Nice File Performance Optimizations Coming With Linux 6.13
In addition to the pull requests managed by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner for VFS untorn writes for atomic writes with XFS and EXT4, Tmpfs case insensitive file/folder support, new Rust file abstractions, and the renewed multi-grain timestamps work, another interesting Linux 6.13 pull submitted by Brauner revolves around VFS file enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Faster Raspberry Pi Graphics & Intel Xe3 Enablement Starts With Linux 6.13 DRM Changes
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 merge window in bringing many updates to the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers as well as the accelerator subsystem… ⌘ Read more

ReiserFS Has Been Deleted From The Linux Kernel
Linus Torvalds just merged the change to the Linux 6.13 kernel that goes ahead and deletes the ReiserFS file-system from the source tree. Removing ReiserFS from the Linux tree lightens the kernel by 32.8k lines of code… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.3 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 24.3 has managed to make it out today, one week ahead of the previous release plans due to the lack of any major blocker bugs appearing. Mesa 24.3 has a lot of new feature work on the contained open-source Vulkan drivers as well as evolutionary improvements to their OpenGL drivers and other user-space 3D driver code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 SoC Updates Land With Initial Support For Many Older Apple Devices
The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support… ⌘ Read more

Zrythm 1.0 Released For Powerful Open-Source Digital Audio Workstation
Zrythm 1.0 released today as a big milestone for this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software that caters from professional users down to beginners… ⌘ Read more

Khronos Announces Slang Initiative From Open-Source NVIDIA Code
On top of an exciting Vulkan spec update out today, The Khronos Group has announced the Slang Initiative based on NVIDIA’s open-source Slang compiler code… ⌘ Read more

VKD3D 1.14 Released With Initial Metal Shading Language Output
Ahead of the upcoming freeze for Wine 10.0, VKD3D 1.14 is now available for this prominent Wine component that allows Direct3D 12 to be implemented over the Vulkan API for enhancing Windows games/apps running on Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 EDAC Preps For Panther Lake H & Missing Support For Old Kabylake S CPUs
The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates landed this week for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel merge window… ⌘ Read more

PHP 8.4 Released With Property Hooks, Lazy Objects & Other New Features
PHP 8.4 is out today as the newest annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.3.302 Published With AV1 Encode & NVIDIA Display Stereo Extensions
Vulkan 1.3.302 was published this morning with a handful of new extensions, including AV1 encode support for Vulkan Video… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Changes Rejected Reportedly Due To CoC, Kernel Future “Uncertain”
While the Bcachefs feature changes for Linux 6.13 were already submitted even before the Linux 6.12 stable kernel was released, merging these changes are supposedly on hold due to the kernel’s Code of Conduct (CoC) board… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 Adds Support For Ultra Capacity SD Cards “SDUC” For 2TB To 128TB Storage
Linux 6.13 has merged support for the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity “SDUC” standard for 2TB to 128TB storage capacity SD cards… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 “MM” Patches Bring Some Enticing Performance Optimizations
Andrew Morton on Monday submitted all the memory management “MM” related patches for the Linux 6.13 merge window. As usual there’s a lot of interesting performance optimizations and other low-level refinements… ⌘ Read more

Many Networking Changes In Linux 6.13 - One Line Of Code Helping WireGuard Performance
The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements… ⌘ Read more

8 vs. 12 Channel DDR5-6000 Memory Performance With AMD 5th Gen EPYC
As I wrote about last week within the Supermicro H13SSL-N EPYC Turin motherboard review, one of the factors leading me to purchasing that EPYC 9005 series motherboard was that this board offered support for full 12 channel DDR5-6000 memory performance compared to some of the other lower-cost Socket SP5 motherboards offering just 8 memory channels. For those wanting to quantify the performance difference between eight and twelve memory channels wi … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Camera Front End “CFE” Video Capture With Linux 6.13
Following the initial Raspberry Pi 5 upstream support in Linux 6.12 providing basic support, an exciting Raspberry Pi addition with the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is introducing a Raspberry Pi Camera Front-End “CFE” driver… ⌘ Read more

Many AMD CPU Feature Additions Land In Linux 6.13
The in-development Linux 6.13 kernel is bringing a lot of exciting improvements for AMD Linux customers… ⌘ Read more

OpenVINO 2024.5 Released With More Intel Optimizations, Better LLM/GenAI Coverage
Intel’s open-source software developers released today OpenVINO 2024.5 as the newest major feature release for this cross-platform AI toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Faster CRC32C & AEGIS-128 Crypto Performance On Linux 6.13 With Intel/AMD CPUs
The crypto subsystem updates were merged yesterday for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel. Among other crypto improvements are new optimizations for some algorithms when running on Intel and AMD x86_64 processors… ⌘ Read more

Multigrain Timestamps Try Again For Linux 6.13 - Now With Less Performance Impact
Merged last year for Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps to address the current coarse-grained timestamps when updating creation time and modification time that a lot of I/O activity can happen in the once-per-jiffy timestamp. Just a few weeks in the Linux 6.6 kernel, multi-grain timestamps were removed due to bugs. The multigrain code went back to be reworked and now just over one year later the code has been re-merged … ⌘ Read more

Corsair Void Headset & Kysona M600 Lightweight Gaming Mouse Support In Linux 6.13
The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Lazy Preemption Merged Along With Other Scheduler Improvements For Linux 6.13
All of the scheduler feature changes were merged today for the Linux 6.13 kernel, including the introduction of the lazy preemption model… ⌘ Read more

FLTK 1.4 Released With Wayland & HiDPI Display Support
FLTK 1.4 is out as the newest version of the Fast Light Toolkit that has been around since the late 90’s… ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patch Lets You Force CPU Bugs/Mitigations Even When Not Vulnerable
While most users frown upon the increasing number of CPU security mitigations in part due to the additional overhead commonly introduced, a new Linux kernel patch by a Google engineer would allow users/developers to opt-in to forcing CPU bugs and their mitigations even if the system in use isn’t known to be vulnerable… ⌘ Read more

Blender 4.3 Released With AMD HIP-RT Ray-Tracing On Linux, Experimental Vulkan Backend
Blender 4.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

FreeCAD 1.0 Released With UI/UX Improvements, New Materials System
FreeCAD 1.0 was just released as a major update to this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D parametric modeler software… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 PM Switches EPYC Turin To AMD P-State, More Aggressive Default For Intel GNR
The power management subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly opened Linux 6.13 merge window. As covered within individual articles over the past few weeks, the Linux 6.13 power management updates include some notable changes for both AMD and Intel systems… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat & Microsoft Bringing RHEL To WSL
The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft’s blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux… Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13 Is Quickly Approaching - Desktop Artwork Voting Now Underway
The Debian 13 “Trixie” release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13 Is Quickly Approaching - Desktop Artwork Voting Now Underway
The Debian 13 “Trixie” release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching… ⌘ Read more

MiTAC Releases AMD openSIL Based Open-Source Firmware For Their Capri2 EPYC Server
Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD’s in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization… ⌘ Read more

Intel SNC6 Sub-NUMA Clustering Support With Linux 6.13
A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux Working To Affirm Its Package Sources Under A BSD Zero Clause License
Arch Linux package sources with its PKGBUILD files and similar have lacked carrying a clear license. Arch Linux developers have been working to come together to allow all Arch Linux package sources to be licensed under a BSD zero-clause “BSD0” license… ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu Continues Dealing With More Blobs In The Kernel
The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today’s hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation… ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Adding “GFX950” GPU Support To LLVM For Next CDNA Accelerator
As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year’s LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for “GFX950”, the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 Quadrupling Workqueue Concurrency Limit
The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Praises 5~7% PGO Compiler Optimization Performance Benefits
Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.. … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 Rolling Out NVMe 2.1 Support & NVMe Rotational Media
All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions… ⌘ Read more

New AMD ERAPS Feature Yields Additional Performance Gains On Zen 5
At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new “ERAPS” feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn’t talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 “Turin” launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitiga … ⌘ Read more

GCC 15 Compiler Development Shifts From Features To Bug Fixing
GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi OS Now Defaults To 512MB Swap, Updates Labwc Compositor
With last month’s Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes… ⌘ Read more

LLVM Clang 20 Merges Intel Diamond Rapids Support With “-march=diamondrapids”
Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing “-march=diamondrapids” targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors… ⌘ Read more

DXVK 2.5.1 Released To Fix A Major Regression & Other Bugs
DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a “major regression” as well as a few other bugs… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs With Linux 6.13 Delivers Performance Improvements & Other Features
Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 3 Released - FreeBSD Now Publishing OCI Container Images
The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 For ARM64 Brings GCS Support & Protected VMs With Arm CCA
The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.12 Released With Real-Time Capabilities, Sched_Ext, More AMD RDNA4 & More
As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version… ⌘ Read more

Linux Fixes Hosts Randomly Rebooting During Virtualization With Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs
Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute “x86/urgent” pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 – and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions – is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 Adding “slab_strict_numa” SLAB Option For Helping ARM Performance
As part of the SLAB (SLUB) allocator updates pending for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is a new “slab_strict_numa” option that is reported to further help ARM Linux performance such as for Ampere Computing servers… ⌘ Read more