The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024.

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland.

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.

AMD ROCm 6.2.4 is out today as the newest point release for this Radeon and Instinct open-source GPU compute stack.

Following the GIMP 3.0-RC1 tagging, the GIMP project has now put out their lengthy write-up outlining many of the new features to enjoy with this first release candidate of the much anticipated GIMP 3.0. Plus there is a few words about future releases when moving past the upcoming GIMP 3.0 stable.

Linux I/O expert and block/IO_uring maintainer Jens Axboe of Meta has recently revisited his patches around uncached buffered I/O. Back in 2019 the "RWF_UNCACHED" effort was started by Axboe to address a throughput cliff in performance once the page cache fills up. That work faded away but Axboe recently took to crafting a set of fresh patches for implementing uncached buffered I/O and they are showing extremely promising results.

Systemd 257-rc1 is out today as a big feature update for this release that brings many new features and other refinements to this key piece of the Linux operating system stack.

Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor as the first Zen 5 CPU released with 3D V-Cache, today the review embargo lifts. Here is a look at how this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5 CPU with 64MB of 3D V-Cache is performing under Ubuntu Linux compared to a variety of other Intel Core and AMD Ryzen desktop processors.

Patches for the Linux kernel over the past week are preparing for an SNC6 sub-NUMA clustering mode. This is the first time I've seen patches or mentions of an SNC6 mode compared to SNC 1/2/3/4 modes with existing processors.

The upcoming Mesa 24.3 graphics driver stack will deliver a very nice performance win with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for aging RDNA1 "GFX10" graphics processors.

Yet another exciting feature expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is the introduction of the Lazy Preemption model.

Intel's oneCCL open-source software that is the oneAPI Collective Communications Library focused on providing an efficient implementation of deep learning communication patterns is out with a new release.

The cURL 8.11 release is now available for this widely-used open-source software library and CLI utility used for downloads and supporting a variety of network protocols for file transfers. Most notable with cURL 8.11 is sporting official WebSockets support.

The long elusive GIMP 3.0 image editor that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop has finally reached the release candidate phase of development.

Typically in my launch-day Linux reviews of new AMD EPYC processors I try to include results both of the performance determinism (default) and power determinism modes available with these server processors since opting in to the power determinism mode can allow for additional performance uplift at the cost of slightly higher power costs. With the AMD EPYC 9575F / 9755 / 9965 benchmarks and review I didn't have a chance to complete all of the power determinism runs in time for that review, but for those curious about power vs. performance determinism modes with the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors, here is a side-by-side comparison.

Upstreamed at the start of the year was the Imagination PowerVR open-source DRM kernel driver for newer Imagination Rogue GPUs. That upstream kernel driver is now being extended to cover the Imagination BXS-4-64 MC1 GPU.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus subsystem as a set of network protocols for real-time distributed control of automated industrial systems. But now five years later, Fieldbus is being removed from the mainline Linux kernel since the code hasn't been maintained.

Due to the possibility of DMA attacks from connected Thunderbolt devices, Linux and other platforms have built up safeguards over the years and different security levels for Thunderbolt to better protect systems having this high speed interface exposing PCIe. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the logic of the kernel is being enhanced to better detect and trust built-in Thunderbolt controllers.