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)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Beta Performance Looks Great - Initial RHEL 9 vs. RHEL 10 Benchmarks

([Operating Systems] 16 December 10:45 AM EST 18 Comments)

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server.



Linux 6.14 Looks To Support AMD's Zen 5 RMPREAD Instruction & Segmented RMP Mode

([AMD] 16 December 09:03 AM EST RMPREAD)

For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).



Blaize BLZP1600 SoC Support Coming To Linux 6.14 For AI Edge Processing

([Hardware] 16 December 08:00 AM EST Blaize BLZP1600)

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing.



Linux 6.14 To Introduce New DRM Boot Logger For Kernel Messages

([Linux Kernel] 16 December 06:34 AM EST drm_log)

Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.



Better Linux Support For The Samsung Galaxy Book Laptops With New Driver Coming

([Hardware] 16 December 06:16 AM EST samsung-galaxybook)

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.



Last Minute AMD GFX12 Changes For RadeonSI Driver Enable ACO For RDNA4

([Radeon] 16 December 05:58 AM EST RadeonSI ACO For RDNA4)

Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support.



Linux 6.13-rc3 Released With KVM Caching For "Wildly Expensive" Intel CPUID Handling

([Linux Kernel] 15 December 07:22 PM EST Linux 6.13-rc3)

Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January.



Java Throughput/Latency & Power Efficiency Tuning For AMD EPYC Turin

([Software] 15 December 10:00 AM EST 7 Comments)

Last month I looked at the impact of AMD's BIOS tuning guide on AI / machine learning workloads for new 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors. In today's article I am looking at the performance and power efficiency impact of AMD EPYC 9005 series processors with AMD's BIOS tuning recommendations for Java workloads on Linux.



Linux Fixing A "Hilarious/Revolting Performance Regression" Around Intel KVM Virtualization

([Intel] 15 December 08:55 AM EST Whoops...)

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today.



Xfce 4.20 Desktop Released With Wayland Improvements & New Features

([Wayland] 15 December 06:34 AM EST Xfce 4.20)

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays.



Btrfs Working On RAID1 Round-Robin Read Balancing

([Linux Storage] 15 December 06:20 AM EST Btrfs RAID1 Round Robin Read Balancing)

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing.



Linux 6.14 To Add Sensor Monitoring For A ~$180 ASRock AM5 Motherboard

([Hardware] 15 December 06:06 AM EST ASRock B650 Steel Legend)

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel.



Linux 6.6.66 LTS Kernel Released With New Hardware Support & Many Fixes

([Linux Kernel] 14 December 05:15 PM EST Linux 6.6.66)

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions.



Some Qualcomm CPUs Left Exposed To Spectre Vulnerabilities On Mainline Linux

([Arm] 14 December 03:09 PM EST Patches Fix It)

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order.



Intel P-State Energy Aware Scheduling Patches Updated For Lunar Lake

([Intel] 14 December 09:27 AM EST Intel P-State EAS)

As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel.



Mesa 25.0 Introduces Standard Library For Driver OpenCL C

([Mesa] 14 December 08:50 AM EST OpenCL C Driver Standard Library)

An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code.



NTSYNC Linux Driver Updated With API Design Improvements

([Linux Kernel] 14 December 06:36 AM EST NTSYNC v7)

After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those "v6" patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver.



Qualcomm Preps Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" Accelerator Support

([Hardware] 14 December 06:22 AM EST Qualcomm AIC200)

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way.



KDE Plasma 6.3 Delivers Much Better Fractional Scaling, Clipboard Using SQLite

([KDE] 14 December 05:46 AM EST Plasma 6.3)

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release.



Wine 10.0-rc2 Released With 21 Fixes For The Week

([WINE] 13 December 08:31 PM EST Wine 10.0)

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January.



More

`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order
by staff writers

...
The central Superhighway site called ``sunsite.unc.edu''
collapsed in the morning before the release. News about the release had
been leaked by a German hacker group, Harmonious Hardware Hackers, who
had cracked into the author's computer earlier in the week. They had
got the release date wrong by one day, and caused dozens of eager fans
to connect to the sunsite computer at the wrong time. ``No computer can
handle that kind of stress,'' explained the mourning sunsite manager,
Erik Troan. ``The spinning disks made the whole computer jump, and
finally it crashed through the floor to the basement.'' Luckily,
repairs were swift and the computer was working again the same evening.
``Thank God we were able to buy enough needles and thread and patch it
together without major problems.'' The site has also installed a new
throttle on the network pipe, allowing at most four clients at the same
time, thus making a new crash less likely. ``The book is now in our
Incoming folder'', says Troan, ``and you're all welcome to come and get it.''
-- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi>
[comp.os.linux.announce]