KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development recap of all the interesting Plasma desktop changes to have landed over the past week.

Microsoft overnight released the newest version of their Azure Linux 3.0 in-house Linux distribution that is used by a variety of internal services at the company as well as external customers.

The belated first release candidate of Mesa 24.3 is now available for testing of the upgraded OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers commonly used on Linux systems and elsewhere.

Following a one week delay, Wine 9.21 has been released as the latest development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems. We are also closing in on the approaching Wine 10.0 stable release.

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release as a big step forward for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

A patch is working its way to the mainline Linux kernel for addressing an annoyance affecting new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops.

Last week Google announced the general availability of their C4A instances powered by their in-house Axion processors. I delivered launch-day benchmarks looking at the Google Axion CPU performance with the C4A instances compared to other Google Cloud instance types powered by Ampere Altra and Intel Xeon. In this article is a look at how the Google Axion processor performance compares to the competing Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processor.

Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an "Edition" status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.

Intel's Linux kernel test robot has reported a 3888.9% performance improvement in the mainline Linux kernel as of this past week.

Mesa 24.3 feature development is now over and Mesa 25.0 has entered development with Mesa Git.

As the latest on the compiler enablement front for Intel's next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids processors, LLVM Git has merged support for the AMX-AVX512 instructions for next spring's Clang 20 compiler release.

A patch posted on Thursday by one of Intel's long-time Linux kernel engineers would begin treating outdated Intel CPU microcode as a security vulnerability that would be reported to user-space via the existing sysfs vulnerabilities reporting.

With the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" testing over the past month since launch I have looked at how well the new EPYC Turin CPUs compete against Intel Xeon, how Turin Dense dominates in performance and power efficiency to AmpereOne at 192 cores, and the generational uplift from EPYC Genoa to Turin at the same core counts, among other Turin performance benchmark tests. Up for comparison today is a look at how the NVIDIA Grace CPU performance within the GH200 Superchip compares to the AMD EPYC Turin processors.

Sent out yesterday was an AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver pull request with the last few feature additions and patches slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel merge window. Alongside other AMD kernel graphics driver updates, the new driver code with Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards will finally allow controlling the zero RPM fan feature under Linux.

The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has remained very active implementing more features and fixes as we approach the end of 2024.

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

Yet another feature merging into Mesa 24.3 with the code branching (feature freeze) yet to take place is Vulkan FIFO presentation mode support under Wayland.

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.

AMD ROCm 6.2.4 is out today as the newest point release for this Radeon and Instinct open-source GPU compute stack.