Category Archives: Linux

AMD Squeezing Out More More ROCm/HIP Performance With New Device-Side PGO

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Compiler profile guided optimization (PGO) techniques have paid off well for increasing CPU performance via application/workload-specific profiles fed back to the compiler to make more informed decisions. AMD compiler engineers have been working on crafting device-side PGO for their AMDGPU LLVM back-end for allowing ROCm/HIP workloads to achieve greater GPU performance. An initial merge request is now open for upstream LLVM…

[$] Fedora and GPG 2.5

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The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG)
project decided to break from the OpenPGP standard for email
encryption in 2023, and instead adopted its own homegrown LibrePGP specification. The GPG 2.4
branch, the last one to adhere to OpenPGP, will be reaching the end of
life in mid-2026. The Fedora project is currently having a discussion
about how that affects the distribution, its users, and what to offer
once 2.4 is no longer receiving updates.

Stenberg: The end of the curl bug-bounty program

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Curl creator Daniel Stenberg has written a blog
post explaining why the project is ending its bug-bounty
program, which started in April 2019:

The never-ending slop submissions take a serious mental toll to
manage and sometimes also a long time to debunk. Time and energy that
is completely wasted while also hampering our will to live.

I have also started to get the feeling that a lot of the security
reporters submit reports with a bad faith attitude. These “helpers”
try too hard to twist whatever they find into something horribly bad
and a critical vulnerability, but they rarely actively contribute to
actually improve curl. They can go to extreme efforts to argue and
insist on their specific current finding, but not to write a fix or
work with the team on improving curl long-term etc. I don’t think we
need more of that.

There are these three bad trends combined that makes us take this
step: the mind-numbing AI slop, humans doing worse than ever and the
apparent will to poke holes rather than to help.

Stenberg writes that he still expects “the best and our most
valued security reporters” to continue informing the project when
security vulnerabilities are discovered. The program will officially
end on January 31, 2026.

Revisiting The Linux 6.19 Performance With “NEXT_BUDDY” Now Disabled

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Back at the start of the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle I ran benchmarks showing some scheduler performance regressions with the new kernel. Fortunately, two weeks out from the Linux 6.19 stable release, merged this weekend was disabling the scheduler’s NEXT_BUDDY feature due to performance regressions. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the latest Linux 6.19 Git state with/without NEXT_BUDDY and comparing it to Linux 6.18 stable for reference.

AMDGPU Patches Updated For HDMI Gaming Features On Linux With Radeon Graphics

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A patch series posted last week for the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver implements HDMI Variable Rate Refresh “VRR” and other gaming features for HDMI displays. With the HDMI Forum blocking HDMI 2.1 open-source support, these HDMI gaming features for the AMDGPU driver were developed via trial-and-error and the limited public knowledge available. A second iteration of these patches are now available for testing…

Espressif Launches Industry’s First MCU-Based Matter Camera Solution

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Espressif Systems has announced a Matter Camera Solution for the ESP32-P4, described as the industry’s first Matter 1.5 camera implementation on an MCU-class platform. The RTOS-based design targets smart home devices such as security cameras, video doorbells, and intercoms, while reducing power consumption and startup latency compared to Linux-based systems. The architecture is built around […]