Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the N4A performance against the Intel Xeon N4 and AMD EPYC N4D series.

A change merged to upstream LLVM Git yesterday for LLVM 23 is moving AMD's HIP to using the new/modern offload driver by default. This aligns with a prior change for NVIDIA CUDA and already in place for OpenMP offloading too...

Following various Intel open-source projects recently being archived with Intel formally discontinuing their development, another wave of Intel open-source projects were formally sunset on Monday...

LLVM/Clang 22.1 was released overnight as the first stable release of the LLVM 22 series. This is a nice, feature-packaged half-year update to this prominent open-source compiler stack with many great refinements...

Following last week's Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes...

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard and Linux cryptography fame has taken a break from that to release a new version of CGIT, the lightweight web interface for Git repositories. CGIT 1.3 is the first new release in six years and comes with a lot of changes...

The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1...

Following yesterday's Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel's WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam...

The newest driver proposed for the Linux kernel's accelerator "accel" subsystem is named QDA and is a Qualcomm DSP Accelerator driver...

Intel's open-source OpenVINO AI toolkit is out with its first major release of 2026. With today's OpenVINO 2026.0 release there is expanded large language model (LLM) support, improved Intel NPU support for Core Ultra systems, and a variety of other enhancements for benefiting Intel's CPU / NPU / GPU range of products for AI...

Firefox 148 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement on Tuesday. Most notable is the new AI controls found with Firefox 148 for those wishing to disable Firefox's growing AI capabilities...

While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds' versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0.

The FreeBSD Project has published their Q4'2025 status report to outline progress made on their software, infrastructure, and other initiatives over the past quarter. Meanwhile among the work to look forward to this year in FreeBSD is getting their Rust kernel driver support up to scratch...

It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel's entire codebase as the single largest driver...

For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel "ANV" open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes...

While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS...

Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux's cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities...

FFmpeg developer Lynne is most known recently for all the Vulkan Video work to this open-source multimedia library while merged today to FFmpeg is another great contribution outside the scope of that: xHE-AAC MPS212 audio decoding support...

Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features...

There's the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell's contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years...

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4...

While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (OAC)...

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance "perf" subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors...

Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has been doing a fantastic job enhancing the older AMD Radeon GPU support under Linux. Last year he made enough improvements to the AMDGPU open-source driver that older Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 dGPUs switched over to AMDGPU by default for nice performance gains, RADV Vulkan driver support out of the box, and all around better experience than using the legacy Radeon driver. He's also been fixing countless bugs affecting older AMD GPUs. There is another improvement on the way for benefiting some with aging AMD GPUs...