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Clang 21 Delivering Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Zen 4 With HBM3

One of the areas I've been meaning to run more benchmarks on this season has been for the recently released Clang 21 compiler. Back in September when LLVM Clang 21 was debuting I ran some initial benchmarks and found it to deliver some nice performance gains on AMD EPYC Zen 5 but then have been busy with other benchmarks/articles for expanding that testing. Recently with having some spare cycles and gratis access still to the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instance for AMD EPYC Zen 4 with HBM3, I ran some Clang 20 vs. Clang 21 performance benchmarks there for those wondering about any performance benefits of this new compiler release on Zen 4.

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Sovereign Tech Fund Hiring A New Leader For Driving Open-Source Funding

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund / Sovereign Tech Agency has been a godsend the past few years for the open-source community. This funding from the German government has led to significant funding for dozens of prominent open-source infrastructure projects to provide more resources for enhancing security, enabling new features, and more. As the Sovereign Tech Fund prepares for the next phase of growth, they are hiring a new head to lead the efforts...

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Intel Continues Working On Dynamic PAMT To Reduce Memory Overhead For TDX

One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs...

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Servo Announces Sponsorship Tiers To Get More Organizations Backing This Browser Engine

The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations...

OMG! Ubuntu

LibrePods β€œLiberates” AirPods from the Apple Ecosystem

Using Apple AirPods Pro on Linux is easy enough, right? You pair them over Bluetooth and listen away – except, not quite. Many features of these gleaming white buds only work on macOS and iOS, meaning that using AirPods Pro on Linux comes with functional limitations: no active noise cancellation (ANC), transparency mode, ear detection or even reliable battery level reporting. If you own a pair of AirPods Pro (any generation), chances are those are the key features you paid for, and you want to use. Well, now you can use them on Linux thanks to the LibrePods project. AirPods […]