It's been a long journey to see good web camera support for Intel Alder Lake and newer designs making use of the IPU6 imaging IP. But with Fedora 41 due for release in the coming weeks, there will finally be good out-of-the-box, open-source support for the IPU6-based web cameras in modern Intel Core laptops across Tigerlake / Alder Lake / Raptor Lake laptops.

We are not done yet seeing new Arm cores still impacted by the Speculative Store Bypass handling errata. Merged to Linux 6.12 on Friday was adding the speculative SSBS workaround for the Cortex-A715, Neoverse-N3, and Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 cores.

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 is now available for testing as the next major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Sam Lantinga released SDL 3.1.3 on Friday as their "stable ABI preview" version ahead of the SDL 3.2.0 stable release. The developer at Valve notes that SDL3 has already been "battle tested by millions of people in DOTA, CS2 and Steam" and they are now gearing up for the SDL 3.2 stable release to get SDL3 out to the masses.

KDE developers have been putting the finishing touches on the Plasma 6.2 desktop as it prepares to release next week. Plasma 6.2 will be out on Tuesday barring any last minute issues.

We are quickly working our way to the end of the calendar year where Wine 9.xx bi-weekly development releases will focus on a shift to stability for releasing Wine 10.0 in early 2025. But we're not there yet and Wine 9.19 is out today to deliver the newest batch of features and fixes for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and apps on Linux.

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost.

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on preparing for next-generation hardware support within the kernel well ahead of launch. The latest on the recent enablement around next-gen Panther Lake processors is enabling a new "5th Gen" neural processing unit (NPU) to be found with Panther Lake P.

Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced Fwupd 2.0 as a major release to this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems. Fwupd 2.0 clears out a lot of long deprecated and legacy bits while adding new features and shipping many fixes.

Blender 4.3 is available today in beta form to encourage public testing of this next feature release to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe has been working to sort out DRM Panic support for the AMDGPU driver. The DRM Panic infrastructure is useful since it's what allows presenting a panic screen, a.k.a. a "Blue Screen of Death" type experience when running into major kernel problems. With Linux 6.12 there's now the ability to show QR codes for error messages with DRM Panic.

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has experimental code now available for testing that also implements the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) atop the Vulkan Video APIs. This is an interesting effort that now allows VA-API applications to rely on drivers with Vulkan Video support underneath.

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine project that was born at Mozilla and now continued by Linux Foundation Europe with other stakeholders like Igalia has been making steady progress in recent months. The project's September 2024 status report is now available that outlines recent improvements to this open-source browser layout engine.

A new set of patches from AMD Linux engineers today aim to boost the performance for heterogeneous CPU designs such as the recent Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs that have multiple core types.

Last week with the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors, Intel didn't disclose their list prices... Today they added the Granite Rapids list prices to their ARK database. With Granite Rapids making Intel much more competitive to the AMD EPYC competition and over prior generation Xeon CPUs, these new processors are commanding a higher price tag with the Xeon 6980P topping out at $17,800 USD.

Mesa 24.2.4 is out today as the newest stable point release to this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers.

Last week when kicking off the Intel Granite Rapids benchmarking with the Xeon 6980P processors there was particularly strong performance within HPC and other scientific computing workloads. Besides going now up to 128 cores / 256 threads per socket, another reason for the especially strong generational uplift and against the current AMD EPYC competition is Xeon 6 Granite Rapids introducing Multiplexed Rank memory support. One of the areas I've been eager to explore is quantifying the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM 8800MT/s performance difference and this article is dedicated to looking at that memory performance impact for the Xeon 6900P series.