AI-powered voice typing is coming to Ubuntu in Myna, a speech-to-text feature that lets you talk into any valid text field. It’s still a work in progress, but I grabbed an early build to see how it’s shaping up. With Ubuntu 26.10 now entering its freeze, the user-facing pieces of myna are falling in to place. This week, a new GNOME Shell extension was added to default installs to provide an on-screen indicator when myna is listening and recording. To be clear: Myna is not a GNOME Shell extension. It’s an orchestrator that manages loading the AI model, listening for […]
Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes...
Virtualization can increase CPU utilization by allowing a large number of virtual CPUs to share a smaller number of physical CPUs. The amount of CPU time that is actually available does not change, though, so heavy activity on too many virtual CPUs can lead to contention and significant performance loss. The steal governor patch series from Shrikanth Hegde is an attempt to address that problem with a mechanism that allows virtual machines to voluntarily reduce the number of virtual CPUs they use when contention is high.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.1, 7.1.11, 6.18.47, 6.12.106, 6.6.154, 6.1.185, 5.15.218, and 5.10.267 stable kernels. Each of these has important updates throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.
Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump... to ROCm 10.0...
Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system.
With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space...
For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems...
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