AMD has published AMDVLK 2024.Q2.3 as the newest version of their open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for the Xe2 next-generation graphics to be found with forthcoming Lunar Lake processors and the Battlemage discrete graphics cards.

OpenSUSE has released Leap Micro 6.0 as stable for this community rebranded build of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 6.0. Leap Micro continues to be focused on delivering a very reliable and robust experience for containers and virtual machines.

NVIDIA has upstreamed a patch to the GCC 15 compiler for adding the "-mcpu=grace" option to make it easier to target NVIDIA Grace AArch64 CPU cores from this open-source compiler.

A change proposal has been approved for Fedora 41 to make OpenSSL distrust SHA1 signatures by default.

Engineers at consulting firm Igalia are exploring NUMA emulation for ARM64 (AArch64) due to the potential of "significant" performance uplift as observed on the popular Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer.

With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

When testing Intel's aggressive software Linux optimizations shipped by way of their in-house Clear Linux distribution, I am most often testing it on their high core count Xeon processors with AVX-512... Over the years in dozens of Phoronix articles there have been countless metrics showing off the out-of-the-box performance benefits from leveraging software built for higher x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels, employing compiler-based function multi-versioning, and the other extensive performance tuning carried out by Intel software engineers. But now with the Intel Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" series now being available for these all-E-core server processors, I was curious about quantifying the Clear Linux benefits over the likes of Ubuntu Linux. Here are those benchmarks for those curious about the difference.

Back in May the Raspberry Pi crew announced Raspberry Pi Access as an easy means of remote GUI access to Raspberry Pi single board computers all from a web browser. Today they've announced the latest improvements to Raspberry Pi Connect.

Earlier this month AMD Fast CPPC support was queued into the Linux power management subsystem's "-next" codebase ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle. Additional AMD P-State driver enhancements are now deemed ready and submitted for staging ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off.

The open-source Intel ANV Vulkan driver has recently been seeing improvements around better handling the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

With Fedora's new web-based installer UI being delayed to 2025 with Fedora 42, part of Red Hat's justification for that setback was needing to invest resources first in Fedora 41 by transitioning the OS installer to being a native Wayland application. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on that work as expected to make the Anaconda OS installer a native Wayland application.

OpenShot 3.2 has been released as the latest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editor that is popular on Linux systems.

Related to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz for significantly improving the Mesa glReadPixels performance by more than 100%, the open-source driver developer at Valve has now enabled compute PBO blits within mainline Mesa for the AMD Radeon "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver.

Llamafile has been one of the better new initiatives out of Mozilla in recent years. Llamafile makes it easy to conveniently distribute and run large language models as a single file while supporting both CPU and GPU execution and all-around making AI LLMs much more approachable for end-users. Out today is Llamafile 0.8.7 with more performance optimizations and new features.

A new set of patches are currently being tested for improving task scheduling and in turn performance for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. With the patch also mentioning systems that are hybrid but without SMT, this looks like it may be some early tuning as well for upcoming Intel Lunar Lake processors that lack Hyper Threading.

With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

Qualcomm engineers on Sunday posted patches for enabling the Adreno X1-85 GPU within the MSM DRM driver. The Adreno X1-85 GPU is what's found within the Snapdragon X Elite SoC powering various new Windows ARM laptops although the Linux support continues maturing too for these platforms.

Just a friendly reminder that if you've been procrastinating in migrating past the once-great CentOS Linux 7, there is less than one week to go now until it's officially end-of-life.

Back during the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle support was added for the ASUS ROG Raikiri as a newer gaming controller. Now on its way for landing in Linux 6.10 is support for the ASUS ROG Raikiri Pro.