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)

There Will Not Be Official ROCm Support For The Radeon RX 9070 Series On Launch Day

([Radeon] 28 February 08:00 AM EST AMD ROCm)

AMD has been investing a lot into the ROCm compute stack to make it a more formidable contender against the NVIDIA CUDA software ecosystem. From better documentation and improved application/API coverage to expanding their range of supported AMD GPUs, there's been a lot going on. So with this morning's much anticipated Radeon RX 9070 series launch announcement ahead of product availability next week, you are probably wondering about Radeon RX 9000 series support for ROCm too... Here's what I know so far.



AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Officially Announced

([Graphics Cards] 28 February 08:00 AM EST 74 Comments)

The embargo is over! We finally can share details on the exciting Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards powered by RDNA4 that will be available from Internet retailers next week.



AMD Engineer Talks Up Vulkan/SPIR-V As Part Of Their MLIR-Based Unified AI Software Play

([Radeon] 28 February 07:02 AM EST Wide GPU Coverage)

An AMD engineer presented earlier this month at the Vulkanised 2025 conference in Cambridge (UK) around the work they are pursuing for AI using the MLIR intermediate representation, IREE, and the role that Vulkan/SPIR-V can play for AI acceleration across AMD's wares as well as other hardware.



GCC 15.1 Compiler Nears Release As Bugs Whittled Away

([GNU] 28 February 06:28 AM EST GCC 15.1)

Current GNU Compiler Collection release manager Richard Biener of SUSE provided an update concerning the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release.



RADV Driver Expands Use Of Performance-Helping DCC Fast Clears On RDNA3 GPUs

([Radeon] 28 February 06:20 AM EST Delta Color Compression)

Just ahead of the AMD RDNA4 GPUs launching, the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has expanded a performance optimization technique for existing RDNA3 graphics processors.



AMDVLK 2025.Q1.2 Released With Strix Halo Support

([Radeon] 28 February 05:57 AM EST AMDVLK 2025.Q1.2)

When seeing a new AMDVLK release was just tagged on GitHub and just a few hours to go until the Radeon RX 9070 series announcement, I was hoping it was going to be a new driver officially rolling out their new RDNA4 GPU support. Today's AMDVLK 2025.Q1.2 driver was not for officially introducing RDNA4 but does bring Strix Halo support and other improvements.



Intel Posts Linux Kernel Patches For Supporting APX - Advanced Performance Extensions

([Intel] 27 February 03:40 PM EST Linux Kernel + Intel AMX)

Intel initially detailed Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) back in mid-2023 as extensions to double the number of general purpose registers and add other performance features. In the time since they have done a lot preparing the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers for the new APX ISA features while finally today they sent out an initial set of patches for preparing the Linux kernel for APX processors.



EA Open-Sources Command & Conquer Red Alert

([Linux Gaming] 27 February 02:44 PM EST EA Open-Source)

In a surprising announcement, Electronic Arts announced today that they have open-sourced Command and Conquer Red Alert under the GPL license along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and related titles.



Motion Control Subsystem Proposed For The Linux Kernel

([Linux Kernel] 27 February 01:30 PM EST Linux Motion Control Subsystem)

A set of patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today propose the introduction of a Linux Motion Control "LMC" subsystem for drivers that could control devices like CNC machines and 3D printers.



SUSE's "Agama" OS Installer Receives Pleasant Facelift, Future Roadmap

([SUSE] 27 February 12:11 PM EST Agama 12)

SUSE's Agama project is their modern OS installer featuring a web-based UI that will serve as the installer of SUSE/openSUSE in future releases moving forward. Agama 12 is now available as the newest iteration of this operating system installer and there is also now a public road-map concerning future development plans.



NVIDIA 570.124.04 Linux Driver Brings Additional Fixes

([NVIDIA] 27 February 10:39 AM EST NVIDIA 570.124.04)

Going into beta just under one month ago was the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux driver that brought initial support for GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics cards as well as Vulkan driver improvements, Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) support with multiple displays, GPU overclocking exposed by default, and various other refinements to this official NVIDIA Linux driver. Out today is the NVIDIA 570.124.04 stable Linux driver release.



FFmpeg Lands AV1 RTP Packetizer/Depacketizer

([Multimedia] 27 February 10:08 AM EST FFmpeg + AV1 RTP)

Merged yesterday to FFmpeg Git is an initial AV1 RTP packetizer and depacketizer in working to support the tentative AV1 RTP specification.



FreeBSD In Q4 Saw More Work For AMD Systems, Framework Laptops & PinePhone Pro

([BSD] 27 February 08:45 AM EST FreeBSD Status Update)

The FreeBSD project this morning published their quarterly status report that outlines all of the interesting OS improvements and other changes made during Q4'2024.



Fish 4.0 Shell Released With Code Ported From C++ To Rust

([Free Software] 27 February 08:24 AM EST Fish Shell 4.0)

Entering beta last year was the Fish Shell 4.0 release that migrated its codebase from C++ to Rust. Out today is the first stable 4.0 release for the Rust-ed version of the popular Fish Shell.



AMD Open-Sources GMLIB For RadeonSI Driver - Working On HDR Video Support

([Radeon] 27 February 06:58 AM EST AMD GMLIB)

Merged today for Mesa 25.1 is introducing a new previously AMD-internal library to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver dubbed GMLIB. This GMLIB code is being used by RadeonSI in conjunction with Radeon GPUs having the Video Processing Engine (VPE) hardware to deal with HDR video on Linux.



Zink Working On A "Nice Performance Boost" For OpenCL / DaVinci Resolve

([Mesa] 27 February 06:25 AM EST Zink cl_khr_image2d_from_buffer)

Mike Blumenkrantz as the lead developer of Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation and working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics team has been spending much time recently optimizing for OpenCL with the Rusticl Gallium3D driver.



x86 32-bit Changes Look To Be Ready For Linux 6.15 - Drops Support For More Than 4GB RAM

([Linux Kernel] 27 February 06:34 AM EST Cleaning Up x86 32-bit CPU Support)

Over the past few months there's been an in-progress patch series by Arnd Bergmann for cleaning up the x86 32-bit kernel support for running on x86_64 CPUs. After the third iteration of the patches were posted this week, these x86 32-bit CPU clean-ups were shuffled into the tip/tip.git "x86/cpu" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window.



Git 2.49-rc0 Released With "git backfill", zlib-ng Preparations & Rust Interface

([Programming] 26 February 01:57 PM EST Git 2.49-rc0)

Git maintainer Junio C Hamano announced Git 2.49-rc0 today as an early preview release for the next version of this widely-used, distributed version control system.



AMD EPYC Turin Power Profile Selection Impact On Performance & Efficiency

([Software] 26 February 11:00 AM EST 4 Comments)

Last week I published an article looking at the power efficiency of 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" using the modern AMD P-State driver and the Power Profile options. The AMD P-State driver being used by default now for the EPYC 9005 series processors on Linux 6.12+ and paired with Power Profile option tuning can deliver a nice boost to server energy efficiency with only modest impact to the performance. Today's article are some complementary numbers I carried out recently on a Supermicro server looking at more of the Power Profile Selection options.



AMD Driver Lands DCC For Multi-Plane Formats With RDNA4, Tiling For Video Buffers

([Radeon] 26 February 08:55 AM EST RadeonSI Gallium3D)

More RadeonSI Gallium3D changes worth mentioning have landed today in Mesa 25.1 Git for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack.



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Laundry is the fifth dimension!! ... um ... um ... th' washing machine
is a black hole and the pink socks are bus drivers who just fell in!!