Last year Canonical delivered an Intel TDX "tech preview" for Ubuntu 23.10 to experiment with using Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) found on the latest Xeon server processors. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS they began shipping a formal TDX software stack and now have rolled out an update to that software stack as a stable release update.

Following Canonical's decision to enable frame pointers by default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then they ended up adding a number of performance tools to ship by default with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, for Ubuntu 24.10 a late change is adding another tool to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop: Sysprof.

Thanks to the work of Valve Linux graphics driver developer Samuel Pitoiset, the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now the first within Mesa supporting the new Vulkan pipeline binary extension.

The Intel Arrow Lake Linux graphics driver support appears largely wrapped up following a patch for properly handling the necessary GSC firmware requirements and building off all the existing Meteor Lake Arc Graphics driver code paths. There are a number of Arrow Lake PCI device IDs already present for the graphics while a new one is being added now to the kernel drivers.

Some long-rotting code in Mesa has been flushed out today... Mesa 24.3 is now 11.6k lines of code lighter after removing support for the OpenMAX (OMX) API that was implemented as a Gallium3D state tracker long ago and hasn't seen any activity in recent years and the upstream OpenMAX standards work halted more than one decade ago.

Last month I wrote about Intel Linux engineers working on a new Efficiency Latency Control feature for their uncore driver. This ELC option allows for adjusting the behavior of the Intel uncore for efficiency versus latency characteristics. Those Intel ELC patches to the TPMI uncore driver are now queued up for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle.

Excitement is building that the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support might finally be ready for the mainline kernel as soon as the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. It will be interesting to see if that long-awaited day finally comes this month but recently noted patches have now been queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/rt" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window.

With the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server that's in the lab for a few weeks for reviewing the AmpereOne A192-32X and delivering the first independent benchmarks of the AmpereOne 192-core AArch64 server processor, the AmpereOne benchmarks to date have been comparing to other Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. But if looking up to the cloud is the closest AArch64 server competition to AmpereOne there is: Amazon's Graviton4. In today's article ia showdown looking at how AmpereOne and AWS Graviton4 compete at 192 cores for ARM 64-bit server performance.

Redox OS 0.9 has been released today as a big update to this from-scratch Rust-written open-source operating system.

Earlier this summer KDE began soliciting ideas for what their goals should be over the next 2~3 years. This weekend at their annual Akademy KDE developer conference their next round of goals were solidified.

While Intel Lunar Lake is only beginning to ship later this month, Intel Linux engineers have already begun work on enabling its successor: Panther Lake. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be more early enablement work on Intel Panther Lake, presumably what will be the Core Ultra 300 series.

OpenJPH v0.16 has been released as the newest version of this open-source implementation of High-Throughput JPEG2000 (HTJK), also known as JPH / JPEG2000 Part 15. With this new release comes faster performance thanks to making use of Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to complement its existing AVX-512 code.

Miracle-WM 0.3.5 was released this weekend as the newest step forward for this Mir-based window manager / Wayland compositor developed by a Canonical engineer. Miracle-WM continues being polished ahead of the upcoming Fedora Miracle Spin debuting as part of Fedora 41.

Hyprland 0.43 is out as the newest version of this independent, very customizable Wayland compositor focused on providing a dynamic tiling experience.

The GNOME 47 release candidate was announced a short time ago in preparing for the stable GNOME 47 stable desktop coming up.

Following recent international travels, Linus Torvalds is back to his usual late Sunday Linux kernel release regiment. Linux 6.11-rc7 was released a few minutes ago as Linux 6.11 approaches the finish line.

While Windows gamers seem mixed over the AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, for creator, scientific / HPC, code development, and many other technical computing areas I remain very impressed by the Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) series desktop processors more than one month into constant testing with these Granite Ridge chips. One of the areas I hadn't explored until now but made me curious given the mixed messaging around gaming was how well workstation graphics workloads were performing with the new processors. For this brief weekend article is a look at the workstation graphics performance between the Ryzen 9 9950X and former Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D processors.

The work written about earlier this year on New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle as the patches have now been queued into the power management subsystem's "-next" branch. This latest Intel Core hybrid handling work is particularly focused on hybrid P/E-core processors without SMT / Hyper Threading, such as found with the upcoming Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors.

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.

While RISC-V processors don't need to worry about Meltdown and Spectre or have any other severe CPU vulnerabilities at the moment, with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the RISC-V code is set to enable the generic CPU vulnerabilities support.