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.

Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board.

On Sunday there was a new patch posted by an Intel Linux engineer to boost the Lunar Lake Linux performance out-of-the-box for ASUS laptops by adjusting the new ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology "AIPT" feature so that Linux follows the same behavior as Windows 11. My initial testing of this ASUS AIPT patch has indeed shown the Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" yielding much better performance with this patch applied.

Making for an exciting Monday morning, AMD Linux engineers have kicked off the new week with a patch series introducing an exciting and long-awaited change: using the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver by default for EPYC server platforms moving forward rather than the ACPI CPUFreq driver.

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being "overkill and painfully slow." The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU security mitigations.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.20 for running Windows games/applications on Linux, Hangover 9.20 is now available for this extension of Wine that builds off that codebase while pairing it with an x86/x86_64 emulator for running Windows programs on other CPU architectures like ARM64 Linux. With Hangover 9.20 they have restored the ability for running Win64 applications on ARM64 Linux hosts.

The Unvanquished 0.55 open-source game that was recently teased for its OpenGL 4.6 renderer work is out today with its shiny new release. As it's been more than one and a half years since Unvanquished 0.54, this new beta comes with a load of improvements especially around optimizing its Daemon open-source engine that is long derived from id Tech 3.

Meson 1.6 was published on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular cross-platform build system.

Linux 6.12-rc4 is out today as the half-way point to releasing the Linux 6.12 stable kernel around this time of the month in November.

Since purchasing an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" laptop for Linux testing last month, the performance has been coming in below expectations. Among the tests were finding Xe2 graphics on Lunar Lake performing slower that under Windows 11 and in comparison slower than Meteor Lake graphics on Linux. Intel engineers have been able to reproduce my original findings and they uncovered the culprit is a new ASUS laptop feature called AIPT. In turn a patch was posted today for supporting ASUS AIPT controls under Linux to fix this low Lunar Lake Linux performance.

Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.

With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that... ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase.

Patches posted this week by Oracle's Lorenzo Stoakes are the latest attempt at lightweight guard pages for the Linux kernel.

Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 "X1E80100" series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git.

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.