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Clang Thread Safety Checks Begin Uncovering Bugs In The Linux Kernel
Clang Thread Safety Checks Begin Uncovering Bugs In The Linux Kernel
57 Minutes Ago - LLVM - Linux Kernel -Wthread-safety - 1 Comment

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were two competing solutions for new LLVM Clang capability / thread safety analysis to the Linux kernel. Two developers had separately been working on implementations for the Linux kernel to make use of Clang's "-Wthread-safety" functionality. Ultimately the upstream kernel will likely settle upon the superior or unified solution while already making use of these new checks is uncovering Linux kernel bugs.

GNU G-Golf v0.8 Released For Writing GTK Apps In Guile/Scheme
GNU G-Golf v0.8 Released For Writing GTK Apps In Guile/Scheme
5 Hours Ago - GNU - GNU G-Golf 0.8 - 5 Comments

Years in the making, GNU G-Golf 0.8 was released on Friday as a significant release for this GNU project. No, it's not a golfing simulator or anything like that, but rather a Guile Object Library for GNOME so that you can develop GTK applications from the Guile/Scheme programming language.

7 February

Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer
Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer
7 February 11:28 AM EST - Radeon - AMD RDNA4 Improvements - 5 Comments

Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity.

GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5
GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5
7 February 10:13 AM EST - Software - 4 Comments

With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.

Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer
Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer
7 February 08:32 AM EST - Apple - Asahi Linux - 132 Comments

Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.

Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs
Bcachefs Preps More Fixes For Linux 6.14, Continues Tracking Down Other Bugs
7 February 06:33 AM EST - Linux Storage - Bcachefs - 21 Comments

With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs.

6 February

SMT Remains Very Advantageous For 5th Gen AMD EPYC Performance
SMT Remains Very Advantageous For 5th Gen AMD EPYC Performance
6 February 10:50 AM EST - Processors - 61 Comments

After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.

AMD Talks Up IREE/MLIR Programming For Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD Talks Up IREE/MLIR Programming For Ryzen AI NPUs
6 February 10:00 AM EST - AMD - Ryzen AI NPU Programming - Add A Comment

While the AMDXDNA driver was merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs atop a mainline kernel build, there's still the user-space software needed for making use of the neural processing units found in Ryzen AI SoCs. AMD talked more about programming Ryzen AI NPUs last weekend in Belgium at the FOSDEM 2025 developer conference.

GNU Gold Linker Is Deprecated & Will Be Gone For Good Without New Developers
GNU Gold Linker Is Deprecated & Will Be Gone For Good Without New Developers
6 February 06:39 AM EST - GNU - GNU Gold Linker - 44 Comments

With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker.

5 February

Google Interested In The Modern Intel Xe Linux Kernel Driver On Alder Lake
Google Interested In The Modern Intel Xe Linux Kernel Driver On Alder Lake
5 February 08:40 PM EST - Intel - Xe Driver Rather Than i915 - 17 Comments

The modern Intel "Xe" Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver as the clean successor to the i915 driver has been an experimental option for Tigerlake and newer but only for Xe2 graphics (Lunar Lake / Battlemage) and newer is it used by default. But Google at least for their Chromebook use-cases is entertaining the idea of switching over to the Xe driver rather than the long-used i915 kernel driver for Alder Lake era hardware.

Bisecting The Linux 6.14 Performance Regression With System76 Thelio + AMD Threadripper
Bisecting The Linux 6.14 Performance Regression With System76 Thelio + AMD Threadripper
5 February 04:30 PM EST - Linux Kernel - Power Management Woes - 9 Comments

Yesterday I showcased Linux 6.14 Git performance worse than Linux 6.13 and 6.12 in a number of multi-threaded workloads. Due to that initial discover being on the lone AMD EPYC Turin 2P server that is always busy running through new benchmarks for future content as well as I am being persistently short on time and constantly under pressure due to the state of the web/ad industry, I didn't expect to get around to digging deeper into the problem in the near-term. But as I ended up being able to reproduce some of the regressions on a System76 Thelio Major workstation at my desk with the still mighty powerful Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, I was able to turn around a quick bisect.

NVIDIA Engineer Talks Up sched_ext Linux Scheduler Possibilities At FOSDEM
NVIDIA Engineer Talks Up sched_ext Linux Scheduler Possibilities At FOSDEM
5 February 02:00 PM EST - NVIDIA - sched_ext - 39 Comments

Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities.

AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Patches For Linux Updated, Intel RAR Eyed Next
AMD Broadcast TLB Invalidation Patches For Linux Updated, Intel RAR Eyed Next
5 February 10:29 AM EST - AMD - AMD INVLPGB - 1 Comment

One of the set of patches for the Linux kernel that we have been looking forward to but that wasn't wrapped up in time for the recent Linux v6.14 merge window was the work enabling use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction on Zen 3 CPUs and newer for broadcast TLB invalidation. This can lead to a nice performance bump in some workloads while the eighth iteration of those patches were posted overnight.

New Linux Patches Yield Up To 3.3x Faster AES-CTR Performance On AMD Zen 5 CPUs
New Linux Patches Yield Up To 3.3x Faster AES-CTR Performance On AMD Zen 5 CPUs
5 February 06:52 AM EST - AMD - AES Crypto Performance - 21 Comments

Google engineer Eric Biggers is known for some of his great crypto performance optimization patches to benefit the Linux kernel and his most recent patch series is yielding some very tantalizing results for AMD Zen 5 processors whether it be the Ryzen 9000 series, Ryzen AI 300 series, or EPYC 9005 server processors.

4 February

GRUB Continues Working Toward Its Next Release In 2025
4 February 04:54 PM EST - GNU - GRUB Bootloader - 28 Comments

As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.

FFmpeg Adds AMD AMF Decoder, FSR-Based Upscaling
4 February 12:55 PM EST - Radeon - FFmpeg + AMF + FSR - 24 Comments

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg.

Optimizing The Linux Kernel With PGO Can Yield ~3% Benefit For HPC Workloads
4 February 12:37 PM EST - Programming - High Performance Computing - 5 Comments

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled.

Ubuntu Infrastructure Woe Continues Making It A Hassle To Run The Latest Upstream Kernel
4 February 08:42 AM EST - Ubuntu - No Mainline Kernel PPA - 34 Comments

The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for years has been a great feature for Ubuntu users to be able to easily fetch and run the newest upstream kernel whether it's the latest stable kernel version, one of the weekly release candidates, or even the very leading-edge daily Git kernel builds. Sadly for months now this service has been out of order.

Linux 6.15 Looks Like It May Try Again With EXECMEM_ROX Support
4 February 06:43 AM EST - Linux Kernel - EXECMEM_ROX - Add A Comment

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel.

3 February

Serpent OS Development Slowing Down Amid Lack Of Funding
3 February 08:40 PM EST - Operating Systems - Serpent OS Funding Low - 51 Comments

Serpent OS is the original Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame and has been pursuing its own package management system and new innovations in the Linux distribution landscape. While there has been recent success and new development builds coming out, feature development on Serpent OS is expected to slowdown now due to a lack of project funding.

FreeBSD On Laptops Effort Gets Proof-Of-Concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi Working
3 February 05:02 PM EST - BSD - FreeBSD On Laptops - 15 Comments

In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation funding work on s0ix sleep state support as part of their initiative to improve FreeBSD's support for modern laptops, they have also been funding work on a number of other objectives, including better WiFi driver coverage. A milestone now being achieved for 2025 is getting a proof-of-concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi driver support working for this BSD operating system.

GEICO Insurance Company Developing TuxTape - A New Linux Kernel Livepatching Solution
3 February 04:06 PM EST - Linux Kernel - GEICO TuxTape - 15 Comments

Red Hat's Kpatch, Oracle's Ksplice, and SUSE's kGraft are the most well known solutions currently for Linux kernel live-patching primarily for applying security patches to running Linux servers. It wasn't on my bingo card for insurance giant GEICO working baking their own Linux kernel live-patching solution, but they announced it this weekend and it will soon be open-source.

Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting
3 February 01:00 PM EST - Operating Systems - Alpine Linx - 21 Comments

Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position.

Red Hat Hiring To Continue Advancing The Linux Desktop In 2025
3 February 10:00 AM EST - Fedora - Fedora 2025 Plans - 60 Comments

Christian Schaller as Red Hat's Director of Software Engineering outlined in a blog post today some of the areas they will be focusing on this year with Fedora Workstation development. Additionally, they will be hiring at least two more Linux desktop engineers this year at Red Hat.

Sound Open Firmware 2.12 Adds NXP iMX95 Support, Zephyr RTOS For AMD ACP 6.0
3 February 06:50 AM EST - Multimedia - Sound Open Firmware 2.12 - Add A Comment

Sound Open Firmware 2.12 is now available to succeed the SOF 2.11 release from last September. Sound Open Firmware as a reminder is an open-source audio DSP firmware solution and related SDK/tooling. SOF started out as an open-source Intel project and has successfully evolved into an excellent multi-vendor initiative and platform agnostic.

Intel NPU Driver 1.13 Released For Core Ultra Linux Systems
3 February 06:36 AM EST - Intel - Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.13 - 4 Comments

Intel on Friday released an updated user-space driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found with Core Ultra SoCs. This user-space driver code works with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver for opening up the Intel NPU for helping speed-up AI workloads on Linux.

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