Going back to 2016 we've known of NVIDIA beginning to use RISC-V to replace their Falcon micro-controller and other micro-controllers within their graphics processors to using this common open-source ISA. That use has continued to grow and an unofficial estimate now puts it at around one billion RISC-V cores shipping in 2024 NVIDIA chips.

Following the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit back during the summer with up to 13 TOPS performance for AI inference, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ was announced today with up to 26 TOPS capabilities.

Following the ASUS AIPT patch posting this weekend from an Intel Linux engineer that was analyzing my previously-published Lunar Lake results showing rather poor performance on the ASUS Zenbook S 14, the performance has been looking much better. On Monday I posted updated Intel Xe2 graphics results showing strong uplift now that the ASUS Lunar Lake laptop was operating in its standard mode rather than whisper mode. In today's article is data from more than 400 CPU/system benchmarks to see how the Core Ultra 7 256V performance has improved with this new Linux kernel patch and compared to the prior AMD Ryzen and Intel Core laptop comparison data.

Following yesterday's news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the matter.

More than a decade ago the DTrace tracing framework from Sun Microsystems was one of the long sought features from Solaris desired by Linux developers. Oracle ended up porting DTrace to Linux over the years but without too much fanfare outside of Oracle Linux especially since the advent of (e)BPF on Linux and other tracing/debugging open-source advancements. With the recent DTrace 2.0, it's now built atop the BPF engine and other upstream kernel tracing features on Linux. Gentoo Linux today announced their support for DTrace 2.0.

Google engineer Eric Biggers has worked on some very nice performance optimizations for the crypto code within the Linux kernel such as faster AES-GCM for Intel and AMD CPUs, much faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern CPUs, and many other optimizations over the years. His latest work is on enhancing the CRC32C crypto performance for x86/x86_64 processors.

Intel engineers this morning sent out their newest pull request of "drm-intel-gt-next" material to queue in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window. There is a new feature enabled on newer Intel graphics hardware as well as some improvements for very old Intel integrated graphics.

It was just earlier this week that AMD posted Linux patches to switch EPYC over to using the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. This should lead to better power efficiency out-of-the-box and is a change being made just for EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and future server processors. Already it's looking like this change will be introduced for the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window.

It was just one and a half years ago that Cloudflare began rolling out OpenBMC on their massive array of servers to replace traditional proprietary Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) firmware stacks. Since the end of last year they've been talking up their successes using OpenBMC and now as we approach two years of their OpenBMC use within production, they continue singing the praise of this open-source, Linux-based BMC software stack.

The Free Software Foundation announced on Tuesday they have begun work on "freedom in machine learning applications". Or in particular, a to-be-issued "statement" on free machine learning applications for software and the associated scripts and training data.

Rustls was initially talked up as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees. But now besides the talked up advantages due to being written in Rust, it has reached the point of reportedly being faster than both OpenSSL and BoringSSL.

Quietly merged into this week's Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers.

AlmaLinux Kitten 10 has been introduced today as what will be the next iteration of this community-based, RHEL/CentOS-derived enterprise-grade Linux distribution. AlmaLinux Kitten 10 is tracking the CentOS Stream 10 sources for what will eventually become the base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

System76 is announcing one of their most innovative and interesting products going back to their Launch Configurable Keyboard and HP Dev One collaboration: the System76 Thelio Astra. The Thelio Astra is a high-end ARM64 desktop system geared for developers with a focus on AI / STEM / self-driving technologies and powered by Ampere Computing and NVIDIA.

The first NVIDIA R565 series Linux driver beta was released this morning in the form of the NVIDIA 565.57.01 driver release.

Intel's compiler engineers today posted a number of feature patches for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for enabling new ISA features to be found with next-generation Xeon "Diamond Rapids" processors. Excitingly a number of new Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) features are coming with next-gen Intel Xeon.

Outside of the likes of the Arch Linux based CachyOS and Intel's Clear Linux there aren't too many distributions that widely rely on aggressive compiler optimizations in the name of bettering the system performance. A suggestion was raised recently though for Fedora to use profile-guided optimizations (PGO) and post-link optimizations with the likes of LLVM BOLT for more packages, but at this stage it's not clear if such a shift in Fedora package optimizations will actually materialize.

Intel Compute Runtime 24.39.31294.12 was released on Monday as the newest update to this open-source Intel integrated/discrete graphics compute stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their hardware on Windows and Linux.

For those interested in the prospects of WebAssembly for being able to write "universal apps" that can run anywhere, Wasmer as one of the leading WASM runtimes is closing in on its v5.0 feature release.

For those still managing to avoid systemd use on Linux systems and preferring SysVinit as their init system of choice, SysVinit 3.11 is out today with a new "important feature" addition.