Nearly one year ago Microsoft announced the HBv5 virtual machines powered by a custom-designed AMD 4th Gen EPYC processor with high bandwidth memory (HBM3). Finally today the Azure HBv5 series is reaching general availability for those with memory-intensive HPC applications and other workloads. Microsoft kindly provided Phoronix with HBv5 access in advance to begin testing these new VMs with the AMD EPYC 9V64H CPUs featuring HBM memory, so here are some of the first independent benchmarks of these exciting processors powering Azure's new HPC VM instances.

The Rust Foundation announced today the creation of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund as a new means of providing consistent, transparent, and long-term support for developers that make the Rust programming language possible...

Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality for user-space that could be used by other kernel graphics drivers. Finally with the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel, this Intel Content Adaptive Sharpness Filter "CASF" feature is being introduced to the mainline kernel...

The Open Container Initiative unveiled today the OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 update for this standard around operating system process and application containers. This runtime specification continues to evolve for outlining the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of a container. Notable with the v1.3 revision is introducing official FreeBSD support...

The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world...

AMD's RDSEED issue with Zen 5 processors that is in the process of being addressed with microcode/BIOS updates is in the interim causing headaches for Arch Linux powered CachyOS that provides optimized binaries for these latest Ryzen processors...

Wild 0.7 released on Monday as the newest feature release for this very fast linker for Linux systems competing with Mold on x86_64 / ARM64 / RISC-V devices...

Back in August was the announcement of LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. LLM-Scaler is a new Intel software project to provide optimized AI inference capabilities on Intel graphics hardware. A new beta release of LLM-Scaler "llm-scaler-vllm" is now available with expanded LLM model coverage...

SUSE's hardware enablement team has worked through proper U-Boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer...

The libinput input handling library for the Linux desktop on both Wayland and X.Org based systems is rolling out Lua plug-in support. Out today is libinput 1.30-rc1 with the initial infrastructure for supporting plug-ins written in the Lua scripting language...

Last month Intel's open-source Linux software engineers began sending out Xe3P_LPD display support in preparation for display capabilities with Nova Lake. Now being built out atop that is further functionality with the most recent talking point being DisplayPort 2.1 Advanced Link Power Management (ALPM)...

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source operating system project is out with its October 2025 status report. Most notable is this Rust-based OS now having the Rust-based Servo web engine running... Albeit in extremely crude form at the moment...

Queued up in a TIP branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window opening in about one month's time is optimizing the Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" code for its exit to user-space code path...

The first test release of the Git 2.52 distributed revision control system is now available. As has been a common trend, Git 2.52 is making further preparations in anticipation of the big Git 3.0 milestone...

Flatpak 1.17 is out today as the newest feature release for this Linux app sandboxing/distribution tech. Flatpak 1.17 brings a number of exciting new features...

Last week the AMD Radeon PRO R9700 officially began shipping for that new AI-minded workstation/professional graphics card built on RDNA4 and packing 32GB of RAM to accommodate large language models (LLMs) especially with multi-GPU configurations. While the focus of the product has been all about AI workloads, you may be wondering about the graphics capabilities of the Radeon AI PRO R9700 given the lack of any other "Radeon PRO 9000" series product at this point. In today's testing is a look at the workstation graphics capabilities for the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700.

With the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end for all Radeon GPUs rather than the conventional AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with Radeon 8060S Graphics for comparison...

A few weeks back I reported on Linux kernel patches surfacing for implementing Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions. This should help some HP devices and hardware from other OEMs for obtaining fan information reporting under Linux. The good news now is that the patches should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

H.J. Lu, a long-time compiler expert at Intel, merged today improved memmove() behavior for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 16 release...

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel will add support for the Line 6 POD HD Pro X audio effects processor that has been in the market for several years now -- the past decade! -- but only now seeing the necessary additions for Linux support...

Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur" is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for "init freedom" lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.18-rc4 as the latest weekly test release. Linux 6.18 is looking to be in good shape for potentially releasing on-time at the end of November otherwise the first week of December...

Slipping under my radar in October was the release of NASM 3.00 and the follow-up NASM 3.01 release shortly there after. This widely-used open-source assembler is now ready with support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10...

Merged this weekend ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc4 test kernel release due out later today is the "x86/fixes" for the week. There are a few notable changes on the x86 (x86_64) side of the kernel this week for Linux 6.18...