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)

Mold 2.37 Linker Preps For Intel APX

([Programming] 6 March 06:14 AM EST Advanced Performance Extensions)

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.



AMD Announces "Instella" Fully Open-Source 3B Language Models

([AMD] 5 March 07:13 PM EST AMD Instella)

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.



Intel Engineers To Return To Working On Habana Labs Linux Driver, Gaudi 3 Expected

([Intel] 5 March 01:09 PM EST Linux Upstream Driver)

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.



Xen 4.20 Hypervisor Released With AMD Zen 5 Support, More Performance Optimizations

([Virtualization] 5 March 10:06 AM EST Xen 4.20)

The Xen Project announced the availability today of the Xen 4.20 virtualization hypervisor.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance

([Graphics Cards] 5 March 09:00 AM EST 90 Comments)

Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 5 March 09:00 AM EST 31 Comments)

In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today's embargo lift, I've also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.



Making Vulkan More Of A "Joy To Use" Discussed At Vulkanised 2025

([Vulkan] 5 March 06:57 AM EST Vulkanised 2025 Conference)

In addition to Vulkan-powered AI / machine learning talks at last month's Vulkanised 2025 conference, another interesting topic at this annual Vulkan developer conference was around improving the Vulkan API and making it easier for new developers and maximizing the potential with new GPU hardware.



FreeDesktop.org GitLab Will Be Down For Up To One Week Due To Cloud Migration

([Free Software] 5 March 06:40 AM EST FreeDesktop.org Downtime)

The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration.



Linux 6.15 Preparing Support For The XP-Pen Artist Pro 19, A Big 4K Drawing Tablet

([Hardware] 5 March 06:30 AM EST XP-Pen Artist Pro 19)

Linux already supports a number of XP-Pen drawing tablets while the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to include support for another one: the XP-Pen Artist Pro 19. This XP-Pen Artist Pro 19 is a big, 4K resolution display drawing tablet that retails for nearly $800 USD and features dual stylus, 16K pressure levels, and a nice display for this 19-inch drawing surface.



More Apple SoC DeviceTree Additions Being Upstreamed For Linux 6.15

([Apple] 5 March 06:13 AM EST Apple SoC DT)

Sven Peter continues work on upstreaming more of the Apple SoC support to the mainline Linux kernel. On the DeviceTree side following the DT support for Apple T2 SoCs sent out last month, another set of updates were submitted this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.



AMD ZenDNN 5.0.1 Released To Help With EPYC Inferencing For Recommender Systems & LLMs

([AMD] 4 March 04:35 PM EST AMD ZenDNN 5.0.1)

Released last year shortly after the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 for Zen 5 optimized CPU inferencing with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. ZenDNN 5.0 delivers up to a 400% performance uplift according to AMD engineers. Out today is ZenDNN 5.0.1 with further optimizations, particularly around recommendation engines and large language models (LLMs).



LLVM/Clang 20.1 Released With AMX-AVX512, AMX-FP8, AVX10.2, AMD GFX950 & Much More

([LLVM] 4 March 03:25 PM EST LLVM 20.1 Released)

LLVM 20.1 was just tagged in Git as the first stable version of the LLVM 20 compiler stack including sub-projects like the Clang 20 C/C++ Compiler.



Firefox 137 Beta Now Available With VA-API Accelerated H.265/HEVC On Linux

([Mozilla] 4 March 11:51 AM EST Firefox 137.0 Beta)

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.



Intel Finds More Women Getting Involved In Open-Source, Maintainer Burnout Continues

([Intel] 4 March 10:54 AM EST Intel Survey)

Intel has been running an annual open-source developer survey and they recently wrapped up their survey for 2024 and today published the results to provide various insight into the health of open-source development.



ExpressVPN Adds A GUI To Their Linux App

([Linux Networking] 4 March 10:07 AM EST ExpressVPN Linux App)

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package.



NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU Compute Performance

([Graphics Cards] 4 March 09:00 AM EST 29 Comments)

Ahead of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics cards seeing retail availability tomorrow, today the review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics cards. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5070 under Linux and today have a number of GPU compute benchmarks to share.



Perforator 0.0.5 Released - Switches To Apache 2.0 License, Drops CLA Requirement

([Free Software] 4 March 08:35 AM EST Yandex Perforator)

Open-sourced back in January was the Yandex Perforator as a new software project for uncovering code inefficiencies and potentially "save billions of dollars" in expenses. Perforator has continued evolving since its open-source announcement and out today is Perforator 0.0.5 as the latest milestone.



RADV Driver Adds CI Coverage For Aging Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs

([Radeon] 4 March 06:30 AM EST AMD Hawaii GPUs)

While AMD hasn't released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU.



Linux's AMD Radeon Vulkan Driver Adds Experimental Support For The BC-250 Mining Board

([Radeon] 4 March 06:49 AM EST BC-250 + RADV)

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.



Direct3D Video Decode To Vulkan Video API Being Worked On For Wine

([WINE] 4 March 06:32 AM EST Vulkan Video Under D3D11 Video)

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API.



More

Put another password in,
Bomb it out, then try again.
Try to get past logging in,
We're hacking, hacking, hacking.

Try his first wife's maiden name,
This is more than just a game.
It's real fun, but just the same,
It's hacking, hacking, hacking.
-- To the tune of "Music, Music, Music?"