Intel's Open Image Denoise 2.5 Delivers Solid Performance Improvements For GPUs

([Intel] 11 June 06:04 AM EDT Open Image Denoise 2.5)

Intel's Open Image Denoise is the open-source project providing a high performance denoising library for ray-tracing and used by the likes of Blender and other renderers/creative apps for powerful denoising capabilities. Released last week was Open Image Denoise 2.5 with some very nice performance improvements for Intel GPUs.

GNOME Foundation Announces First Participants Of Fellowship Program

([GNOME] 11 June 05:50 AM EDT GNOME Fellowship)

Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced.

ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life

([Operating Systems] 10 June 08:31 PM EDT ReactOS)

ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform.

Framework Laptop 13 Pro To Begin Shipping In July

([Hardware] 10 June 04:10 PM EDT Not June)

Framework Computer began informing those that pre-ordered the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro that it will begin shipping in July rather than their original June target. The setback is coming to address two issues that came up in their testing process that delayed the start of mass production.

Intel XPU Manager 2.0 Overhauls Windows & Linux Management For Arc Pro GPUs

([Intel] 10 June 03:06 PM EDT Intel XPU Manager 2.0)

Just a week after the release of Intel XPU Manager 1.3.7, Intel today released XPU Manager 2.0 as a major overhaul for this software for monitoring and management of their data center GPUs on Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Linux 7.2 To Enable ESWIN SoC Support By Default For RISC-V Kernel Builds

([RISC-V] 10 June 02:42 PM EDT ESWIN By Default)

An important one-liner is set to come for Linux 7.2 to enable ESWIN SoC support by default for RISC-V kernel builds. This change will allow default RISC-V kernel builds in turn to boot on the likes of SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 developer board.

AMD's Lemonade SDK For Local AI Adds NVIDIA CUDA Support

([AMD] 10 June 12:25 PM EDT Lemonade 10.7)

Lemonade, the local AI server solution developed by AMD that is designed to work across their CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, is out with a new version today that also adds NVIDIA CUDA support.

Linux Foundation's Latest AI Effort Is Around AI Asset & Data Exchange

([AI] 10 June 10:39 AM EDT OpenSharing Project)

The Linux Foundation continues working to get more involved in new AI initiatives. Today the Linux Foundation announced the OpenSharing Project with an effort to standardize AI asset and data exchange.

Intel Arc Pro B70 Showing Off Some Performance Wins With Linux 7.1

([Display Drivers] 10 June 10:46 AM EDT 2 Comments)

After recently noticing the Intel Arc B580 performing better on Linux 7.1 for that kernel version soon to be released as stable, I was curious if there were performance gains also to be found with the new flagship Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 workstation graphics card. Here are some benchmarks of the Intel Arc Pro B70 in relevant workloads between Linux 7.0 and the near-final Linux 7.1 kernel.

NVIDIA Engineer Devises Patch To Significantly Reduce GCC Bootstrap Time

([GNU] 10 June 09:30 AM EDT Faster GCC Builds)

NVIDIA engineer Kyrylo Tkachov posted a patch for testing yesterday to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for conducting a native bootstrap. The time spent in the configure process for native GCC builds is reduced by around 43% while the overall bootstrap wall time is lowered by around 15%.

Linux's CrOS EC Driver To Support Custom Fan Curves - Useful For Framework Laptops

([Hardware] 10 June 09:12 AM EDT CrOS EC Custom Fan Curves)

The cros_ec Linux kernel driver is used for supporting the ChromeOS Embedded Controller "EC" used by Chromebooks and various other laptops like Framework Laptops. With patches pending to cros_ec, support for custom fan curves is being introduced.

KDE KWin Patches Aiming To Optimize Gaming Latency To Better Compete With Windows

([KDE] 10 June 06:37 AM EDT KDE KWin Latency Optimizations)

Open-source developer Jakub Okoński has been working on comparing the gaming latency between Linux and Windows and in turn working to drive some improvements into KDE's KWin Wayland compositor so the latency is more competitive with the gaming experience under Microsoft Windows 11.

Linux Firmware Repository Preps For AI Coding Agents

([AI] 10 June 06:25 AM EDT linux-firmware.git)

The linux-firmware.git repository that serves as the de facto home of all the binary blobs used by the mainline Linux kernel open-source drivers has now introduced AGENTS.md documentation and other preparations for embracing AI coding agents.

AMDGPU Linux Driver Preps For HDMI 2.1 Compliance Testing

([Radeon] 10 June 06:11 AM EDT HDMI 2.1 Compliance Testing)

While not as exciting as features like HDMI 2.1 FRL and Display Stream Compression itself, as part of AMD's efforts to provide a fully open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for AMDGPU, new code is being prepped for their kernel driver to support the HDMI compliance testing efforts.

Linux's KVM Preps For APX Support In VMs

([Virtualization] 10 June 06:00 AM EDT Advanced Performance Extensions)

Among the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) work being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window are preparations for supporting Advanced Performance Extensions within KVM virtual machines.

RADV Driver Now Leveraging RDNA3+ Hardware Feature For Better Instruction Cache Prefetching

([Radeon] 10 June 05:49 AM EDT Better Instruction Cache Prefetching)

Initially introduced in RDNA3 (GFX11) GPUs is INST_PREF_SIZE to specify the number of instruction bytes to prefetch prior to a wavefront beginning execution. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now making use of this feature in RDNA3/RDNA4 GPUs for better instruction cache prefetching.

Linux Sees Patches For "Critical" Vulnerability Affecting Many Arm CPUs

([Arm] 9 June 08:35 PM EDT CVE-2025-10263)

Made public today is CVE-2025-10263 as a "critical" security vulnerability affecting many different Arm CPU cores. CVE-2025-10263 could allow for privilege escalation on affected systems due to a specific timing condition during a memory permission change. Fundamentally it comes down to completion of affected memory accesses might not be guaranteed by the completion of a TLBI.

Alpine Linux 3.24 Improves Installer Experience, Adds COSMIC Desktop Option

([Operating Systems] 9 June 05:02 PM EDT Alpine Linux 3.24)

Alpine Linux, the Linux distribution popular especially for containers / micro-services and embedded devices, is out with its newest feature release.

macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux

([Apple] 9 June 10:52 AM EDT macOS Golden Gate)

Asahi Linux is warning its users from trying out the new macOS 27 "Golden Gate" beta released this week by Apple. With macOS 27 beta, the Asahi Linux partition is no longer visible and thus unable to boot to your Apple Silicon Linux installation.

RISC-V CPU Performance Up 8x In Five Years: SiFive HiFive Unmatched To SpacemiT K3

([Processors] 9 June 10:12 AM EDT 28 Comments)

Recently I published some initial SpacemiT K3 benchmarks for that first-to-market RISC-V RVA23 SoC with the K3 Pico-ITX mini computer. In there was a comparison against modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs along with the likes of the Raspberry Pi 5, Loongson 3B6000, and SiFive HiFive Premier. For those curious about the longer-term RISC-V performance, here is a look at how far the RISC-V hardware performance has come compared to the SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V board from five years ago.