Scaleway by way of their Scaleway Labs group recently launched the Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) as the world's first RISC-V servers available in the cloud. These RISC-V cloud servers are built around the T-Head 1520 SoC and are an interesting way to explore the RISC-V architecture and/or otherwise make use of RISC-V for CI/CD deployments or other testing purposes. In this article are some benchmarks showing the RISC-V EM-RV1 performance against Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux.

Back in late 2023 were Rust abstractions for the Linux kernel's Virtual File-System (VFS) code. Those patches by Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho have now seen a second iteration posted... In addition to various improvements to the Rust VFS bindings, the new patches bring a work-in-progress EXT2 Rust file-system driver...

Debian's APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was APT's new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver...

The Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly-opened Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Among the HID driver updates coming with Linux 6.10 are supporting the Steam Deck IMU motion sensors as well as HID coverage for the ASUS ROG Ally and ASUS ROG Z13 devices...

After the 22 patches were under review for the past eight months, merged today is the NVK Vulkan driver support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension for handling DRM format modifiers...

Along with the IO_uring improvements for Linux 6.10, the block subsystem changes have also been merged for this new kernel version...

While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support...

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ has finally launched for allowing M.2 devices like NVMe drives, WiFi adapters, accelerators, and more to be connected to the Raspberry Pi 5...

Manjaro 24.0 has been released today as the newest version of this Arch Linux derived desktop OS. Manjaro 24.0 ships with the latest the newly-released Linux 6.9 kernel and a slew of other updated packages...

There's another Rust upgrade coming for the Linux 6.10 kernel to bump the Rust version baseline required for building the Rust in-tree kernel components. This raising of the baseline will continue until a suitable minimum version is achieved where official Rust compiler "just works" well with the Rust'ed kernel bits. The Rust upgrade in Linux 6.10 also does away with its in-tree "alloc" fork for big code savings and simplifying maintenance...

The various ARM SoC/platform pull requests were already merged today by Linus Torvalds for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September already, sadly the mainline Linux kernel still lacks support for booting this popular single board computer... The support on Raspberry Pi OS and other downstream distributions/kernels is good, but the mainline kernel support for the Raspberry Pi SBCs remains a sore spot for this popular ARM single board computer. SUSE engineers have been working on implementing minimal boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 that will hopefully make it to the mainline kernel...

Mozilla has pushed out its release images of the Firefox 126 web browser ahead of its official debut on Tuesday...

The work written about one month ago on Phoronix for much faster AES-XTS on modern Intel/AMD CPUs for speeding up disk and file encryption by as much as 155% with AMD Zen 4 CPUs has been submitted for Linux 6.10! As expected, this work providing new AES-XTS implementations for modern x86_64 processors is going into Linux 6.10 as part of the crypto subsystem updates...

Back at Supercomputing 23, the Linux Foundation announced their intent on forming the High Performance Software Foundation for helping to advance open-source software for high performance computing (HPC). The Linux Foundation is now using ISC 24 this week in Hamburg, Germany for announcing that the High Performance Software Foundation has launched...

Today marks the first official day of the Linux 6.10 merge window. Among the horde of pull requests sent out today were the numerous x86 pull requests of material that's been queuing up in TIP.git of which there are many changes benefiting both Intel and AMD...

Building off last night's release of Linux 6.9 stable, GNU Linux-libre 6.9-gnu has debuted as this kernel downstream that works on stripping out support for any drivers/hardware depending upon closed-source firmware/microcode and other alterations in the name of software freedom...

Intel, HPE, and Argonne National Laboratory have announced at ISC High Performance 2024 that the Aurora Supercomputer has broken the Excascale barrier and is now the fastest AI supercomputer currently in existence...

Arch Linux derived CachyOS is known for its aggressive performance optimizations and running well on modern hardware. It's also leading when it comes to adopting other new Linux/open-source features. With this weekend's May 2024 ISO update, CachyOS has rolled out initial support for installing to a root file-system based on Bcachefs...