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KosmicKrisp Now Vulkan 1.3 Compliant For Apple Devices

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation...

Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks: Some Minor & Rare Performance Advantages For Desktop Workloads

Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

AMD Strix Point Performance Continues Evolving Nicely With Ubuntu 25.10

This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

AMD ROCm 7.1 Release Appears Imminent

AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1...

AMDGPU With Linux 6.19 Will Support Analog Video Connectors For Old GCN 1.0 GPUs

Following last week's initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.19, another round of new AMDGPU / Radeon / AMDKFD material was sent out today to DRM-Next. Notable with this pull is the Display Core "DC" work for analog video connectors as the initiative from one of Valve's contractors for improving the Radeon GCN 1.0 era GPU support with the AMDGPU driver...

AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Performance For OpenCL Workloads

On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have since sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

Fedora Linux 43 Now Available For Download

It's Fedora 43 release day! This latest installment of Fedora Linux is now available for download with Fedora Workstation 43 using the GNOME 49 desktop, the modern Linux 6.17 kernel powering this distribution release, and many exciting improvements and other leading-edge software updates powering this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

OpenRazer 3.11 Released With Linux Driver Support For Newer Razer Devices

OpenRazer 3.11 is out as the newest version of these out-of-tree but open-source and community-maintained drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Plus OpenRazer also provides a user-space daemon for controlling Razer RGB lighting and other features. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic app, OpenRazer makes for a pleasant Razer device experience for gamers and enthusiasts under Linux...

FreeBSD Celebrates The Milestone Of Reproducible Builds & No Root Needed

A big focus for the FreeBSD 15.0 development was on supporting reproducible builds as has been a growing trend in the open-source ecosystem in recent years. One month out from the official FreeBSD 15.0 release, the FreeBSD project is today celebrating having crossed the milestone of being able to be built reproducibly and as well now building FreeBSD without requiring root privileges...

Ubuntu Unity In Need Of More Developers To Survive

The Ubuntu Unity community flavor of Ubuntu Linux built around the Unity desktop is in a difficult position and at risk for its survival given the lack of developers involved. A call-out has been made in seeking more community developers to contribute to Ubuntu Unity...

AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" 2P Performance Seeing Some Gains On Linux 6.18

Beyond packing many exciting new features and changes, Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Assuming the Linux 6.18 LTS designation, this next kernel version will see lots of use in enterprise environments and thus recently carried out some AMD EPYC 9965 2P "Turin" benchmarks between Linux 6.17 stable and the Linux 6.18 development kernel state...

AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Linux Performance For Single & Dual GPU Benchmarks

Today the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is officially shipping as the company's new RDNA4-based offering designed for AI workloads and priced at $1299+ USD. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 offers 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and features 128 AI accelerators and rated for 96 TFLOPs peak half-precision compute, up to 1531 TOPS INT4 sparse, and has a 300 Watt TDP. Here are the initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 under Linux with ROCm 7.0 and testing both in single and dual R9700 graphics card configurations.

Splash DRM Client Proposed For Linux But Its Future Is Uncertain

Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution...
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