Phoronix

Earlier this year Google announced Axion as their first Arm-based CPU for the Google Cloud. Today already they are taking Axion to general availability with the new C4A instances. These new C4A instances are advertised as offering up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy efficiency than their current generation x86 instance types. In this article are some of the first public independent performance benchmarks of the Google Axion CPU along with comparing to existing GCE Arm and x86_64 instance types.

Enterprise security firm Edera today is announcing OpenPaX that they promoted in their advance press notice as a "new open-source alternative to GrSecurity." GrSecurity being the firm focused on providing out-of-tree Linux kernel patches focused in the name of security enhancements. With OpenPaX they are open-source and publicly available kernel patch for mitigating common memory safety errors and other system hardening...

DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver used by all modern AMD Radeon graphics hardware has landed support in Mesa 24.3 for async VCE/UVD video operations to enhance the performance with the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

Support for making use of Vulkan with VirtIO-GPU while using QEMU could very soon be upstream...

Wasmer 5.0 is now available as the latest major update to this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime focused on being able to allow developers to write "universal apps" that will run anywhere thanks to the power and versatility of WebAssembly...

Shotcut 24.10 is now available as the latest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT framework, Qt6, FFmpeg, SDL, and other software components...

Intel off their typical second Tuesday of the month patch regiment today posted new CPU microcode just for 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" and 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors for Linux systems. Notable with the updated Raptor Lake CPU microcode is the internal voltage handling fix for that well known problem plaguing many Raptor Lake owners plus two other fixes...

Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response...

For years there have been statements about how over half of the VMs running within the Microsoft Azure public cloud are Linux-based... In a new blog post today is the first time I am seeing Microsoft cite now "over 60%" Linux marketshare on Microsoft's cloud...

CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation...

Earlier this year Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 memory for AMD and Intel desktops and catering to gamers. With the newest AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Arrow Lake) processors out there and enjoying even faster memory, today Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 memory kits for greater performance. In advance of today's launch I have been testing the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 32GB Kit (16GBx2) UDIMM Kit (CP2K16G64C38U5B) and have some initial benchmarks to share from the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake desktop.

Fedora 41 is ready for release today as a wonderful update to this leading edge Linux distribution...

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle will be adding RISC-V support for user-space pointer masking and tagged address ABI...

A set of patches are currently under review on the Linux kernel mailing list for helping to further lower idle power use for Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors...

Thanks to Valve's Linux graphics team, VK_EXT_device_generated_commands is now supported by the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release...

Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock...

David Rosca working for AMD has continued to improve their open-source video acceleration support within Mesa. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 is the code within the Gallium3D video acceleration front-end and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for handling AV1 still picture encode...

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii is out with an insightful blog post today on how XWayland window resizing has been enhanced for Plasma 6.3 so that resizing X11 clients will now appear much more polished than the status quo...

Following last week's launch testing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K Arrow Lake desktop processors, the next area I've been exploring deeper has been the DDR5 memory performance including with CUDIMMs. Here's a closer look at the Core Ultra 9 285K performance under Linux while testing several different sets of memory and running Ubuntu 24.10.