It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor.

A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files.

Microsoft has released Azure Linux 3.0.20241005 as the "October 2024" update to the company's in-house Linux distribution.

ISPC 1.25 has been released as the newest feature update to the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as the C language variant for "single program, multiple data" programming to target both Intel's CPUs and GPUs.

It was just last week that Python 3.13 saw its official release with many great features from a new interactive interpreter to an experimental JIT and removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental free-threaded build mode. Python 3.14 Alpha 1 is already out today in the first very early stage development milestone toward next year's big Python update.

Building off the existing Linux support for GPU Direct RDMA / Peer-To-Peer DMA functionality, a set of patches were posted by NVIDIA today enabling this P2P DMA support to also work for device-private pages.

Back in March for GDC, Microsoft excitingly announced the official releases of Direct3D 12 Work Graphs for "enabling new types of GPU autonomy" for allowing more rendering work to be offloaded to the GPU. While this greater GPU-driven rendering with Work Graphs has been talked up by Microsoft and other parties, Valve engineers working on VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12 over Vulkan have found the new Work Graphs functionality to not be as nearly captivating.

Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, on the same day AOCC 5.0 was quietly released as the newest version of AMD's Zen-focused compiler derived from LLVM/Clang. With not only adding AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support but also additional vectorization improvements and other performance optimizations, I was eager to run some benchmarks of AOCC 5.0 against the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers. Here are those initial benchmarks using dual AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 processors.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.10, today Canonical announced a developer preview of an Ubuntu 24.10 Linux build targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops.

LLVM's modern Fortran compiler "flang-new" has now been renamed to "flang" for next year's LLVM 20 update.

Solus 4.6 is out as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution that is known for its default Budgie desktop while also shipping with other desktop options.

Intel engineers have released the oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" version 3.6 release that serves as the building blocks for deep learning software like ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, Apache MXNet, Apache SIGNA, and optionally by PyTorch and TensorFlow with Intel's extensions.

While ARM-based SoCs with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) aren't too common, there do exist some such as select models of the Huawei Kunpeng server SoC with SMT or there HiSilicon Kirin 9000S. As such Huawei/HiSilicon engineers have been working to expose SMT controls on ARM64 for the Linux kernel.

It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.

The OpenBSD project has released LibreSSL 4.0 as the newest version of this open-source TLS implementation that was forked from OpenSSL a decade ago.

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 released last week with RAIDZ expansion, fast deduplication, and direct IO support among other changes for this ZFS file-system implementation for use on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3-rc2 is out today with a few more interesting changes.

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.