As part of my various end-of-year benchmarks, recently I looked at the Linux LTS kernel performance on AMD EPYC 9005 over the past year, the AMD EPYC Milan-X performance over the past four years, and various other performance comparisons over time to look the evolution of the Linux software performance. Another run I had carried out was looking at the AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" series since its launch just over two years ago. Here is a look at how an up-to-date Linux software stack can deliver some additional performance gains for these energy efficiency and cost-optimized server processors.
A patch queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle enables the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) functionality by default on the mainline kernel for capable CPUs and those not affected by side-channel attacks due to TSX Async Abort (TAA) and similar vulnerabilities. For newer Intel CPUs with safe TSX support, this change can mean better performance with the kernel defaults...
If all goes well the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will further enhance the NVIDIA graphics performance under its default GNOME Wayland session. The improvements might be upstreamed to GNOME 50 in time but otherwise it's looking like Ubuntu 26.04 will carry its own patch(es) for improving the NVIDIA Wayland performance...
The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a "for-next" branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig options...
For those looking for a speedy Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library, OpenBLAS 0.3.31 is now available for this optimized open-source implementation...
One of the initiatives launched by Intel in 2025 was LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. The open-source LLM Scaler is a Docker-based solution for helping to deploy Generative AI "GenAI" workloads on Intel Battlemage graphics cards with frameworks like vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and more. There continues to be routine new feature releases of LLM Scaler for broadening the large language models supported and other improvements...
Wild 0.8 is now available as this speedy linker focused on iterative development, a goal of incremental linking, and written in the Rust programming language...
For those shopping for an AI-ready mobile workstation with NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 offers a lot of potential for developers, AI researchers, content creators, and others. This Linux-friendly mobile workstation is well built and aligns with ThinkPad P-Series expectations while being ready to be tasked with demanding workloads.
The upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle will provide expanded GPU temperature reporting capabilities for Intel graphics cards. Additional temperature sensors will now be exposed under Linux with the Intel Xe driver using the hardware monitoring (HWMON) interface for easy consumption by different Linux user-space software...
A significant update to Burn was released today, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licensed tensor library and deep learning framework written in the Rust programming language. Burn 0.20 brings some low-level changes as it continues to strive to deliver high performance AI across the diverse hardware ecosystem...
Sent out today was the latest DRM-Misc-Next pull request of new material ahead of the next kernel cycle either Linux 6.20 or 7.0 depending upon what Linus Torvalds decides to call it...
Whisper.cpp as the open-source high performance inference project built around OpenAI's Whisper and from the same developers as Llama.cpp / GGML is out with a big new release. Whisper.cpp 1.8.3 is capable of delivering a 12x performance boost for systems with integrated AMD and Intel graphics...
Started last year was D7VK as a project bringing Direct3D 7 implemented over the Vulkan API for enjoying better performance and support for legacy Windows games on Linux, akin to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for newer versions of Direct3D over Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton). Back in December D7VK added a Direct3D 6 front-end for allowing even older game titles to be accelerated using the modern Vulkan API. Today D7VK 1.2 is out for furthering the D3D6 support...
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