With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the user-space ROCm components from the end of last summer to the latest ROCm 7.2.3 milestone.
Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver...
I have been writing about the Cache Aware Scheduling work led by Intel engineers on the Linux kernel for more than a year. I've also tested out Cache Aware Scheduling on both Intel and AMD CPUs with the patched Linux kernel to great success. And thus very happy to see the Cache Aware Scheduling patches inching closer to the mainline Linux kernel...
Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge...
Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature...
PipeWire 1.6.5 audio/video server for Linux is now available for download with extra security checks and hardening fixes, removal of the pipe filter in filter-graph, and various bug fixes.
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers...
The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported...
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