Last week Amazon/AWS announced the new EC2 M8a instances as their latest-generation, general-purpose compute instances now powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Amazon announced the M8a as having up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price performance over M7a. With my testing of both at 32 vCPUs, the new AMD EPYC Turin instance provided 1.59x the performance over the prior-generation EPYC Genoa instance!

Apple today announced the M5 SoC as the newest in the Apple Silicon family and with claims of 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI of the M4...

Merged today to the Tinygrad deep learning framework is a Mesa NIR back-end to allow targeting that common intermediate representation used by these open-source Linux GPU drivers. Initially supported with this Tinygrad NIR back-end is the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" with its Rust-based NAK compiler as well as the CPU-based LLVMpipe driver...

AMD's HIP-RT is used by the Blender 3D modeling software for GPU-accelerated ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs. For Blender 5.0 the AMD HIP-RT support is expected to be declared "stable" but will not be enabled by default until Blender 5.1...

While the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers saw Panther Lake support added in early 2024, only overnight was support upstreamed to GCC and Clang for the similar Wildcat Lake target...

In development for around the past year was the cross-vendor mesh shading extension for OpenGL. Last week GL_EXT_mesh_shader was merged to the OpenGL Registry for this mesh shader support and first new GL extension in a while...

David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead...

A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support...

Autumn Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn't ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone...

The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary...

There's been work to get the Nix functional package manager available on Fedora Linux for those wanting to leverage its available packages or features like supporting side-by-side packages of different versions, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, non-root user for installing software, and other features. One of the hurdles though is that the Nix package manager relies by default on the /nix directory, which goes against Fedora's default directory requirements. Now though the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted permission for using the /nix directory hierarchy...

Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering.

Intel Linux engineers have begun posting patches for enabling the Xe3P architecture. While Xe3P is also expected to be found with next-generation Intel discrete GPUs, the initial focus is on enabling support for Nova Lake...

Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel...

Firefox 144.0 is now available but it's not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support...

A low-level Linux kernel improvement being worked on by engineers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is for introducing a PCI Configuration Space Cache "PCSC" to help with dense SR-IOV deployments that can end up hitting significant overhead with the current Linux kernel...

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...

Even prior to the recent ending of the Linux 6.18 merge window and its many new features, the first "drm-misc-next" pull request of new material intended for Linux 6.19 was already submitted for inclusion to DRM-Next...

Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread...

Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has published their September 2025 progress report to outline recent work on this open-source OS...

It's been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group...

Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics...

A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU security mitigations to all be toggled at run-time...