AMD today quietly posted a new open-source Linux kernel driver for review... the AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver. This AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for Linux is intended to help optimize performance on systems sporting 3D V-Cache such as the AMD Ryzen "X3D" parts and the EPYC "X" processors.

For those making use of Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) on Linux systems, there is an enticing performance optimization on the way.

The Open 3D Engine as the open-source game engine developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella and began as an advanced version of the Amazon Lumberyard engine is out with a new feature release. Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 24.09 is out today with a variety of enhancements for this cross-platform game engine.

While not a long-term support release, Ubuntu Server 24.10 is delivering an interesting proof-of-concept for supporting NVMe/TCP based installations.

Slipping under my radar until now was the Vulkan API 1.3.297 spec update released last week that introduces a new extension, VK_EXT_present_mode_fifo_latest_ready.

Following my recent Intel Core Ultra 7 200V "Lunar Lake" Linux benchmarks and looking at the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics (including Windows 11 vs. Linux already), you may be wondering about the Lunar Lake CPU performance between Windows and Linux... Here are some benchmarks of the ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24.10 Linux.

Microsoft Linux engineers have continued preparing the Linux kernel to support Hyper-V Dom0 for Linux to run as the root partition.

Originally published last summer were patches from Intel for the Linux kernel to introduce a PCI Express bandwidth controller Linux driver to provide a PCIe cooling mechanism via bandwidth reduction to devices in order to prevent thermal issues. One year later this driver continues to be worked on and today brought the eighth iteration of these patches.

The long-in-development GNOME triple buffering support that is patched into the Ubuntu and Debian builds and available for years in patch form might need to undergo a redesign. That's to better accommodate the NVIDIA Linux driver and likely help other non-Mesa graphics drivers too.

The GCC 14 compiler marked Itanium IA-64 support as obsolete with plans to remove that Intel architecture in GCC 15. But for now at least the Itanium Linux compiler support has seen some reprieve with it being un-deprecated.

While the Linux 6.12 merge window has been closed for more than one week, the modern NTFS "NTFS3" driver has seen some late feature enhancements as well as some fixes merged today for this new kernel version.

For more than one year Arm engineers have been working on Guarded Control Stack "GCS" support for the Linux kernel as a means of protecting against return-oriented programming (ROP) sttacks with modern AArch64 processors. It looks like for Linux 6.13 this Arm GCS support will be ready for upstreaming.

With the Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarking at Phoronix the past few weeks it's been in a dual socket (2S / 2P) configuration. For those curious about the Intel Xeon 6980P 128-core server performance for a single socket (1S) configuration, here are those complementary results out today and for both DDR5-6400 and MRDIMM-8800 memory configurations. Thus a well-rounded look at the single Xeon 6980P performance compared to other single and dual socket Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server processors.

Intel's oneAPI Rendering Toolkit with the likes of OSPRay, Embree, OpenVKL, Open Image Denoise, and others has been open-source for years. But it's not been exactly an open-source development model with making it easy for independent contributors to propose code changes. But Intel has now decided to make these projects more like traditional open-source projects and welcoming community contributions -- including from different hardware vendors.

KDE Plasma 6.2 is now available as the latest refinement to the modern Plasma 6 desktop environment.

Merged as part of last week's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver fixes for Linux 6.12-rc2 are a few performance tuning updates for Intel Xe2 graphics to benefit the recently released Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops.

While there is the open-source MoltenVK project that implements the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers on iOS/macOS, the 3D graphics consulting firm LunarG is exploring the possibility of implementing Vulkan to Metal translation using Mesa.

Today marks the release of Qt 6.8 as not only a new feature release but also the latest long-term support (LTS) release for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit.

While the recently-departed GNOME Foundation Executive Director in the summer statement was described as "drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves." It turns out that wasn't enough. The GNOME Foundation today announced some new cost-cutting measures for the project overseeing the open-source GNOME desktop.

OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements.