A lot of AMD GFX12 IP enablement landed in Mesa 24.2-devel over the past week for bringing up the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming RDNA4 graphics.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.10-rc3 as a rather pleasant week for this stage of the kernel cycle.

Arch Linux derivative CachyOS that is optimized for a nice desktop experience and shipping a nice set of performance optimizations/tuning by default is out with its June 2024 refresh.

In addition to debuting their "Peano" LLVM compiler back-end for Ryzen AI NPUs on Friday, AMD also submitted a new batch of feature code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver of new feature code aiming for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

Intel's IGB and IXGBE network drivers within the mainline Linux kernel are being adapted to support firmware updates for the underlying driver. To date such functionality was limited to Intel's out-of-tree versions of these drivers for their higher-end network hardware.

Mold 2.32 is out as the newest feature release for this high speed code linker that rivals LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

There was a very exciting Friday evening code drop out of AMD... They announced a new project called Peano that serves as an open-source LLVM compiler back-end for AMD/Xilinx AI engine processors with a particular focus on the Ryzen AI SOCs with existing Phoenix and Hawk Point hardware as well as the upcoming XDNA2 found with the forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series.

Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications.

GNOME developers continue to be quite busy this summer from enhancing their desktop with more security and accessibility features to further crafting GNOME OS.

Out for testing this weekend is the OBS Studio 30.2 beta software for those into live-streaming their desktop and other screen recording purposes. With the OBS Studio 30.2 release there are video encode improvements for Linux, support for multi-track video streaming, hybrid MP4 output, and other new features.

The KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop is due for release in a little more than one week. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham thinks this is going to be a "good one" with a lot of new features, better performance, and more.

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack.

The patches have been years in the making around AMD SEV-SNP encrypted virtualization and various elements have been upstreamed in prior kernel versions while for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle are finally the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) bits for launching SEV-SNP protected guest virtual machines.

The patches recently covered on Phoronix for up to 162% faster AES-GCM encryption/decryption with modern Intel and AMD processors is now queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle!

SPIR-V used by the likes of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan is a common intermediate representation (IR) / intermediate language for consumption by device drivers. With code now merged into LLVM, AMD has introduced the notion of vendor "flavored" SPIR-V for containing extra information pertinent to the GPU device/driver being targeted.

The second beta is now available for testing of the upcoming Python 3.13 release that is bringing an experimental JIT, a new interactive interpreter, and other big features for this annual Python feature release.

On Thursday the first set of Intel Xe driver feature updates were submitted to DRM-Next of material intended for merging with the Linux 6.11 kernel in July.

Merged to the Linux kernel back in 2018 was an LG Gram laptop driver for supporting various hotkeys and extra functionality of these LG laptops. That driver is now being extended to support the latest LG Gram laptop models.

With this week marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, as part of the commemorative articles this week has been looking at the most popular Linux/open-source news over 20 years. In the piece today is looking back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles on Phoronix since 2004.

It's like magic with one line of code changed in the Linux kernel that Intel is reporting up to 19% performance improvement for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" and up to an 11% improvement in performance per Watt. Or in another EPP mode, the power consumption during video playback can be reduced by 52%!