The Most Popular Clear Linux Benchmarks & Intel's Software Innovations Over Its History

Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clea…
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LLVM Begins Landing Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" Support

The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations...
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Around 8% Of Debian Source Packages Are Building Against Rust Libraries

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large...
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Firefox 141 Release Brings Lower RAM Usage On Linux

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser...
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HarfBuzz 11.3 Delivers Significant Performance Improvements

HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adoboe Photoshop and…
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Linux 6.16-rc7 Released: "I Think We're In Good Shape"

The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now availablr for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week...
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Linux 6.16-rc7 Bringing Fix For Possible Bogus/Miscalculated Load Averages

Among the fixes merged today ahead of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 6.16-rc7 test kernel release is a lone patch on the "sched/urgent" side to fix possible bogus load average values. Reported system load averages within the kernel's scheduler code could potentially be off going back to May of 2021...
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NVIDIA Bringing CUDA To RISC-V

NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors...
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Linux Kernel Patches Speed-Up CRC32 Performance For CPUs With "Good" AVX-512

Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC…
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Debian 13.0 Ready To Introduce Formal RISC-V Support But Still Bound By Slow Hardware

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by sl…
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SFrame Support Beginning To Materialize For LLVM/Clang

SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream...
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Radeon Vulkan Driver's Emulated Ray-Tracing Scores A ~40% Improvement For Quake II RTX

In addition to Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" making some nice performance improvements for modern AMD GPUs with hardware ray-tracing, the emulated ray-tracing code path in RADV for primarily older GPUs has seen some improvements merged this weekend. In fact, so significant that from one merge request is around 40% faster performance fo…
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Debian 13.0 "Trixie" Planning For Release On August 9

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time...
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Rust-Written NOVA Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Being Further Built Out In Linux 6.17

For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version...
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Open-Source & Rust-Written Burn MATMUL Kernels Can Compete With NVIDIA's CUDA/cuBLAS

The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end...
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Wayland Color Management For HDR Under Review For Chrome/Chromium

The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser...
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KDE Plasma 6.5 Brings Rounded Bottom Corners For Windows By Default

KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows...
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