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This past week Intel published an Intel Core Ultra 200S Series "Arrow Lake" performance status update following mixed reviews since launch around the Arrow Lake gaming performance that were inconsistent with Intel's internal findings. Among Intel's findings detailed in their report this past week were some new BIOS performance optimizations, some misconfigured performance settings in early/reviewer BIOSes, and also some Windows 11 updates being pushed down to help with different performance issues. ASUS already started releasing new BIOSes that incorporate the 0x114 Arrow Lake intended to help the situation. While it's been a Windows-focused issue, I couldn't help but to run Intel Arrow Lake performance comparison benchmarks on Linux with the new microcode / BIOS.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.13-rc4 kernel as the newest weekly test release leading up to Linux 6.13 stable by mid to late January...

OpenShot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular open-source video editor. This Qt-based cross-platform non-linear video editor has a new default theme and many other enhancements in time for editing any of your year-end or holiday videos...

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits...

Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using both Family 18 and Family 19 identification for future processor models...

Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework...

For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there's a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that's found on most of the X1 laptop models...

For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system...

Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs...

In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application...

The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system...

The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers...

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code...

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update...

It's not only KDE seeing nice improvements ahead of the holidays but GNOME developers were also busy this week preparing new improvements to their open-source desktop stack. There's been some rather exciting changes on the GNOME front as we prepare to cap off the year...

While the Christmas holidays are quickly approach, KDE developers remain busy working on new features for the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop as well as continuing to land many bug fixes...

Building off the ROCm 6.3 release from earlier this month, there's been a Friday night drop of ROCm 6.3.1 with some rather exciting end-of-year improvements...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 10.0 is now available for testing with another 15 bugs fixed this week...

Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week's set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month...

If you are looking for some interesting technical content to watch over the holidays or end-of-year downtime, AMD shared today that they have launched their own YouTube channel for developer-related content...