upcoming Xe2 graphics starting with Lunar Lake. This new adaptive sharpening filter has minimal power and performance impact and at least according to the driver engineers is working out rather well. Besides the Intel Xe kernel driver support around enabling this adaptive sharpening filter, Intel has also been readying the rest of the Linux desktop stack for exposing this capability.

Both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers today saw support for Intel's Branch Hint extension merged today for this feature of Redwood Cove P cores as found with current generation Meteor Lake processors as well as upcoming Intel Granite Rapids server processors.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc7 as the latest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.10 kernel.

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution.

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux.

Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 22 aims for release this month after a busier than usual period of bug fixing.

Upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel last year was HID BPF as a means of more easily shipping new drivers and in particular quirks/workarounds for different HID devices. This allows for some nice continued innovations around (e)BPF within the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.11 there is yet more HID BPF capabilities to be upstreamed as well as new drivers.

When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC.

The Linux kernel's block subsystem for storage is poised to introduce support for atomic writes with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

The latest Linux kernel enablement work for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors is perf subsystem support.

This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July.

It's been a busy start to July with KDE developers tackling more features for Plasma 6.2 while continuing to deliver fixes to the modern KDE Plasma desktop stack.

Intel's IDXD driver is what enables the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) under Linux as found since Sapphire Rapids as part of Intel's accelerator offerings on their Xeon processors. With patches posted today, the IDXD driver will help the hardware recover in case of errors to provide a more robust experience.

Back in Linux 6.9 the Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC support was upstreamed for that MIPS-based platform powering Mobileye's level-5 autonomous driving system. With the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel, support for the newer Mobileye EyeQ6 is being upstreamed.

One of several nice Linux performance optimizations recently by Eric Biggers of Google has been speeding up DM-Verity via multi-buffer hashing. DM-Verity is used for transparent integrity checking of block devices and this multi-buffer hashing code looks like it will land with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.