On Monday at CES Intel announced Panther Lake as Core Ultra Series 3 with the initial laptop designs to be available for pre-order starting the following day, 6 January, while global availability is expected around 27 January. Now a few days after pre-orders opened up, few options are available and some of the models will not be shipping until mid-February.

Since the 6th I've been looking around quite a bit at US Internet retailers and that of the major manufacturers to explore Panther Lake laptop

A NVIDIA engineer restructuring some of the printf-related code within the memory resource controller "memcg" statistics printing code to reduce the system time by 11% for dumping those stats.

NVIDIA continues investing more and more into lower-level Linux kernel engineering improvements given their grand successes in the data center, beyond just their traditional scope of GPU and networking subsystems. One of their latest improvements they are working to upstream is to the memory management code to optimize the statistics output printing for an 11% reduction in system

The Linux kernel developers for months now have been debating proposed guidelines for tool-generated submissions to the Linux kernel . As part of the "tools", the main motivator for this documentation has been around the era of AI and large language models with coding assistants and more. Torvalds made some remarks on the Linux kernel mailing list around his belief in focusing the documentation on "tools" rather than explicitly focusing on AI, given the likelihood of AI-assisted contributions continuing regardless of documentation.

For those wondering Linus Torvalds latest

The modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was designed from the start to be more broadly compatible with non-x86 architectures given their discrete graphics processors being front and center, unlike the legacy i915 kernel graphics driver being very x86 minded. While this allows running Intel Arc Graphics on ARM or RISC-V, there are some other kinks still being ironed out with using Intel graphics in the non-x86 world. One of those limitations currently being worked through is the lack of GPU

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-misc-next changes to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante graphics/NPU hardware has added a new "PPU flop reset" feature gleaned off studying the downstream vendor kernel driver.

Gert Wollny of Collabora has sorted out this PPU flop reset feature needed some Vivante hardware implementations. The PPU flop reset is used for clearing temporary registers of the GPU.

To allow for additional security hardening of the Linux kernel, a patch series has been updated more than one year later to link the relocatable x86_64 kernel as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code.

Ard Biesheuvel sent out the set of 19 patches today for switching to PIE linking for the relocatable kernel. This would provide long-term security benefits and would be paired with Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) usage.

Biesheuvel explained on today's patch series:

"This series is a

FEX, the open-source emulator for running x86 and x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux and that is sponsored by Valve and to be used by the Steam Frame , is out with a new monthly feature release.

FEX 2601 updated its thunks for Vulkan 1.4.337 to address some newer Vulkan API extensions not previously supported. This update to FEX will allow newer Mesa/Vulkan drivers to in turn work properly with the

For those using a DisplayPort to HDMI dongle currently with the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver may find some higher resolutions / modes unavailable. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for dealing with this situation due to an oversight in the kernel driver.

It turns out the AMDGPU kernel driver has accidentally been limiting the clock to 165MHz even though HDMI 1.3+ bumped the clock to 340MHz. That in turn could cause issues for DP-HDMI dongles trying to run high resolution displays due to

While for years open-source firmware enthusiasts have been after an open-source Firmware Support Package "FSP" for Intel CPUs and back during Raja Koduri's tenure at Intel it sounded like it might happen, it has yet to happen. But at least with the forthcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" there are some FSP improvements.

For those considering a Panther Lake laptop with the first Core Ultra Series 3 laptops coming to market in the weeks ahead, there are some FSP improvements that haven't