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While Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" has been working out well under Linux already -- especially with regards to the enticing integrated Arc Graphics -- with the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel it's looking even better for the CPU performance. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake performance with Linux 6.8 vs. 6.9 Git.

Arm China is looking at upstreaming their "Zhouyi" NPU driver into the Linux kernel via the recently-created accelerator "accel" subsystem. The Arm China Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver in its current form has both an open-source kernel and user-space stack...

Simon McVittie issued the Flatpak 1.15.7 pre-release on Wednesday with a few notable changes for this widely-used open-source app sandboxing and distribution framework...

Patches posted today by an Intel engineer allow for importing scanout buffers from other devices with the VirtIO DRM driver that is used in the virtualization space. The importing of scanout buffers from other devices/drivers can allow for more efficient use by avoiding excess copies...

Adding to the Linux 6.9 features is a minor post merge window change: the read-only EROFS file-system is no longer treading its FSDAX support as experimental...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso recently began the effort of creating an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for the Rockchip NPU found in some of the latest Rockchip SoCs. After succeeding at open-source NPU driver support for the VeriSilicon NPU IP, Vizoso took up the challenge of working on Rockchip NPU support. With his open-source user-space driver he's already got his first model running. Not only is it running but it's doing so at similar performance to the proprietary driver...

Some time ago I ran through a number of benchmarks of Google Cloud's C3D VMs powered by AMD EPYC Genoa processors. The AMD EPYC 9004 series showed terrific performance with strong generational improvements over the Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Following that a request came in to examine the PingCAP TiDB database performance given its growing popularity. In this article we'll review those benchmarks showing how GCE C3D delivers strong performance advantages for TiDB.

Samba 4.20 is out as the newest feature update to this free software implementation for SMB networking protocol support and others to enhance file/print interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems...

Besides its desktop-level customizations, further differentiating System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution from its Ubuntu LTS package base is the tendency to roll down newer versions of the upstream Linux kernel once validated across System76's portfolio of laptops and desktops. The latest on that front is Pop!_OS now shipping with the fresh Linux 6.8 stable series...

Following several days of discussions from both sides of the table over whether SDL 3.0 should revert its Wayland over X11 preference in light of some aspects of the Wayland ecosystem support not being in good shape, for now at least SDL 3.0 is sticking to the Wayland support by default. It may be revisited though closer to release to see how the upstream support is for users of this hardware/software abstraction library widely used by cross-platform games...

Ubuntu maker Canonical has spent the past several months exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 based images for leveraging the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level capabilities to target the level embracing AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other instructions supported largely since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator era processors. As shown in benchmarks Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds can deliver better performance for the AMD/Intel systems of the past number of years. Canonical's latest foray in this area is offering up Microsoft Azure images that are tailored for x86-64-v3...

Blender has long enjoyed faster CPU rendering under Linux compared to using Microsoft Windows. Across many different processors over the years consistently we see faster Linux CPU render performance than under Windows, though that's typically the case for most renderers. With yesterday's release of Blender 4.1, there is even faster Linux CPU render speeds. Here are some initial Blender 4.0 vs. 4.1 benchmarks...

Red Hat has made the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Beta available to their customers this week for those wanting to test the next iteration of RHEL9...

What a time we live in where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support. A previously unimaginable combination of Microsoft, the Rust programming language, and the Linux kernel...

The Intel open-source engineers working on the modern Xe DRM kernel graphics driver have begun looking at Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support for cross-device and cross-driver scenarios as the latest exciting feature work for this still-experimental driver...

TornadoVM is the OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that opens up the Java programming language to heterogeneous hardware support by allowing the easy targeting of Java code to TornadoVM targets including OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V -- in addition to CPUs. With the SPIR-V and OpenCL support in turn this means Java can run not only on GPUs but also some FPGAs and other devices...

Meta's Yann Collet just released Zstd 1.5.6 as the newest version of this Zstandard compression implementation. This release is driven in part by Google Chrome 123 adding support for Zstd encoding for web traffic. Chrome now allows Zstandard (zstd) for the content-encoding to speed-up page load speeds and bandwidth savings...

Blender 4.1 is officially out today as the newest version of this wildly popular, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

With the SDL library that's widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par...

The beta release of Fedora 40 is now available for testing ahead of the planned official release next month...