The Mozilla Ocho group has published their newest version of Llamafile, the open-source project that makes it very easy to distribute and run large language models (LLMs) as a single file. Llamafile is an excellent solution for easily sharing and running LLMs and supporting both speedy CPU-based execution as well as GPU acceleration where available.
This Week In GNOME is out with their newest edition to outline all of the interesting developments as we approach the end of May.
Intel software engineers did a late Friday night release of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library v1.1, their Python library for tapping into the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found on the new Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. This Python library makes it easier to interface with the Intel VPU/NPU kernel driver and in turn enjoying accelerated operations for AI.
It was a busy week for KDE developers ahead of yesterday's Plasma 6.1 Beta release. KDE developer Nate Graham in his weekly development summary outlined all of the interesting changes to make it into the Plasma 6.1 desktop ahead of the feature freeze that went into effect with the beta release.
24 May
Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.
Famed open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has landed 13 more patches in Mesa 24.2-devel to provide fixes for GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics IP while also adding more GFX11 (RDNA3) APUs.
The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.
For those considering an Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" powered laptop, here are some benchmarks of the 165U using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 compared against the Acer Swift 14 with the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (Zen 4) within the Framework 13, and the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (Zen 4) within the Framework 16 under Linux.
The four month old KWin merge request by Xaver Hugl to allow for triple buffering has been merged and just in time for the Plasma 6.1 code branching!
POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" OpenCL implementation that originally began as a CPU-based run-time and has expanded to support a variety of GPU and accelerator targets is out with its first release candidate of the upcoming PoCL 6.0.
Last week saw the main Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.10 that delivered on some performance optimizations while today saw a secondary set of merge window changes for this CoW file-system that is now adding back the "norecovery" mount option.
The Device Mapper changes were merged last week into the Linux 6.10 kernel, including a new "high priority" option for DM-Crypt.
Following the recent PipeWire 1.2 release candidate, a second release candidate is out today that also includes the ability to stream to Snapcast servers.
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel include enabling monitoring of more all-in-one liquid coolers for CPUs, a new driver for exposing monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and other new monitoring capabilities.
The Framework 13 and Framework 16 AMD Ryzen powered laptops make use of an NPCX embedded controller that rely on the ChromeOS open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware. With the Linux 6.10 kernel the Chrome OS "cros_ec_lpc" driver is being extended to support these latest Framework upgradeable laptops.
Following the HID changes last week that brought Steam Deck IMU and ASUS ROG Ally support along with other Human Interface Device additions, on Thursday the input subsystem updates were submitted for this new kernel. The Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller is now supported along with other input additions.
23 May
Following the NFS server changes from a few days ago for Linux 6.10 that brought optimizations and prepping for the new "nfsdctl" utility, the Network File System client changes have been submitted and merged for this new kernel.
The GNOME Foundation has published a draft copy of their five-year strategic plan that calls for more around the community, DEI, services, a more streamlined and inclusive annual event, and strengthening the foundation.
Coreboot 24.05 is available today as the newest stable release of this open-source system firmware solution. With Coreboot 24.05 there is support for 25 more motherboards/platforms and an assortment of other improvements.
While earlier this week was looking at the AMD EPYC 4004 vs. Intel Xeon E-2488 performance for entry-level server performance, in today's benchmarking showdown is a fresh look higher up the stack at the current generation server performance out of Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids / Emerald Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena with a leading-edge open-source software stack of using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while also jumping from Linux 6.8 to Linux 6.9 for the very latest x86_64 Linux server performance.
The ACPI and power management / thermal subsystem changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This cycle there are updates to both the Intel and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers.
Merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel were all of the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes. There is ACPI FACS support, the ability to easily construct FIT images, and a new command-line option for disabling 32-bit application support.
In addition to the Linux 6.10 USB changes and char/misc with the new NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Wednesday also sent out the staging updates for Linux 6.10. There isn't much in the way of new code but some 19k lines of code removed thanks to removing an unused driver as well as a broken driver.
Similar to the GCC compiler dropping support for the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators a few days ago, Intel has also gone ahead and seen to the removal of Xeon Phi support for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler.
Andrew Morton sent out more patches on Wednesday that have been pulled into the Linux 6.10 kernel. Notable from this latest round of "non-MM" updates is enabling more compiler warnings by default and getting newer AMD GPUs working on the RISC-V architecture.
GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.
All of the VirtIO updates are now ready for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is closing this weekend.
22 May
It looks like systemd 256 will officially debut as stable in the near future with systemd 256-rc3 being released today and not tacking on any new features compared to the prior release candidates.
Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent in the char/misc updates for Linux 6.10 alongside the other areas of the kernel he oversees. Among the char/misc changes is adding the NTSYNC driver that exposes the /dev/ntsync character device for use by the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton). But for Linux 6.10 the driver is effectively "broken" as most of the feature patches have yet to be included.
Eric Engestrom has announced the release of Mesa 24.1 as this quarter's feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.
The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.
Back in February 2022 prior to the Valve Steam Deck being released, a Steam Deck Platform Driver was posted for the Linux kernel. Sadly, more than two years later, this driver still hasn't been upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and it looks like it could still be months before it happens.
Introduced last year with the Linux 6.7 kernel was a hardening configuration to allow for "make hardening.config" as an easy way of building a security-hardened Linux kernel with sane defaults. With Linux 6.10 there are some additional security minded features now enabled.
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes this morning for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is wrapping up this weekend. Surprisingly, in 2024, a new USB to parallel printer port adapter variant is being introduced with Linux 6.10.
The FUSE updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel in supporting file-system implementations within user-space.
Alpine Linux 3.20 has been released as the newest feature release to this security-minded, lightweight Linux distribution that is popular for embedded and container use. Alpine Linux continues to set itself apart from others by making use of musl libc, Busybox, and other modifications in the name of security and small footprint.
Sent out on Tuesday were all of the perf tool changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This includes perf event support for recent Intel CPUs as well as initial AMD Zen 5 processor support.
The KVM changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel were merged a few days ago for this important piece to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.45 is now available as the newest version of this high performance JVM for Java applications.
Last week the main SoC/platform updates were sent in for Linux 6.10 that included more ARM-based handheld game consoles and other new Arm devices from ASUS wireless routers to set-top boxes to enabling various SoCs. This week a secondary set of updates were submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.
Box64 is out as the newest version of this Linux user-space x86_64 emulator for running on ARM64 Linux devices. There is also an updated version of Box86 too for that x86 32-bit version on ARM.
21 May
As a follow-up to this morning's AMD EPYC 4004 review and benchmarks, Supermicro, ASRock Rack, Giga Computing, Tyan, and others have announced new motherboards/servers for these entry-level EPYC servers. In addition with the likes of ASRock Rack they have already published BIOS updates enabling existing AM5 Ryzen server boards to officially support the EPYC 4004 series processors.
It's coming a week later than anticipated but the NVIDIA R555 Linux driver beta has been released! This is the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver update that brings Wayland explicit sync support along with a host of other important improvements.
Over the past several years we have seen AMD Ryzen processors being used for low-cost servers, budget web hosting platforms, game servers, and more. Since the Ryzen 5000 series we have seen the likes of ASRock Rack and Supermicro putting out interesting budget-friendly Ryzen servers and that has ramped up even more with AMD Ryzen 7000 series server performance being stellar thanks to AVX-512 and other improvements making it more practical for such workloads. AMD has now solidified its positioning for entry-level servers with the introduction of the EPYC 4004 series processors. The EPYC 4004 series is derived from the Ryzen 7000 series offerings to facilitate cost conscious server options and putting the Intel Xeon E-2400 series in the crosshairs. In this review is a look at the EPYC 4004 series along with benchmarks of nearly the entire EPYC 4004 product stack compared to Intel's current top-end Xeon E-2400 series processor, the Intel Xeon E-2488 Raptor Lake.
Ahead of the planned release in August, the first alpha release of the LibreOffice 24.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing.
Qualcomm and their partners at Linaro have been busy working on the Linux support for the Snapdragon X Elite as the high-end Arm SoC beginning to roll-out for laptops. The latest Snapdragon X Elite upstreaming is Embedded DisplayPort and DisplayPort support for the Snapdragon X Elite.
There's a lot of file-system activity going on for the Linux 6.10 merge window: Bcachefs safety improvements, better OCFS2 write performance, continued XFS online repair, and even a "mail-in merge request" from prison for ReiserFS. The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has also seen some new feature work this cycle and has now been merged.
André Zwing continues hacking on the Hangover project as a means of running Windows applications on AArch64 Linux by leveraging Wine and pairing it with emulators like QEMU, FEX, or Box64. Besides the initial AArch64/ARM64 focus, Hangover can be important for bring Windows game/application on Linux support eventually to other architectures like POWER and RISC-V.
While GCC 14 recently debuted as stable in the form of GCC 14.1, for those relying on the GCC 13 compiler that debuted last year there is now a new point release available with many bug fixes.
In addition to the CXL updates for Linux 6.10 that were sent in last week, the PCI subsystem updates this week bring a notable addition for Compute Express Link (CXL) devices.
The Qt Company today released Qt 6.7.1 as the first point release for the cross-platform Qt 6.7.1 toolkit. Since releasing Qt 6.7 just under two months ago, they have fixed more than 400 bugs.
20 May
The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.
While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.
Red Hat engineers have been developing Nova as a new, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver as the eventual successor to the Nouveau kernel driver and is designed around NVIDIA's GPU System Processor (GSP) thus making the driver relevant for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer. Today they posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series of the Nova driver and Rust DRM abstractions.
Intel previously indicated that Lunar Lake processors would launch by the end of 2024 and leading to anticipation of a Q4 launch... Intel today announced that Lunar Lake will actually launch in Q3.
The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window. The platform-drivers-x86 changes continue to primarily revolve around x86 Intel/AMD laptops but also some other desktop/platform drivers. Now in Linux 6.10 there is also a new "ARM64" sub-section of the platform drivers.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of the newest Fedora desktop ISO spin: Fedora Miracle.
Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed.
It was just earlier this month that AMD Linux kernel graphics driver patches appeared for introducing a new ISP hardware block for Image Signal Processing with new AMD APUs. Already the AMDGPU ISP firmware has appeared in linux-firmware.git indicating that this "ISP" block may be coming in hardware quite soon if not already quietly found within some products.
It's not often having anything to write about on the Oracle Cluster File-System v2 (OCFS2), but with Linux 6.10 it's seeing a rather significant performance optimization.
As a small information heads up, the Linux 6.10 kernel will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time to the kernel log as a little helper.
Intel Compute Runtime 24.17.29377.6 is now available as the latest routine update to this open-source GPU compute stack used by the company's integrated and discrete graphics products for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute capabilities.
While Fwupd developers are working toward the Fwupd 2.0 release, out this morning is Fwupd 1.9.20 as the newest point release for this open-source solution for firmware updating on Linux that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).