While AMD Zen 4 processors whether it be the Ryzen 7000/8000 desktop/mobile series or EPYC 8004/9004 series server processors are already performing very well on Linux and with great power efficiency against the competition as shown in dozens of Phoronix articles at this point, it turns out there's been a minor power/performance optimization left untapped yet under Linux for select Zen 4 processors. A new patch series posted this Sunday allows for this "fast CPPC" feature to be utilized on supported processors.
On top of prior DRM-Next pull requests for the AMD kernel graphics driver working on next-gen GPU support along with fixes and other low-level improvements, on Friday another batch of new feature code was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window opening up in mid-May.
A commit made to the Linux kernel three weeks ago accidentally broke the default CPU security mitigations for non-x86 CPUs. With code sent in today via x86/urgent ahead of tonight's Linux 6.9-rc6 release, that accidental default breakage is being addressed.
Cloud Hypervisor 39 was released on Saturday for this cloud-focused, Rust-based VMM started by Intel and now a multi-vendor Linux Foundation project.
Since going beta in 2020, the Zrythm open-source digital audio workstation software has been inching its way toward a v1.0 release. On Saturday marked the release of v1.0.0-rc.1 as a release candidate for the upcoming v1.0 release of this GTK-based digital audio workstation (DAW) software.
Merged on Friday to the development codebase for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler is support for the Arm Neoverse N3, V3, and V3AE SoCs.
27 April
The uutils' Rust-based Coreutils implementation is out with another update that further increases the drop-in replacement compatibility with GNU Coreutils.
It was just a few days ago that Llamafile 0.8 released with LLaMA 3 and Grok support along with faster F16 performance. Now this project out of Mozilla for self-contained, easily re-distributable large language model (LLM) deployments is out with a new release.
Intel engineers have been reworking Intel CPU model handling for Linux after using "Family 6" since the mid-90's with the P6 micro-architecture and continuing to rev the model ID only with new micro-architectural generations. It's an end of the era for Family 6 coming up and thus there's a lot of Linux patches being worked on to address assumptions within the kernel code that was only checking for an Intel CPU's model ID and not for any family ID differences.
GTK 4.15.0 is now available as part of the new unstable series for this widely used open-source toolkit. Most notable with GTK 4.15.0 is the Vulkan renderer being used by default on supported systems.
KDE developer Nate Graham is back from the latest KDE sprint in Germany and out with his new weekly status report to highlight all of the interesting KDE changes that landed this week.
26 April
Valve and CodeWeavers today released the Proton 9.0 Release Candidate 2 build based off Wine 9.0 for powering Steam Play to enjoy an excellent assortment of modern (and legacy) Windows games on Linux.
Given a two year old bug against Mesa around slow initialization/start-up time for GTK4 on Intel graphics, prolific Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently took to optimizing Zink's start-up time for this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation.
After several years of the GNOME Foundation running at a deficit (loss), the GNOME Foundation is going to be driving a push for greater fundraising.
As mentioned following the AMD GFX90C target being added, the GCC 14 compiler code was branched from the main Git branch with release preparations for GCC 14 underway. A status report was just published outlining release plans for getting GCC 14.1 stable out around 7 May.
As the last feature patch prior to the GCC 14 compiler code being branched today and GCC 15 opening up on the mainline codebase, AMD GFX90C support was merged for enabling GPU OpenMP device offloading to the numerous AMD SoCs/APUs with the GFX9/Vega graphics.
Following the big set of Xe DRM driver updates for Linux 6.10 and earlier Adaptive Snyc SDP, Lunar Lake display support, and more DG2 PCI IDs for i915 pulls sent in over weeks prior for this next kernel version, the drm-intel-gt-next pull request was submitted today for last minute Intel graphics driver feature changes aiming for Linux 6.10.
AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers continue being quite busy preparing for multiple new hardware IP.
The Servo web engine developers have enjoyed a busy April with a number of new features added to this Rust creation.
After publishing open-source versions of MS-DOS years ago for versions 1.25 and 2.0, Microsoft and IBM have now announced that MS-DOS 4.0 has been open-sourced under an MIT license.
25 April
Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It's a big one.
If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver.
As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today's focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.
This year already marks ten years since the introduction of RHEL 7. While the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support period is typically 10 years, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 they have decided to extend that by up to four years with Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS).
As expected, the Wayland 1.23 Alpha release is now available as this next Wayland release looks to officially roll-out toward the end of May.
Intel engineers have just released OpenVINO 2024.1, the newest feature release for this excellent open-source AI toolkit that continues expanding its features and capabilities particularly around Generative AI "GenAI" and Large Language Models (LLMs).
Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making significant, much-needed investments into various open-source upstream projects from the GNOME desktop to Rust-written Coreutils and more. Today the Sovereign Tech Fund outlined their latest funding for advancing the open-source software ecosystem.
The release ISOs for Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" are now available! Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features.
Following yesterday's Mesa 24.1 feature branching, Mesa 24.2-devel is now open for the Mesa Git mainline code and some early feature work has begun for that Q3 release series.
Not to be confused with Fedora's "Beefy Miracle" from a decade ago during their entertaining codename days, but a Fedora Miracle spin has been proposed for the now-open Fedora 41 development cycle.
Llamafile has been quite an interesting project out of Mozilla's Ocho group in the era of AI. Llamafile makes it easy to run and distribute large language models (LLMs) that are self-contained within a single file. Llamafile builds off Llama.cpp and makes it easy to ship an entire LLM as a single file with both CPU and GPU execution support. Llamafile 0.8 is out now to join in on the LLaMA3 fun as well as delivering other model support and enhancing the CPU performance.
In addition to many RadeonSI driver optimizations that were merged just prior to yesterday's code branching and Mesa 24.1-rc1 release, a number of Etnaviv driver improvements were also merged for benefiting that recent Vivante NPU IP open-source driver work.
24 April
Shortly following today's Mesa 24.1 code branching, the first release candidate has been announced by ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom.
Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged.
AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer.
One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.
A new AMD Linux kernel patch queued today via "x86/urgent" for routing into the Linux 6.9 development kernel expands the range of recognized CPU model IDs for upcoming Zen 5 processors.
DNF 4.20 was released this morning by Red Hat as a stepping stone toward the upcoming DNF5 package manager.
Polychromatic is the open-source software package that serves as a GUI front-end to the OpenRazer drivers for allowing Razer devices to be configured under Linux for managing keyboard/mice RGB lighting and other options. With today's Polychromatic 0.9 release there is a port for the Qt6 toolkit.
The folks at iXsystems have released TrueNAS SCALEE 24.04 as the newest iteration of their Linux-based platform for network attached storage (NAS) devices. TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 brings better performance, new features, and additional hardware support.
Nginx 1.26 stable is out as the newest version of this popular alternative to the Apache web server while also able to work as a load balancer, reverse proxy, and HTTP cache. Nginx 1.26 incorporates the great work from the Nginx 1.25 mainline branch such as experimental HTTP/3 support.
A small but notable patch was merged to upstream Wine overnight: the window title for application windows is now actually set under Wayland.
23 April
QEMU 9.0 is out tonight as the latest feature release for this prominent component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
The widely-used, open-source FFmpeg multimedia library has seen commits this week advancing its support for Dolby Vision.
Mozilla hopes you'll never have to see it, but they've been rewriting their crash reporting application for Firefox within the Rust programming language.
Intel today sent out more than one hundred new feature patches to DRM-Next of new "Xe" kernel graphics driver material they have readied for the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.
The folks behind the very popular Framework upgradeable/modular laptops announced today $18M in new funding and a few other interesting details.
It's Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution.
Adding to the impressive number of features to be found in this quarter's Mesa 24.1 release is now the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver supporting implicit pipeline caching.
The latest Compute Express Link (CXL) feature work being pursued for the mainline Linux kernel is a driver to create CXL block devices for storage. On Monday a "request for comments" patch series sent out the initial code for setting up CXL shared memory to be used as Linux block devices.
Another week, another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes for the mainline Linux kernel.
The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver.
NetBSD 10.0 debuted last month with a long list of improvements and other enhancements that built up over the past several years. For those not yet taking the leap to this big NetBSD update, NetBSD 9.4 is out today for those relying on the stable NetBSD 9 series.