Given the promising AMD Strix Halo benchmark results on Linux 6.17 following the recent merge window and early regression fixes landing in the kernel, I was curious to see how Linux 6.17 was fairing on more powerful AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a brief look at some of the performance improvements found running EPYC 9005 "Turin" with the latest Linux 6.17 development kernel compared to Linux 6.16 stable.

One of the new hardware drivers expected to appear in the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year is the "us144mkii" USB sound driver for supporting the TASCAM US-144MKII USB audio interface.

AMD's GPUOpen HIPRT 3.0.9ba63f3 released today as the first update since HIPRT 2.5 shipped near the beginning of the year. HIPRT is AMD's ray-tracing library built around their HIP Interface for making it easier to enable ray-tracing workloads for HIP-based software like Blender.

Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser.

While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

Tinygrad 0.11 is out as the newest version of this deep learning framework maintained by Tiny Corp.

As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage.

One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs. Given all the interest recently around Strix Halo and the Framework Desktop as well, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance between these different OpenCL driver implementations for the Radeon 8060S Graphics.

Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs.

While the Linux v6.17 merge window only wrapped up earlier this month, Apple Silicon DeviceTree "DT" updates have already begun queuing for the Linux 6.18 merge window that will happen in October.

Intel's newest contribution to the upstream LLVM compiler stack is XeVM as their Multi-Level Intermediate Representation "MLIR" dialect catering to modern Intel graphics processors.

Patches were posted on Monday for Kernel Stack Watch, a new lightweight debugging tool for detecting kernel stack corruption in real-time on Linux.

Google engineer Roman Gushchin has proposed the ability for the Linux kernel to customize the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs.

We still don't have much confirmed information on AMD's GFX1250 that has come to light in recent months due to being developed for their AMDGPU shader compiler back-end within LLVM. AMD GFX1250 surfaced in LLVM activity and the past few months has been seeing more additions made. A notable change committed today for LLVM is that the number of user Scalar General-Purpose Registers (SGPRs) has doubled.

Following the AMD ZenDNN 5.0 release from last year's EPYC Turin launch that brought big performance improvements for CPU-based inferencing with this open-source library compatible with Intel's oneDNN, today marks the availability of ZenDNN 5.1 as the next update.

Kdenlive 25.08 is out today as the newest feature release for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source video editor. In addition to a number of new features, there are also many bug fixes including more than 15 crash fixes.

Git 2.51 is out this Monday as the newest milestone for this widely-used, distributed version control system.

The Framework Desktop is a nifty and powerful mini PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo". It's been a pleasure testing this small yet powerful Linux-friendly system that easily offers much better performance than the Intel Core Ultra 9 and superb energy efficiency. For complementing the data shared earlier this month in our Framework Desktop review, today's article is a deep dive into the power and thermals of the Framework Desktop in a few different configurations.

One of the areas worked on by AMD Linux engineers recently to better optimize the Linux kernel on AMD Ryzen platforms is for lowering the power consumption in S5 state due to some devices not being put into a low power state when the system is powered off. Sent out today was the sixth iteration of these patches.

The Firefox 142.0 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement due out on Tuesday. Firefox 142 isn't bringing many notable changes but one is likely to cause some contention around Firefox Extensions.