AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements.

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions.

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory.

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion.

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins.

Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February.

Framework Computer Inc announced today that they have been working with DeepComputing on a partner-developed RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13.

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey.

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets.

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has shown no signs of hitting the end of the road for optimizing OpenGL support within the Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack. More than one decade since joining AMD and more than a decade and a half of being involved with Mesa since beginning as a student developer, Marek still isn't slowing down with his performance optimizations and new features to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

A set of patches for the Linux kernel's Intel P-State driver aim to ensure Intel Xeon servers can hit their highest clock frequencies following changes in the server's performance profile. It turns out some special handling is needed to update the highest frequencies of a CPU after boot to ensure the performance profile is properly reflected.

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41.

A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems.

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too.

With the release of Fedora 41 in October, this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution is hoping to have all the software bits aligned that its AMD SEV-SNP virtualization stack will be all squared away for this latest iteration of Secure Encrypted Virtualization.

Intel today released OpenVINO 2024.2, the newest version of its open-source AI toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning (A) inference models across a range of AI frameworks and broad hardware types.

As a planned change for Fedora 41, Red Hat engineers are working on upstream GNOME Software better supporting the NVIDIA proprietary driver installation by allowing the installation to work gracefully with UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems.

After last week looking at how FreeBSD 14.1 has improved performance over FreeBSD 14.0, here is an expanded cross-OS comparison now looking at how the new FreeBSD 14.1 stable release compares to the recently released NetBSD 10.0, the current DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release, and then CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for some Linux comparison data points.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making sizable investments into various Linux desktop projects, the Rust-based Coreutils implementation, libmicrohttpd, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and other prominent open-source software that could benefit from greater financial resources. Today they have announced they have opened up for a new round of applications for those open-source projects seeking funding from this German government initiative.