The past few months we have been intrigued by an AMD GFX1250 target added to the LLVM codebase for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is RDNA4 and GFX1250 is presumably some "RDNA 4.5" / "RDNA Refresh" part akin to GFX1150 having been for the RDNA 3.5 parts with Strix Halo / Strix Point. The prior LLVM code confirmed GFX1250 is in APU form factor but product details beyond that have been scarce. Today a new AMD GFX1251 target was merged to LLVM...

Released yesterday was the OpenJDK Java 25 release along with Oracle's GraalVM 25 alternative JVM...

While down to AMD Austin yesterday for the Instinct MI355X and ROCm 7.0 launch, I had the chance to chat again with Anush Elangovan. As the VP of AI Software at AMD, talking with Anush is always insightful and technical in nature. One of the questions I posed him was around the length of hardware support with ROCm...

GNOME 49.0 is out today as the latest half-year feature release to the GNOME desktop that will go on to power the likes of Fedora Workstation 43 and Ubuntu 25.10...

When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I also ended up carrying out some Llama.cpp AI benchmarks as the first time exploring the AI inferencing performance between Windows and Linux for both CPU and GPU-accelerated deployments. Here are those results for exploring the Llama.cpp performance between Windows and Linux with different large language models.

Yesterday I was invited along with a small group of others to try out the AMD Instinct MI355X accelerator down in Austin, Texas. The AMD Instinct MI355X is fully supported with the newly-released AMD ROCm 7.0...

Systemd 258 is out today as stable as the latest major feature release to this Linux init system and service manager...

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250910 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used by Azure and other services. Azure Linux 3.0 has long been using the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel while now Linux 6.12 LTS is a new option focused on providing better hardware enablement support...

A patch making it to a TIP Git branch this week adds Linux kernel support for detecting the FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor, which will become important with today's growing server CPU counts...

Intel shipped the Compute Runtime 25.35.35096.9 as their newest monthly feature update to this open-source GPU compute stack for their integrated and discrete graphics wares for providing OpenCL and Level Zero support...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team is the one who has been driving the development forward on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver. While traditionally focused on getting OpenGL games running over Zink, recently he has taken to optimizing Zink for workstation graphics...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project published a new blog post to outline some of their latest development activity. One of the areas they have been focusing on in the performance department has been for addressing much slower git status performance compared to Linux...

The big set of Rust DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent out to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel. Most notable with this pull request is merging the Tyr driver, the new open-source and Rust-based DRM driver for Arm Mali GPUs...

AMD engineers have begun ironing out ACPI C4 support for the Linux kernel in order to provide greater power savings on newer AMD Ryzen platforms that have begun to support this deeper sleep state...

Next week marks one year since the launch of the Xeon 6900P series Granite Rapids server processors. Given the occasion and a new server in the lab, here is a look at how Intel's Granite Rapids top-end Xeon 6980P server processors are performing one year after the original introduction with a production-grade server platform as well as incorporating all of the Linux software improvements over the past year.

Overnight the AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags began appearing within the public Git repositories. Now AMD ROCm 7.0 is officially released as a very significant step forward for AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for better competing against NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem...

It's beta day for Fedora 43 and the release media is ready for testing!..

As a pleasant surprise waking up this morning is AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags beginning to appear on GitHub, indicating the likely imminent official release of the ROCm 7.0 compute stack as the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct software stack aimed to be the open alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem...

Fedora 43 Beta is releasing today as we work toward the official release in either late October or early November. I have been testing out the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta candidate to great success on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" powered Framework Desktop. Here are some benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 42 compared to the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta.

Queued up in the past few days to the USB subsystem's "usb-next" Git branch are the Intel USBIO drivers for Linux 6.18. These drivers are needed to support the web cameras on various newer Intel laptop models...