One of the interesting highlights of September was finally having our hands on an AmpereOne server! After years of being eager to test Ampere Computing's next-generation AArch64 server processors, Ampere sent over their 192-core flagship server processor for a few weeks of testing. The review server was comprised of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship model within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR 2U server.

Building off last year's release of the EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors featuring up to sixty-four Zen 4C cores, AMD today announced the EPYC Embedded 8004 series...

Firefox 131 is out today with a few improvements worth mentioning for Mozilla's web browser...

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver...

Igalia open-source developer Carlos Garcia Campos has written a new blog post to outline recent graphics improvements found in WebKitGTK 2.46 and WPEWebKit 2.46. Most notable with the new stable release is using the Skia library rather than Cairo as the 2D graphics renderer. There are also other graphics improvements and more enhancements to come...

During the month of September on Phoronix there were 265 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles. Here's a look back at the most exciting content for September...

Open-source developer Zeeshan Ali Khan presented at last week's systemd "All Systems Go" developer conference on busd as a new D-Bus broker written in the Rust programming language...

The Linux Mint project has published their status update for September 2024 that outlines work on this desktop-focused, Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution as well as its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment...

An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU...

While I have been very eager to test out the Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake series on Linux in part due to the new Xe2 integrated graphics, after several days of pushing a new Lunar Lake laptop on Linux the results have been very disappointing. Besides needing a very leading-edge software stack to enjoy the Xe2 accelerated graphics out-of-the-box, the performance currently is poor. It's a fraction of the Windows performance and currently falls behind the Meteor Lake graphics performance and in turn also being well behind the AMD RDNA3.5 competition with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops.

The newly-merged sched_ext allows for the Linux kernel scheduler to be made more extensible by allowing BPF programs to be loaded to affect the kernel's scheduling behavior. There's now a similar take on CPU frequency scaling: cpufreq_ext. There's a "request for comments" patch series on cpufreq_ext for making extensible CPU frequency scaling algorithm adaptations with BPF...

With the third quarter drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source related content for the quarter. This quarter there's been more than 730 news articles and 50 Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles all written by your's truly covering a range of areas...

FFmpeg 7.1 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. With FFmpeg 7.1 the VVC video decoder has been promoted to stable, there are a number of Vulkan Video improvements, and an assortment of other exciting enhancements...

Open-source developer Simon Ser has released Sway 1.10-rc1 as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor. With Sway 1.10 there are many new features coming...

AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 as their latest open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems prior to ending the quarter...

As expected the Linux 6.12-rc1 kernel is out today in marking the end of the very exciting two-week Linux 6.12 merge window that saw many high profile features land...

The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. There's real-time PREEMPT_RT finally in mainline, the much anticipated sched_ext code also was merged, QR codes for DRM panic messages, initial out-of-the-box support for Intel Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake and Battlemage, initial Raspberry Pi 5 support, and a ton of other hardware support additions and new innovative kernel software features.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system that is known for pursuing aggressive performance while still delivering a nice Linux desktop experience is out with its September 2024 release...

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements...