AMDGPU Driver Ready To Be The Default For Aging Kaveri / Kabini / Mullins APUs

With Linux 6.19 AMD GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.1 dGPUs now default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon Linux driver. For these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics cards it means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improved functionality in using this modern AMDGPU kernel graphics driver on Linux. One of the exceptions has been the GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri still defaulting to the older Radeon driver but a patch has been volleyed to
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Meta Has A New Linux Optimization To Avoid Throttling TCP Throughput Unnecessarily

Meta's great Linux engineering team have been working through some fresh performance optimizations recently from optimizing /proc/interrupts outputs to renewing their investment in jemalloc . A new Linux kernel patch this week provides another optimization to avoid a possible situation of throttling the TCP throughput unnecessarily on Linux systems.

JP Kobryn sent out a mm/vmpressure patch to skip socket pressure for costly order reclaim. Kobryn explained of the situation with the patch this week:
"When kswapd reclaims at high order due to fragmentation, vmpressure() can report

FreeBSD Laptop Project Hopes To Port Newer Linux Graphics Drivers This Year

Developers working on the FreeBSD laptop initiative to make the FreeBSD operating system more suitable for running on modern laptop hardware have drafted their road-map of further action items they hope to accomplish in 2026.

An updated road-map has been published for mapping out and scheduling the FreeBSD Laptop Project's work over the year ahead. Plans are subject to change but they continue to have some ambitious goals for enhancing the quality of FreeBSD support on laptop hardware.

Benefiting not only laptops but also FreeBSD desktop use are
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Snapdragon X2's Adreno X2-85 GPU Sees Driver Improvements For Linux 7.1

Rob Clark on Thursday sent out the batch of MSM DRM driver feature changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. This new work for DRM-Next includes enhancements to the Adreno X2-85 GPU support as found within the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs plus various enhancements to existing Qualcomm graphics/display hardware.

The MSM driver with Linux 7.1 is enabling preemption support for the X2-85 GPU. Also new is SKU detection for the X2-85 GPU. The
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Vulkan 1.4.348 Ships Four New Extensions - Including One To Help OpenGL Emulation

Vulkan 1.4.348 released this morning as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.348 comes four new extensions.

Beyond the usual mundane fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.348 brings four new extensions: VK_ARM_data_graph_instruction_set_tosa, VK_ARM_scheduling_controls (revision 2), VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index, and VK_QCOM
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AMD P-State Driver Introducing New Features With Linux 7.1

A few Linux kernel releases have passed since there have been any new features to talk about for the AMD P-State driver for CPU frequency scaling / power management with modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. But for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel there are some new features now ready for mainline.

There are a few new features for the "amd_pstate" driver with Linux 7.1 plus a couple of fixes too. Mario Limonciello of AMD, who has now taken over as the formal AMD P-
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Linux Fixes Performance Bug Affecting Qualcomm Ath11k & Ath12k WiFi Drivers

Sent out today were the networking subsystem fixes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel. These networking fixes in time for Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc7 release include addressing performance issues within the Qualcomm Ath11k and Ath12k WiFi drivers that have always existed ever since the drivers were upstreamed.

Catching my eye when going through this week's Linux networking fixes were patches to the newer Atheros "Ath" drivers for avoiding poor performance stemming from the stopping the wrong aggregation session.
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Microsoft's Newest Open-Source Project: Runtime Security For AI Agents

Microsoft today announced their newest open-source (MIT-licensed) software project.. the Agent Governance Toolkit. Microsoft is trying their hand at coming up with runtime security governance for autonomous AI agents.

Microsoft proclaims their new open-source project is the first toolkit that addresses all ten agentic AI risks identified last year by the OWASP. These risks include goal hijacking, tool musiuse, identity abuse, supply chain risks, code execution, memory poisoning, insecure communications, cascading failures, human-agent trust exploitation, and
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Intel Posts Fourth Version Of Cache Aware Scheduling For Linux

Just over one year ago Intel Linux engineers began working on cache-aware load balancing for Linux or more commonly referred to as Cache Aware Scheduling . The functionality for helping modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors especially hasn't yet been upstreamed to the Linux kernel but yesterday the fourth version of these patches were posted for review.

Cache Aware Scheduling aims to enhance the Linux performance for modern CPUs with multiple cache domains. The scheduler tries to help ensure that tasks sharing data are colocated to the same last level cache (LLC
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AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software

With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here's a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 since its launch

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