Besides the integrated RDNA3 graphics making the Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs interesting, making the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G a fun benchmarking target besides its sub-$200 price tag is having a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C performance and power efficiency when offlining various core combinations on the Ryzen 5 8500G desktop processor.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution aims to be a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" that is aggressive with its performance optimizations. CachyOS takes to leveraging compiler optimizations like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), the BORE scheduler, and also offering package archives compiled for x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 in allowing the distribution's packages to be catered toward newer Intel and AMD processors. In this article is a comparison of CachyOS packages from their main archive, the x86-64-v3 optimized packages, and then the x86-64-v4 wares that can be beneficial for modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC / AMD Ryzen systems.

February was an exciting month in the hardware and Linux/open-source space with 224 original news articles written by your's truly over the past month along with 15 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark featured articles. There was a lot of exciting open-source accomplishments, the launch of the AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs with RDNA3 graphics, breaking the news about ZLUDA providing CUDA atop AMD ROCm as a formerly stealth project, the Znver5 GCC patch emerging, and more...

A last set of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted this week for DRM-Next to stage ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

There had been some hope that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format out-of-the-box, but that isn't going to happen as a default change...

The X.Org Foundation's elections for the Board of Directors have been delayed as there weren't enough participants nominated for the available seats to hold an election...

Intel has published oneDNN 3.4 as the newest version of this Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI software collection. The oneDNN library provides deep learning primitives for software like PyTorch, MXNet, ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, MATLAB Deep Learning Toolbox, and other sotware...

The long in-development work for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support plumbed into GNOME's Mutter compositor might still make it for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out this month. It's still being treated as an experimental feature at this point but a feature freeze exception is being sought to allow its inclusion this release rather than waiting for GNOME 47 in the autumn...

Succeeding last year's Coreboot 4.22 release is now a new release... Coreboot 24.02. This open-source system firmware project is now the latest to shift to a year-month versioning system. The newly-christened Coreboot 24.02 brings support for three new motherboards, a number of ACPI updates, and also pulls in the new GRUB 2.12 and other changes...

It looks like the new Panthor DRM driver will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel now that it made it into drm-misc-next today. In turn the Mesa 24.1-devel code has landed support for this newer Arm Mali graphics into the Panfrost Gallium3D driver...

Intel has made open-source its NPU Acceleration Library (intel-npu-acceleration-library) as a user-space library for Windows and Linux systems for interfacing with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found initially on their new Meteor Lake laptops...

With Steam on Linux use for January clocking in at 1.95%, I was very eager to see if the February results would once again surpass the 2.0% threshold... Unfortunately, it moved in the opposite direction...

Should you be running nine or more GPUs per system, the Mesa 24.1 release next quarter will raise the limit of 8 DRM devices for the Vulkan API per system to now allow a theoretical 256 GPUs per system...

The WavPack open-source lossless wavefile compressor is up to version 5.7 after more than one year in development. Making this new release quite notable is adding multi-threaded encode and decode support to the WavPack library and its CLI tools...

Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired...

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension...

Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox...

It's happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March...

Nate Graham is out with his belated weekend update to highlight all of the interesting KDE development activity for the week. This week, of course, saw the release of KDE MegaRelease 6 with Plasma 6.0, KDE Gear 24.02, and KDE Frameworks 6.0 in tow. Post-launch Graham characterizes Plasma 6.0 as being in good shape and the extra QA paying off. He commented, "Hopefully this should help banish those now 16-year-old painful memories of KDE 4. It’s a new KDE now. Harder, better, faster, stronger!"..