Intel used their Enterprise Tech Tour last week in Oregon to not only provide insight into the new Xeon 6900 "Granite Rapids" server processors (and Xeon 6980P benchmarks) but also to shed more light on their Gaudi 3 AI inference accelerator. The question I was most curious about with Gaudi 3: where's the Linux driver support?

Building off the launch earlier this year of the first Xeon 6 processors with the Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" processors, today Intel is lifting the wraps on the much anticipated Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors. Where as Sierra Forest is optimized for power efficiency and core density, the Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors are optimized for per-core performance and have shown some very strong generational uplift -- and against the AMD competition -- as we'll show today in the first Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks.

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can showcase staggering leads.

Merged as part of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.12 kernel is a kernel stack usage histogram to help developers in better optimizing the kernel stack sizes and minimizing memory waste.

Going along with other early Linux kernel driver additions for enabling Panther Lake, the intel-lpss driver in Linux 6.12 has made its device ID additions for supporting Panther Lake H and Panther Lake P processors.

The Intel LPMD open-source project is a user-space daemon for optimizing active idle power handling on Linux and can be useful particularly for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. LPMD is short for the "Low Power Mode Daemon" while with today's v0.0.7 release it's now re-identified itself as the "Energy Optimizer" instead.

The Dell-WMI-Sysman driver on Linux allows for managing BIOS settings from within Linux using sysfs. This dell-wmi-sysman kernel driver supports most Dell platforms from 2018 and newer for convenient BIOS management.

Landlock as the Linux security module for unprivileged access control handling is adding new controls around Unix socket handling with the Linux 6.12 kernel.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 merge window.

Months ago Intel Linux engineers began adapting the Linux kernel to end the assumptions made around "Family 6" for Intel CPUs that had been used since the 90's with the Pentium Pro as the CPU family ID. With Linux 6.12 they finished the Intel CPU family/model ID restructuring and now we have the first patch confirming a post-Family 6 Intel CPU: Diamond Rapids is Family 19.

AMD's GPUOpen team has released HIP RT 2.4 as the newest version of this open-source ray-tracing library built atop their HIP interface.

Linux 6.11 introduced the getrandom() in the vDSO support for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. Initially that was focused on Linux x86_64 while for Linux 6.12 is ported to five more architectures.

The media subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. Notable this cycle is a new HDMI CEC driver for a 4K HDMI splitter/amplifier for those looking for a device that can be controlled from within Linux using the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) specification.

The Servo open-source browser layout engine has supported making use of the Firefox Devtools code for the provided web developer tools such as the HTML web page inspector and browser console. But that support had fallen into disrepair. Fortunately, thanks to a useful Outreachy project, the code has been updated and now working nicely with the newer Devtools code.

Back in June it was teased that Framework Computer in collaboration with DeepComputing would be releasing a RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13. That RISC-V laptop motherboard has yet to be officially released but Linux kernel patches were posted today for enabling the DeviceTree support so Linux can boot on this upcoming board.

Following Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 video encoder support being merged into the FFmpeg library, the latest improvement for this open-source multimedia API when leveraging Vulkan is implicit DRM synchronization.

In between Linus Torvalds' busy week being in Vienna for the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit and related Linux Foundation events as well as managing the Linux 6.12 merge window with landing new features like sched_ext and real-time PREEMPT_RT, he also managed to finish up some of his own code for this next kernel version. Being merged today is his own code working on a new user access fast validation path using address masking.

The perf tooling changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable on the perf tools side is supporting some features found in newer Intel processors.

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted all of the Bcachefs file-system feature patches for the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. In his pull request he also lays out his ambitions to remove the "EXPERIMENTAL" flag from Bcachefs within the next year.

The PCI changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel add support for Native PCIe Enclosure Management "NPEM" as a code contribution by Intel for implementing the PCIe spec to standardize storage LEDs.