Canonical's Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop, Oliver Smith, has shared some early roadmap plans for the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle.

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced.

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged.

The Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found in various Xeon SKUs since Sapphire Rapids can be of big benefit to Linux servers/workstations with a Linux kernel patch series that has been in the works to provide Zswap IAA compress batching.

The NVIDIA MLX5 driver for NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 network adapters is preparing to introduce a new Data Direct Placement "DDP" feature with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window.

Xcompmgr 1.1.10 was released yesterday as the newest update to this basic X11 compositor providing "eye candy" effects for classic X.Org usage.

As covered last week Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe has been taking a fresh pursuit of uncached buffered I/O for Linux. This "RWF_UNCACHED" work was originally started back in 2019 while a renewed effort around it is showing ~65% faster read/write performance and so far has been extended to work across EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems.

The AlmaLinux operating system project that was started from the fallout of the RHEL/CentOS development shift several years ago has once again courted AMD as a sponsorship of this community enterprise Linux operating system.

The "intel_idle" driver provides CPU idle time management for Intel processors on Linux for helping to put the processor into low-power states in conjunction with the MWAIT instruction. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the Granite Rapids D support for the Intel Idle driver is set to be merged.

It's the second Tuesday of the month and this Patch Tuesday brings new CPU microcode for mitigating the latest Intel processor security vulnerabilities and updates to some previously disclosed issues.

One of the many changes to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is the AMD P-State driver to be used by default with the new EPYC 9005 series processors. While AMD Ryzen CPUs for a while now have been defaulting to the modern AMD P-State driver that makes use of ACPI CPPC platform support for allowing better power efficiency, AMD EPYC CPUs have kept to using the generic ACPI CPUFreq frequency scaling driver. But now AMD engineers have deemed amd_pstate ready for use with EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs and will be the default choice moving forward. Here is more information and power/performance benchmarks for this shift while testing using the EPYC 9755 processors.

Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops.

Red Hat announced today they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI software company behind the likes of DeepSparse and nm-vllm.

As part of the transition to eventually drop the long dormant Clover OpenCL state tracker from Mesa's Gallium3D codebase in favor of the modern OpenCL Rusticl Rust-written driver, Mesa 25.0 has ended Clover support for NIR-based drivers.

Yesterday brought the eighth and ninth iteration of the AMD XDNA Linux kernel driver posted for review for enabling the Ryzen AI branded NPUs found in their recent SoCs.

Red Hat in cooperation with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM has been developing the Climatik open-source project as a means of power capping AI use within the data center for better energy efficiency and sustainability.

Merged today for the upcoming GCC 15 stable release is a new "X86_TUNE_AVX512_TWO_EPILOGUES" tuning optimization that is enabled by default for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors.

DXVK 2.5 was just released as the newest version of this open-source project implementing Direct3D APIs atop the Vulkan API for better handling of Windows games on Linux systems as used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software.

Memtest86+ 7.0 debuted back in January while now as we approach the end of 2024, Memtest86+ 7.20 is now available as the latest significant update to this open-source memory tester commonly used on Intel and AMD systems.