While not as common as GRUB or systemd-boot, a new version of Limine is now available for this open-source, modern-focused and portable multi-protocol bootloader.

In addition to the KDE development activity this week, GNOME developers have also been busy polishing their desktop ahead of their next GNOME release in September.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekend update that recaps all of the interesting KDE development activities for the past week.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the engineers at Canonical began focusing more on the performance of Ubuntu and establishing a performance team at the company. This work is ongoing and for Ubuntu 24.10 they are exploring another exciting area: leveraging "-O3" compiler optimizations for Ubuntu packages. Available today is an experimental build of the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs that are compiled for the -O3 optimization level.

As expected, AMD has released ROCm 6.2 as the newest version of their open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon graphics cards and Instinct accelerators. ROCm 6.2 is a big update with several new software components, improving the existing PyTorch and TensorFlow support, and a variety of other enhancements as AMD works to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA.

While Intel's upcoming Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" laptop processors are doing away with Hyper Threading (HT) and instead focusing more on additional E cores. AMD has asserted Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is still beneficial and supported across both their Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores. For those curious about the SMT performance and power efficiency impact, here are some SMT on/off comparison benchmarks using the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" laptop processor.

A one line patch to the Linux kernel is yielding significant performance and power efficiency gains for existing Intel Xeon "Emerald Rapids" server processors on the likes of Ubuntu Linux.

The open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who has been working on supporting Vivante NPU IP within the reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver has been much time recently focused on enabling the Vivante NPU found within the NXP i.MX 8M Plus SoC. While not yet upstreamed, he's been successful in this effort and seeing good performance for object detection with this hardware.

For those that have experienced a buggy AMD HDMI audio experience when using recent versions of the Linux kernel, a fix has been submitted today for Linux 6.11 and in turn for back-porting to stable series in addressing "another long-time regression fix for AMD HDMI."

With the start of a new month comes the latest Steam Survey statistics from Valve for providing interesting software and hardware insight.

Like most modern Intel and AMD laptops, the new ASUS Zenbook S 16 models for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" support ACPI Platform Profiles for allowing the system platform behavior to be modified depending upon whether you are seeking maximum performance, balanced (default), or power savings/efficiency. With the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 testing I have been doing thus far it's been on the default balanced mode (along with other laptops being compared) while in this article is a look at the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performance impact on the ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606WA when trying the other platform profile options.

Microsoft is today promoting the v3.0 release of Azure Linux to stable / general availability status for this Linux distribution formerly known as CBL-Mariner.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has done a wonderful job providing funding to various open-source projects for advancing their work on free software. STF has been a huge success for prominent open-source projects while now it's also preparing a pilot program for STF Fellowships to provide funding to open-source maintainers that may be doing important work across multiple projects.

Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next patches of Direct Rendering Manager updates that will be targeting the Linux 6.12 kernel later in the year. Notable from this pull is introducing a new DRM Power Saving Policy for display connectors and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Intel closed out July by publishing AVX10.2 technical details as part of a now public document. Intel's compiler engineers are also already at work on enabling AVX10.2 in the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.

July was an interesting month both in the open-source software world with the Linux 6.11 merge window and other software milestones while also being eventful on the hardware side with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series launch as the first of the Zen 5 processors. During July on Phoronix were 255 original news articles written by your's truly and another 15 featured articles / multi-page reviews.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has recently begun pushing changes to the Mesa 3D graphics code-base as part of "The Juiciest Refactor Ever". After merging the first of the patches last week, this week has brought more code for this juicy refactoring.

For those intrigued by Ikey Doherty's work in recent times on Serpent OS as a new from-scratch Linux distribution that makes use of lots of tooling, Ikey is kicking off August by releasing the first pre-alpha image of this Linux OS.

GCC 14.2 hit the Internet today as the first stable point release update to the GCC 14 series following the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release from early May.