With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.

The Redox OS open-source Rust-written operating system project has published their September 2024 status update.

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors that launched last week there are SNC3 and HEX clustering modes for these new processors. The default Sub-NUMA Clustering 3 (SNC3) mode for the three compute dies while the HEX mode is like SNC1 mode formerly for all three compute dies acting as one NUMA node. Using the flagship 128-core Intel Xeon 6980P processors, I ran some benchmarks looking at the real-world performance difference for SNC3 vs. HEX clustering modes on Granite Rapids.

A roadmap/schedule has been published for the lightweight Xfce 4.20 desktop. If all goes well this next iteration of the Xfce desktop will be out before Christmas.

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version.

The Linux 6.11 kernel introduced getrandom() in the vDSO for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. In addition to patches pending for Glibc to make use of getrandom() vDSO support, Golang is now another early user of this functionality.

For those making use of OpenVPN for your virtual private network (VPN) needs, years in the making has been an "OVPN" Linux kernel driver to enhance the performance by offloading more of the work to kernel-space.

Manjaro 24.1 "Xahea" debuted on Tuesday as the newest update to this Arch Linux based distribution. Manjaro 24.1 is the first new tagged release since May and with it comes updated desktop options, the Linux 6.10 kernel, and other package upgrades.

Back in May Steam on Linux usage crossed the 2% threshold and remained that way until August when it dropped back below 2% for all Steam gamers. The September 2024 Steam Survey results were just published and point to another downward bump for Steam on Linux gaming.

Python 3.13 had been scheduled for release today with a new interactive interpreter, experimental free-threaded build mode to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), an experimental JIT, and other shiny new features. But a performance regression has delayed the Python 3.13 release to next week and in turn an unexpected Python 3.13-rc3 final test release.

Intel is preparing a new staging feature for better handling of CPU microcode updates. Initial patches for the Linux kernel are out for discussion in enabling this feature that can yield around a 40% reduction in latency during the CPU microcode updating process.

Taking place last week in Paris was the annual Kernel Recipes conference devoted to a variety of Linux topics and sponsored by Meta, Dell, Arm, AMD, and other organizations. The slides and videos from the different Linux/open-source talks are now online for those wanting to watch some interesting technical content.

One of the interesting highlights of September was finally having our hands on an AmpereOne server! After years of being eager to test Ampere Computing's next-generation AArch64 server processors, Ampere sent over their 192-core flagship server processor for a few weeks of testing. The review server was comprised of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship model within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR 2U server.

Building off last year's release of the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors featuring up to sixty-four Zen 4C cores, AMD today announced the EPYC Embedded 8004 series.

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser.

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver.

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come.

During the month of September on Phoronix there were 265 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. Here's a look back at the most exciting content for September.

Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week's systemd "All Systems Go" developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language.