Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning.

Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series.

Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems.

Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today allow for inline tail support within the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). This inline tail support allows for saving space when storing many small files and with reduced I/O can lead to faster data copy times.

Power Profiles Daemon as the UPower project to make Linux laptop/system power profile handling via D-Bus is out with a new release. This is the Linux/open-source solution for exposing of power profiles to the Linux desktop and better managing the system state between power-saver / balanced / performance modes and other options.

Coreboot 24.08 debuted on Monday night as the newest feature release for this open-source system firmware project that allows replacing the proprietary BIOS/firmware on many different platforms. With Coreboot 24.08 comes more than 900 patches from 130+ developers in continuing to support new motherboards and making other improvements.

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images.

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning.

The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years.

One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced.

Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack used on both Windows and Linux platforms. Notable with the Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 is having initial Xe2 support.

Ahead of this week's GNOME 47 release candidate announcement the "47.rc" versions of the GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday.

Kdenlive as the KDE-aligned non-linear open-source video editing application is out with its newest feature release.

Armbian 24.8 has been released as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that began with a focus on ARM boards but has also expanded to include RISC-V as well as traditional x86_64 Intel/AMD systems too.

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%.

Like with last week's Linux 6.11-rc5 release, Linux 6.11-rc6 is out a half-day early due to Linus Torvalds' ongoing foreign travels. Linux 6.11-rc6 brings many more fixes to this kernel that will debut as stable in mid-September,

August was a very busy month with the first AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processors going on sale, finally having AmpereOne 192-core Arm processors in the lab, Linux kernel development continuing to advance at a brisk pace, and a variety of other interesting software and hardware milestones. On Phoronix for the month were 213 original news articles authored by me as well as another 20 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles.

Intel has released a new version of their open-source Video Processing Library (VPL) for hardware-accelerated video encode / decode / processing across Intel graphics hardware.

Arm engineer Mihail Atanassov proposed a set of "request for comments" patches this week for adding user submission support to the Panthor DRM driver that is used for handling newer Arm Mali graphics under Linux. This would allow user-space more easily to submit work directly to the GPU hardware without kernel intervention for better performance and management capabilities.