Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.

The "48.alpha" releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday for this week's release of the GNOME 48 Alpha in leading up to the GNOME 48.0 stable release in mid-March.

Philip Rebohle working for Valve has just released DXVK 2.5.3 as the newest update to this Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 implementation over the Vulkan API that is used for enjoying older Windows games on Linux.

Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs.

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts.

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages.

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.