Linux Kernel Patches To Use AMD INVLPGB Instruction Show Huge Speed-Up
Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 “Milan” launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited… Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice pe … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Patches To Use AMD INVLPGB Instruction Show Huge Speed-Up
Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 “Milan” launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited… Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice pe … ⌘ Read more

Intel To Use Both Family 18 And Family 19 Identification For Upcoming CPUs
Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using … ⌘ Read more

LLVM 20 Merges An Initial Telemetry Framework
Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year’s LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework… ⌘ Read more

LLVM 20 Merges An Initial Telemetry Framework
Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year’s LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework… ⌘ Read more

Linux Driver Posted For The EC Found On Most Snapdragon X1 Laptops
For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there’s a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that’s found on most of the X1 laptop models… ⌘ Read more

SysVinit 3.12 Brings Fixes & Better Documentation For Christmas
For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system… ⌘ Read more

Flatpak XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 Brings USB Portal & Notification v2 Portal
Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs… ⌘ Read more

Darktable 5.0 Released With Many UI/UX Improvements
In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Update Now Uses AutoFDO-Optimized Kernel, Rusticl Driver
The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi HEVC Decoder Driver Posted For Linux Kernel Review
The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers… ⌘ Read more

Curl Drops Support For Hyper Rust HTTP Backend Citing Little Demand
The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code… ⌘ Read more

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 Delivers More Performance Optimizations
AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update… ⌘ Read more

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 Delivers More Performance Optimizations
AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update… ⌘ Read more

GNOME User Sharing Ported From C To Rust, libadwaita Adds Adaptive Preview Mode
It’s not only KDE seeing nice improvements ahead of the holidays but GNOME developers were also busy this week preparing new improvements to their open-source desktop stack. There’s been some rather exciting changes on the GNOME front as we prepare to cap off the year… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.3 Improving Game Controller Joystick Support, Many Fixes
While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 6.3.1 Released With Instinct MI325X Support, ROCm Runfile Installer
Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there’s been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.0-rc3 Released With A 16 Year Old Bug “Fixed”
The third weekly release candidate of Wine 10.0 is now available for testing with another 15 bugs fixed this week… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13-rc4 To Fix A Nasty USB Problem Plaguing The Kernel For A Few Weeks
Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week’s set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month… ⌘ Read more

AMD Launches A YouTube Channel For Developers
If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content… ⌘ Read more

OpenSUSE Announces New “YQPkg” Package Management Tool
The openSUSE project announced today YQPkg as a new package management tool for openSUSE Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.39 Released With Data Control & Workspace Additions
Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat just released Wayland Protocols 1.39 as the latest set of updates to this de facto repository for Wayland protocols… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Based CachyOS Takes The Lead On Intel Arrow Lake
Following the recent Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I wanted to expand the testing to look at how well other Linux distributions as well were performing on this new 24-core Arrow Lake desktop processor. To much surprise Intel’s own Clear Linux distribution didn’t take the top spot this round but as a surprising upset the Arch Linux based CachyOS distribution outperformed Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Fedora Worksta … ⌘ Read more

DXVK 2.5.2 Brings Fixes & Optimizations For Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 Atop Vulkan
DXVK 2.5.2 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source software implementing the Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 APIs atop Vulkan for powering Windows games on Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) as well as being used by other software and some games directly… ⌘ Read more

Liquorix vs. Linux 6.12 Upstream Kernel Performance Across Many Workloads
A Phoronix Premium subscriber a while back requested some fresh benchmarks of how the Liquorix downstream of the Linux kernel is comparing against the latest upstream kernel… Here are some benchmarks looking at the Liquorix flavor of the Linux kernel compared to upstream Linux 6.12… ⌘ Read more

Ryzen AI NPU6 Support Added To AMDXDNA Driver For Linux 6.14 Debut
The latest round of drm-misc-next material was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Weighted Interleave Auto-Tuning Being Worked On For Linux
Joshua Hahn has posted the latest “request for comments” draft working on weightedd interleave auto-tuning for the linux kernel in order to better enhance the performance characteristics of primarily Linux servers with multiple memory nodes… ⌘ Read more

OpenMoonRay 1.7 Brings More NVIDIA GPU Acceleration, Additional Features
In early 2023 DreamWorks open-sourced their MoonRay renderer as OpenMoonRay. Since then they have continued advancing this award-winning production MCRT renderer. Before closing out 2024 they have now released OpenMoonRay 1.7… ⌘ Read more

Intel & Canonical Collaborate On Graphics Preview Stack For Ubuntu 24.10
Intel and Canonical have been collaborating to provide an early “Graphics Preview” stack for Ubuntu 24.10 to provide better support for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 2 “Lunar Lake” and Intel Arc B-Series “Battlemage” graphics… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 Is A Great Holiday Gift For AMD Systems With Many New Features
Of the many new features in Linux 6.13 for that kernel debuting by late January, AMD customers once again have a lot to look forward to from new Zen 5 features being enabled to additional performance optimizations. Here is a look at some of the most exciting new AMD features and improvements with this first major Linux kernel release coming for 2025… ⌘ Read more

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance
One of the areas for benchmarking exploration that I had been meaning to dive into since the launch of the Intel Arrow Lake processors back in October was checking out the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for the new Core Ultra 9 285K flagship processor. Particularly with the mix of P and E cores I was curious for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux performance capabilities. With recently carrying out a Windows 11 inst … ⌘ Read more

Fish Shell 4.0 Beta Released With C++ Code Ported To Rust
The Fish Shell as the interactive, user-friendly command line shell debuted its 4.0 beta release ahead of the holidays. Notably in this release is porting the C++ code over to the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

Fish Shell 4.0 Beta Released With C++ Code Ported To Rust
The Fish Shell as the interactive, user-friendly command line shell debuted its 4.0 beta release ahead of the holidays. Notably in this release is porting the C++ code over to the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux 10 Beta Running Great With Nice Performance As Free/Community Alternative To RHEL 10
Along with the recent release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta, the AlmaLinux crew released their AlmaLinux 10 beta as the latest wares for this popular community/free alternative to upstream RHEL. I’ve been running some early benchmarks and testing on this AlmaLinux 10.0 Beta “Purple Lion” release and it’s running well with performance right inline with upstream RHEL 10 Beta. ⌘ Read more

AMD Updates Linux Patches For L3 Smart Data Cache Injection SDCIAE Handling
Back in August AMD posted Linux patches for L3 Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement (SDCIAE). That L3 Smart Data Cache Injection (SDCI) work was since announced as part of the AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors. A second iteration of those SDCIAE were posted this week in working to get this functionality enabled for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 To Support Realtek RTL8125D Rev B 2.5G Ethernet ASIC
The Linux kernel already supports the Realtek RTL8125D 2.5G Ethernet controller but additional handling is required to enable the revision B variant of this chipset, which will be coming in the next kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Cloud Hypervisor 43 Brings Live Migration Over TCP, Performance Improvements
Cloud Hypervisor 43 is out as the newest version of this Intel-backed, Rust-based open-source VMM project that now routinely sees contributions from Microsoft, Arm, Rivos, Tencent, and other organizations… ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 10.1 Released With Support For More Network Hardware, Better Ampere Altra Support
Building off the release of NetBSD 10.0 that arrived for Easter this year and incorporated a half-decade of work, NetBSD 10.1 is out right before Christmas as the first update to this BSD operating system series… ⌘ Read more

AMD Preps Many Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 6.14, DRM Panic Support
AMD today sent out a first batch of “new stuff” feature patches to DRM-Next of new code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of material for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

MemryX MX3 M.2 Module Delivers Nice AI Performance With A Great Software Experience
While there are a growing number of startups offering AI accelerators, many of them are more or less vaporware and the other big challenge even among those actually shipping products is their software stacks are very premature or an outright heaping mess. Surprisingly there’s a company known as MemryX that was started out of the University of Michigan AI research that is both shipping actual hardware – and at a decent price point – and w … ⌘ Read more

UEFI 2.11 Released With PI 1.9 Bringing LoongArch & RNG Additions
On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification… ⌘ Read more

SilverStone XED120S-WS Offers Mega Cooling For 4U Intel/AMD Workstations & Servers
A few weeks back I reviewed the SilverStone XE360-SP5 and XE04-SP5 cooling solutions catering to AMD EPYC 9004/9005 Socket SP5 processors. These coolers worked well with 400 Watt EPYC processors and especially the XE360-SP5 all-in-one liquid cooling was very performant and practical with today’s server CPU TDPs ever increasing. After that SilverStone mentioned to me they had a new heatsink that could run up to 13 degrees cooler tha … ⌘ Read more

EROFS Switches To Buffered I/O For File-Backed Mounts To Speed-Up Container Start Times
Back for the Linux 6.12 kernel EROFS introduced support for file-backed mounts to help with container and sandboxing use-cases. As part of the EROFS “fixes” merged yesterday to the Linux 6.13 kernel, file-backed mounts are now using buffered I/O by default to speed-up container start times… ⌘ Read more

Linux Looks To Drop Support For IBM Cell Blade Servers
The latest house cleaning of the Linux kernel is looking to drop support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those platforms from the better part of two decades ago with Cell BE processors that also had worked their way into some supercomputers at the time… ⌘ Read more

Intel Linux Graphics Driver To Do A Better Job Of Keeping Track Of Its Engine Busyness
A drm-intel-gt-next pull request was sent in today to DRM-Next of the latest batch of Intel kernel graphics driver updates destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle… ⌘ Read more

SilverStone XED120S-WS Offers Mega Cooling For 4U Intel/AMD Workstations & Servers
A few weeks back I reviewed the SilverStone XE360-SP5 and XE04-SP5 cooling solutions catering to AMD EPYC 9004/9005 Socket SP5 processors. These coolers worked well with 400 Watt EPYC processors and especially the XE360-SP5 all-in-one liquid cooling was very performant and practical with today’s server CPU TDPs ever increasing. After that SilverStone mentioned to me they had a new heatsink that could run up to 13 degrees cooler tha … ⌘ Read more

Lenovo Legion Linux Driver Posted For Handling Power/Performance Settings
A patch posted on Tuesday for the Linux kernel would introduce new Lenovo Legion WMI driver options for supporting Lenovo Legion laptops as well as the Legion Go handheld gaming console to support different power/performance settings… ⌘ Read more

AOMP 20.0-1 GPU Compiler Rebased Against ROCm 6.3, Brings SPIR-V JIT Offloading
AOMP 20.0-1 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this LLVM/Clang downstream focused on shipping the latest AMD patches around Radeon/Instinct OpenMP accelerator offload support… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patched For Unsafe Xen Behavior Around CPU Speculative Attack Protections
Merged today to the Linux kernel are fixes for two vulnerabilities with the Xen hypervisor. One of them concerns a malicious network backend being able to crash a guest after a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest. The other more pressing issue addressed is a Xen hypercall page being unsafe against speculative CPU attacks… ⌘ Read more

System76 Releases Updated AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop
System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin “Pang15” laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop… ⌘ Read more