While Gentoo Linux recently ended their support for Itanium (IA-64) hardware, this popular source-based Linux distribution continues to support other aging platforms... Today they sent out an announcement highlighting their improved support for MIPS and Alpha based hardware.

Oracle today released version 7.1 of their VirtualBox virtualization software with an improved GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing support, OCI integration improvements, and other enhancements.

Early in the year we enjoyed seeing AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support upstreamed for the GCC 14 compiler in making it into that annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release. It was great seeing AMD Zen 5 support make it into this open-source compiler well ahead of any Zen 5 products being announced. Since then the GCC support for the new Znver5 target has continued to be improve upon meanwhile we've been waiting to see similar treatment for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Finally this week that AMD Zen 5 (znver5) support has been submitted for review in upstreaming it for LLVM.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, Canonical is introducing permission prompting for more control over Snap access to systems to enhance security.

Motherboard vendors have begun rolling out updated BIOS versions for AMD AM5 platforms that allow a configurable TDP on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors to allow a 105 Watt cTDP compared to the base 65 Watt TDP. For those wondering about the Linux performance and power efficiency impact from running these mid-tier Zen 5 desktop processors at the higher cTDP value, here is the full set of benchmarks compared to my original review data on Linux.

With Linux 6.11 expected for release on Sunday that in turn will mark the start of the two-week merge window for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 cycle will get underway and work towards its stable release in mid to late November. Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window here is a look at some of the material anticipated for merging during this next cycle.

Device Tree patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for review and possible upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel for booting Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods that use the A7 to A11 SoCs.

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo.

ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack.

With this past weekend's release of Linux 6.11-rc7, the kernel changes for the week were larger than prior RCs and Torvalds was a bit hesitant on releasing v6.11 this coming Sunday due to the upcoming that takes place next week in Vienna, Austria. But after a bit of time and feedback from other kernel developers, Torvalds is now more inclined to release Linux 6.11 this coming Sunday rather than dragging it out for an extra week.

The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant.

WolfSSL is an embedded SSl/TLS library designed for a range of use-cases and available as open-source under the GNU GPLv2. WolfSSL was recently packaged and added to Fedora Linux since Netatalk began building against wolfSSL and in the longer-term plans to require its use. So the Fedora packager of Netatalk went ahead with packaging up wolfSSL. But this in turn has led to issues and as of today is now being "immediately retired from Fedora."

As part of the ongoing AmpereOne testing at Phoronix with the 192-core AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor, I've been working on several different Linux distribution benchmarks with this Supermicro AmpereOne server. That comparison in full should be published next week while worth highlighting on its own are some of the gains seen with the in-development CentOS Stream 10 that serves as the upstream to what will be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. There are some nice performance gains seen on AArch64 with CentOS Stream 10 compared to CentOS Stream 9.

Intel today as part of their "Patch Tuesday" released new CPU microcode for recent generation Core and Xeon processors. Two security updates were made along with fixing a handful of functional issues.

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core.

With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the Intel graphics driver will finally be able to report GPU fan speeds. Another long sought feature is also on the way for this open-source Linux driver: GPU package temperature reporting for Intel discrete GPUs.

AlmaLinux to further distinguish itself from other RHEL-based Linux distributions has announced a Certification Special Interest Group (SIG) and out of that is coming a AlmaLinux Hardware Certification Program.

While OpenJDK Java is available via the Ubuntu package archive and the go-to JVM on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical is working to package up Oracle's GraalVM as another option for enhancing the Java stack on Ubuntu.

Intel today released a new version of QATlib, the QuickAssist Technology library for enjoying hardware-accelerated offloading of security, authentication, and compression needs. Recent Intel Xeon CPUs with built-in QAT accelerators stand to benefit a lot from the new QATlib 24.09 release.

Intel engineers have been working on enabling NPEM for Linux: Native PCIe Enclosure Management as a means of standardized storage LED indicators.