Phoronix

AMD originally released a ROCm 7.0 preview build back in May as it works to align their HIP API more closely with NVIDIA's CUDA. Last month was the big ROCm 7.0 preview announcement form AMD's Advancing AI Day in San Jose while this week is another new 7.0 preview build focused on further testing of the ROCm 7.0 HIP changes...

Code compilers like the prominent GCC and LLVM/Clang have been advertising support for the Cache Line Demote "CLDEMOTE" instruction on Arrow Lake processors as well as Lunar Lake and upcoming Panther Lake hybrid processors. Intel engineers added that compiler plumbing but was inaccurate and inadvertently missed until now with this prominent instruction not being supported there...

Following last week's release of OpenZFS 2.2.8, OpenZFS 2.3.3 is now available as the newest point release of this current stable series for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

While the results shouldn't be too surprising given the recent AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Windows 11 vs. Linux testing, when the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by the step-down AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 arrived with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, I also took the opportunity to run some Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks on that AMD Strix Halo SoC.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 2.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a nice Linux system/device firmware updating experience...

Sent out today was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes for consisting of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) core updates as well as changes to the smaller display/graphics kernel drivers plus the growing work around accelerator "accel" drivers within the kernel. Intel NPU accelerator driver changes stand out for this week's pull request ahead of Linux 6.17...

OpenBLAS 0.3.30 released this morning as the newest version of this optimized BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library for multiple CPU architectures...

Debian tag2upload reached an open beta state for allowing Debian developers and maintainers to upload by simply using the git-debpush script for pushing a signed Git tag...

Intel open-source software driver engineers have begun sending in their new kernel graphics driver feature pulls to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window coming up by early August. There is some new feature work included as part of Intel's pull requests for the weeks along with more PCI device IDs being introduced, bug fixes, and other code refactoring...

Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.4 on Wednesday as the latest bi-weekly point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems...

The first beta release of the Godot 4.5 open-source game engine is now available for testing. Notable for Linux users is the continued quest toward Wayland support at parity to X11...

Going on for several months now has been an effort to wire up cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for the Linux kernel for helping out task placement for processors with multiple cache domains such as modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC and Intel Xeon platforms. This cache-aware scheduling has shown much potential for Linux with further enhancing performance on today's interesting CPUs. Out today is the third iteration of cache-aware scheduling with an important rework...

The Zed Editor remains a popular code editor written in the Rust programming language and providing modern features for this project started by former Atom developers. One of the long sought features for Zed has been having built-in debugger capabilities and that work has finally been merged to the project's codebase...

Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday...

Back in February the Framework Laptop 12 was announced as the company's first 2-in-1 convertible laptop while still being well-built and upgrade-friendly/modular as we have come to enjoy out of their various Linux-friendly laptops. Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework Laptop 12 and thus can share our initial impressions on this Intel-powered 12-inch laptop.

The Servo browser engine project born out of Mozilla as an early Rust project and now advanced by open-source developers from various firms continues moving forward. Servo has finally scratched animated GIF support off its TODO list among other features...

AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future...

Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family...

The Arch Linux project announced this week they are working to transition their Wine and Wine-Staging packages over to pure WoW64 builds. This "Windows on Windows 64-bit" allows for 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux platforms without needing 32-bit software libraries/prefixes present and overall a big architectural win...

Alienware G-Mode / Game Shift is a feature designed to "enhance gaming performance" on select Dell/Alienware laptops with the press of a key. But at least under Linux with select laptop models it can actually regress performance compared to just running the laptop in the "performance" platform profile...