Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu desktop provided an update around recent efforts on Ubuntu 24.10.

With all of my AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X Linux benchmarking and Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X reviews as well, many have wondered if AMD Zen 5 is just really great on Linux, if Windows 11 is in particularly poor shape for these new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, if it's just the different/diverse benchmarks being run, or simply why are these new desktop CPUs running so well on Linux but less so with Windows?

The Cloud Hypervisor open-source project that serves as a Rust-written VMM focused on security and started by Intel but now backed by a multitude of vendors is out with its newest feature release. Cloud Hypervisor 41 is the new feature release worked on by engineers at Intel, Google, Microsoft, Rivos, Tencent, Ant Group, and others for this cloud and security minded virtual machine monitor.

Ahead of the now in-place Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the Ubuntu GNOME X.Org session support was split off into its own separate binary Debian package from the main (default) Wayland session handling.

For improving the open-source graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno 700 series hardware such as what's found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and other SoCs, preemption support is finally being tackled.

The Vulkan Video support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver continues to be improved upon. The newest addition now found in the code for Mesa 24.3 is enabling 12-bit AV1 content accelerated decoding.

Sent out today was the latest round of DRM-Misc-Next patches to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening up in mid-September. For those using ARM single board computers with a Rockchip SoC and have been struggling for 4K support over HDMI, the Rockchip updates in Linux 6.12 should excite you.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Ramalama as a new open-source project that hopes to "make AI boring" by this inferencing tool striving for simplicity so users can quickly and easily deploy AI workloads without much fuss.

With the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux review out of the way yesterday, today's benchmarking of the Ryzen 9000 series is looking closely at the AVX-512 performance impact. With the Ryzen 9000 series the Zen 5 cores have a full 512-bit data-path compared to the "double pumped" 256-bit data path found in the Zen 4 processors as well as the Strix Point SKUs. In this article is an AVX-512 enabled versus disabled comparison for not only the Ryzen 9 9950X but also the prior generation Ryzen 9 7950X and looking too at the CPU power use, thermals, and peak frequency when engaging a variety of AVX-512 workloads.

After talking about AmpereOne for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure since last year, earlier this month Oracle finally announced general availability on their OCI Ampere A2 instances for tapping into these latest-generation Ampere Computing AArch64 server processors in the public cloud. Here's a brief look at the OCI Ampere A2 performance with AmpereOne compared to their prior A1 instances powered by Ampere Altra.

A set of patches posted today on the AMD graphics driver mailing list begin implementing support for process isolation within the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Intel engineers on Wednesday released the Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release for this for this MIT-licensed user-space mode driver support for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found since the Core Ultra Series 1 "Meteor Lake" SoCs and currently supporting the upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors as well. This Intel Linux NPU Driver in user-space interfaces with their iVPU kernel accelerator driver for making a nice open-source and upstream NPU software stack on Linux systems.

For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical released Netplan 1.0 as their declarative network configuration software spanning now from servers to desktops. In time for Ubuntu 24.10 due out in two months, Netplan 1.1 has been released as the next iteration of this Linux networking configuration software from Canonical.

Mesa 24.2 is out today as stable for this quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and other platforms.

Gentoo Linux was one of the last few Linux distributions continuing to maintain Itanium (IA-64) architecture builds but that is now being phased out for those discontinued Intel processors.

SiFive today lifted the lid on the P870-D, its new RISC-V processor dor data center and AI workloads. The P870-D is designed to scale up to 256 cores while supporting modern features like CXL and other AI/HPC minded features.

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

Next month AMD will be providing an update on their long-term strategy for open-source firmware. Central to their open-source firmware plans is their OpenSIL effort that remains in development for eventually replacing AGESA on future generations of Ryzen and EPYC platforms.

A new driver has been posted for better supporting the Corsair VOID gaming headsets under Linux.

While Linus Torvalds called for including the "sched_ext" extensible scheduler in Linux 6.11, he ultimately decided not to merge it for Linux 6.11 after some technical issues were raised on the Linux kernel mailing list.