Recently I've been testing out the Scaleway's Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) RISC-V cloud servers. Initially they were using Ubuntu 23.10 for providing an up-to-date Ubuntu Linux RISC-V experience while quickly upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those curious how Ubuntu 24.04 is performing on RISC-V hardware, here are some comparison benchmarks.

Since last year Intel's open-source software engineers have been working on a PCIe bandwidth controller driver for the Linux kernel to avoid thermal issues by being able to automatically reduce the PCIe link speed when needed. This driver still isn't over the finish line but today brought the fifth iteration of these patches...

Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together...

Ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom continues carrying out a splendid job with the on-time releases of new bi-weekly Mesa point releases and the weekly release candidates heading toward the next feature release of these open-source predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack...

The developers at System76 working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment catering to their in-house, Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux distribution have provided their latest monthly status update on the desktop effort...

The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year...

The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP...

For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux's IO_uring for async I/O...

The Intel iVPU accelerator driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window have been submitted for advancing the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) support found since the launch of Meteor Lake with Intel Core Ultra notebook CPUs. For this iVPU/NPU driver in Linux 6.10 are a few notable new features...

In addition to a Framework Laptop EC driver being prepared for Linux that extends the Chrome OS embedded controller (EC) used by recent Framework Laptops, a ChromeOS EC hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem) driver has also been revived as a further support extension for Framework laptops on Linux...

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack...

While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there on x86_64 hardware. Similarly, the recently released Fedora Workstation 40 features the brand new GCC 14 compiler and other leading-edge open-source software packages, but there's still more performance left on the table as shown by Intel. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 40 are competing with Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that offers aggressive x86_64 Linux performance defaults and the best possible out-of-the-box Linux performance on modern x86_64 hardware.

A new patch series sent out today by AMD Linux engineers confirm that PCIe TPH will be supported with "upcoming AMD hardware" as a nice performance optimization feature for PCI Express...

If all goes well the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will be released on Sunday and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window. In hoping for an on-time release, some Linux kernel subsystem maintainers have been already submitting early pull requests of their feature material for v6.10. Among those early pulls are the SLAB (SLUB) updates...

Recently there was an LLVM bug report of "Worse runtime performance on Zen CPU when optimizing for Zen." Well, that's not good... Fortunately, that bug is now fixed with the latest LLVM Clang compiler code but other deficiencies in the AMD CPU optimization targeting remain...

One of the interesting innovations out of Mozilla Ocho as the browser company's innovation and experiments group is Llamafile, a easy way to distribute and run AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file. Out this evening is Llamafile 0.8.2 is the newest release with an updated Llama.cpp and most excitingly are some AVX2 performance optimizations...

Valve tonight released a SteamOS 3.6 Preview as the latest version of their Arch Linux derived operating system that powers the Steam Deck and can be installed on other devices as well...

Intel has released their Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.3 to succeed their earlier v2.1 derived extension. With this updated extension targeting PyTorch 2.3, Intel is rolling out more optimizations around Large Language Models (LLMs)...

Adding to the growing list of features coming with the SDL3 release for this hardware/software abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games and other software is PipeWire camera capturing support...

Building off last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 (RHEL 9.4) has been AlmaLinux 9.4 and now the other notable community-focused downstream: Rocky Linux 9.4...