The x86 platform driver updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.11 merge window. The x86 platform drivers predominantly benefit Intel/AMD laptops on Linux but also some other x86 non-laptop hardware and then more recently also some ARM64 laptop drivers appearing in this area of the kernel.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very popular with the VFX crowd, those relying on the SideFX Houdini 3D animation software are running into a bit of a pickle if trying to use RHEL 9.4. There's a glibc bug causing random crashes for Houdini that Red Hat has been slow to pickup but is now going to be shipped by AlmaLinux early to satisfy VFX users.

Back in early June the KDE Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" were updated. These design principles for KDE software were updated to modern standards, adapt to the latest Qt toolkit behavior, and also making it more inviting to new contributors. Since then the KDE HIG has continued to see more refinements.

Oracle today released the first public beta of their VirtualBox 7.1 virtualization software.

Linux Mint 22 was formally released today as the newest major release of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base while featuring its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment and other software apps.

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.

When it comes to virtualization with the Linux 6.11 kernel, in addition to the latest AMD SEV-SNP code making it upstream, for those making use of VMware virtualization products their initial "VMware Hypercall" API has been merged.

Amazon's Graviton4 server processor that recently went into GA in the AWS cloud is easily the most competitive AArch64 server processor we've seen to date and proving capable of being able to compete with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors across various workloads. Since Graviton4 went GA on AWS earlier this month I've looked at the Graviton4 comparison to other instances at 64 vCPUs and also comparing the Graviton4 96-core metal performance to various Intel, Ampere, and AMD processors. Given the interest in those Graviton4 benchmarks, today's article is another look at Graviton4 looking at the metal performance compared to prior generation Graviton3, Graviton2, and Graviton1 instances for showing just how far Amazon's Graviton processor performance has evolved.

The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 14 as the newest version of this Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE) for developers.

Earlier this month AMD talked more about their Unified AI Software Stack plans for debuting in the coming months to provide a unified software view where AI work can be seamlessly offloaded to Ryzen processors, AMD graphics, or AMD Ryzen AI NPU hardware. Another possible and exciting prospect came to mind when going through the LLVM/Clang 19 changes this week.

The HID subsystem updates recently landed into the mainline Linux 6.11 kernel codebase.

The open-source software pieces have come together where Fedora / Red Hat developers are hoping that for Fedora 41 there can be out-of-the-box support for the web cameras on newer Intel laptops.

Miguel Ojeda has sent out the big Rust pull request for the nearly wrapped up Linux 6.11 merge window. This contains all of the latest Rust programming language infrastructure now ready for the mainline kernel.

For fans of ollama as an open-source means for easily running large language models (LLMs) on your system, ollama v0.3 has been released with support for the newest exciting models.

This weekend the ASUS ROG Ally X began shipping as an upgraded version of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console that launched last year. The ASUS ROG Ally X is still powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC and for the most part similar to the original model but now with 24GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory up from 16GB of LPDDR5-6400, twice as large battery capacity, 1TB of NVMe storage rather than 512GB, improved input controls, improved cooling, and other refinements. But it still is running Microsoft Windows 11 out-of-the-box.

Following LLVM/Clang recently dropping support for AMD 3DNow! instructions, the open-source compiler stack is now pushing the MMX SIMD instruction set to a backseat. Moving forward the MMX intrinsics will not make use of MMX but rather be mapped to SSE2. This is all fine unless you are wanting to use this modern code compiler on an Intel Pentium MMX / Pentium II / Pentium III or AMD K6 / K7 processor from the late 90's.

While we have been super eager for the AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processor launch that's been set for 31 July, AMD has issued a last minute delay. Instead the processors will launch in two stages in August.

One of the newest patch series out from AMD this week is on providing I3C HCI driver support for their MIPI I3C IP block found within their latest processors.

Going back two years has been the effort for adding getrandom() to the vDSO in order to enhance the performance. This work has yielded as much as 15x the performance in showing very fast while being secure user-space RNG needs. A few weeks back Linus Torvalds was unconvinced by adding getrandom() to the vDSO, but after going back through the patches he gave it another go. Today the work has managed to be mainlined for Linux 6.11.

The latest Rust for the Linux kernel work led by Miguel Ojeda is on preparing the Rust kernel code for various CPU security mitigations.