Over the past two years AMD has developed the AMDXDNA accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. But when it comes to user-space software on Linux actually able to leave the Ryzen AI NPUs it's been... extremely limited with nothing really useful besides some niche bits of code. Even AMD's own software like their GAIA on Linux has used Vulkan with their iGPUs rather than any NPU support. But finally today there is a significant shift with the Ryzen AI NPUs becoming useful on Linux and able to handle LLMs...
With GNOME 50 that is being used by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, you may be curious about the out-of-the-box performance especially compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases -- especially with Mutter 50 having some NVIDIA optimizations. In today's article is a first look at how the NVIDIA Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 26.04 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.10 release.
The open-source D7VK project began to implement Direct3D 7 over Vulkan similar to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton providing support for newer Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan. With succeeding releases D7VK was extended to Direct3D 6 too and then Direct3D 5 support. Now with today's D7VK 1.5 release, Direct3D 3 is implemented for faster acceleration using Vulkan...
Posted today were new Intel kernel graphics driver patches for Linux to enable Adaptive Sync SDP (Secondary Data Packet) handling for Panel Replay and Auxless Adaptive Link Power Management (ALPM) modes...
Currently the Linux IPv6 networking stack can be built into the Linux kernel, built as a loadable kernel module, or not built at all. With proposed patches from a SUSE engineer, the IPv6 networking stack would be limited to being a kernel built-in or not at all. In doing away with IPv6 as a loadable kernel module would allow simplifying some code and lowering the Linux networking maintenance burden...
Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) debuting with Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids is ready with Linux 6.16+ and recent open-source compilers. One piece of the support puzzle still coming together though that will be especially important for Xeon Diamond Rapids is the KVM virtualization support. New patches there were posted this week...
Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta announced a new proposal for "A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora." With the help of Google's Gemini AI, Spaleta laid out a proposal to help Fedora make greater accommodations for experimental concepts and building more interest around innovative ideas without a firm commitment to integrate them into Fedora proper until they can be assured of sustainability...
The current crop of RISC-V SoCs are still much slower than alternative CPU architectures and lead to much longer build times for Fedora packages as a result. There's hope with next-gen RISC-V processors being faster but for now even compiling Binutils as an example is around five times slower than x86_64 -- and that's with disabling compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) for RISC-V to avoid an even longer build process...
The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It's interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.
The first alpha release of OpenSSL 4.0 is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.0 they are removing support for SSLv3 that has been deprecated for over one decade while also dropping OpenSSL engines and other removals while also adding in some new features...
Over the past two decades SUSE Linux has been passed around several times. From Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in 2003 to then being acquired by The Attachmate Group to then merging with Micro Focus and then the SUSE business being acquired by private equity firm EQT back in 2018. A report out today indicates that EQT may now be looking to sell off SUSE...
The Free Software Foundation is hiring a new engineering and certification manager for leading the Respect Your Freedom "RYF" hardware certification program. The FSF RYF program is about certifying hardware that respects the user's freedom and privacy for control over the device, such as no proprietary firmware blobs needed to be loaded at run-time, no digital rights management / digital restrictions, and complies with their other free software ideals...
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