Phoronix

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled...

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too...

With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it's looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.

AMD engineers have submitted a HIP-RT update for Blender developers ahead of the big Blender 5.0 release to enhance the RDNA4 ray-tracing performance...

NVIDIA engineer Ankit Agrawal today posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series working on Linux virtualization support for Extended GPU Memory (EGM)...

Following sudo-rs becoming the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 as of a few days ago, Canonical is also proceeding with its transition of using the Rust version of Coreutils for this next Ubuntu Linux release...

Miracle-WM is the Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir project with a focus on tiling and inspired by Sway/i3. Miracle-WM 0.7 is now available for advancing this Mir-powered Wayland experience with additional functionality now in place...

A change proposal filed for next year's Fedora 44 release wants to aim for a nice experience when running Wine or the Proton variants supporting the Linux kernel's NTSYNC driver for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives...

A new feature Microsoft has been working on for its Azure Linux operating system is OS Guard as a container-host platform that enforces immutability, code integrity, mandatory access control, and other features. Microsoft quietly revealed more about OS Guard last month and yesterday's release of Azure Linux 3.0.20250822 builds out more of the OS Guard functionality...

Linux Mint 22.2 is officially out today as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base...

On the same day as beginning to ship the Intel Arc Pro B50 ~$349 USD workstation graphics card, Intel also shipped OpenVINO 2025.3 as the newest feature release for this open-source AI toolkit...

The GNOME 49 release candidate "49.rc" was just released as we close in on the stable GNOME 49.0 release in two weeks...

Well, here is some sad news... After the better part of two decades at Red Hat, Hans de Goede shared today he will be leaving the company next month. Hans de Goede during his time at Red Hat has been responsible for countless hardware improvements especially for Linux laptops, serves as the x86 platform subsystem lead maintainer for the Linux kernel, and has done immense work over the past 17 years for bettering Linux hardware support especially on consumer devices...

SUSE's Lubos Kocman announced today on the behalf of the openSUSE team that they will be providing extended maintenance updates and community support with the upcoming Leap 16 release...

The Rust Foundation today announced the creation of the Rust Innovation Lab that will serve as a stable, neutral home to select Rust projects with governance support, legal and administrative support, fiscal sponsorship, and more...

Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle, which will likely end up being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) version, the AMD Secure AVIC driver appears ready for merging. The AMD Secure AVIC patches were queued this week into a TIP branch and this likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window...

Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support...

Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.

Mesa 25.2.2 is out today as another on-time, bi-weekly Mesa point release managed by Eric Engestrom...

One of the planned changes for Fedora 43 was setting an expectation that RPM package builds are reproducible. Much of Fedora's "reproducible builds" effort is already complete but this change has now been deferred to the Fedora 44 release next year...

A patch series for the Linux kernel scheduler code is queued up for expected introduction in Linux 6.18 to defer throttle when tasks exit to user-space. These changes to switch the scheduler to a task-based throttle model and task-based throttle time accounting can provide a latency win and also address a possible deadlock situation for real-time "RT" kernels...

It's not too often hearing PCMCIA these days as that defunct PC card standard for laptops from the 90's and early 00's. Back in 2023 Linux began dropping old PCMCIA drivers from the kernel while coming as a surprise today are some clean-ups for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) subsystem code persisting within the Linux kernel...

Merged overnight to Mesa 25.3 is an improvement for the Intel driver's Vulkan Video encode/decode handling that has been in the works the past few months...

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run AI large language models (LLMs) across different operating systems, hardware, and models is about to enjoy a nice speed boost...

It looks like the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library widely used by cross-platform games for software/hardware abstractions isn't done enhancing its support for running on the X.Org/X11 Server. Similarly, Valve is still committing resources to enhancing the support...

Due to a "significant portion" of Red Hat's internal QA team responsible for Fedora QA leaving the company or switching to other teams at Red Hat, there are some Fedora ARM release changes coming to deal with the reduced abilities of their quality assurance team...

Two years ago the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver was updated to handle negative temperature reporting. That's for some users with exotic cooling systems and then also use within some industrial applications where the systems may be subject to sub-zero temperatures. The AMD sbtsi_temp driver is also now being similarly updated for handling freezing CPU temperatures...

NVIDIA just released the 580.82.07 stable Linux driver as their newest R580 driver series update...

With LLVM 21.1 having been released last week as the newest half-year feature update to this open-source compiler stack, I have begun benchmarking Clang 21 on a variety of systems for getting a feel for the performance over Clang 20. Eventually it will be extended as well to looking at the Clang 21 performance against GCC and vendor compilers. For some initial Clang 21 benchmarking, here is a look at how the Clang 21 C/C++ compiler is performing on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Zen 5 processors compared to the prior release.

Arch Linux's convenient text-based OS installer "archinstall" is out with a new release today that promotes Logical Volume Manager (LVM) based installs no longer as "beta" quality...

Earlier this year Canonical announced plans for using sudo-rs as the Rust-written sudo implementation by default for Ubuntu 25.10 along with Rust Coreutils and other Rust system components. The sudo-rs goal has been achieved with the newest Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs now using this sudo implementation by default...

Separate from yesterday's upstream new GIMP 3.2 development release, open-source developer Josh Ellithorpe announced the creation of a new GIMP plug-in dubbed "Dream Prompter" for bringing the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview model to this open-source photo/image editing software...

Now that FFmpeg 8.0 has shipped for this widely-used multimedia library, development is back on of major feature work toward the next major release. Landing on Monday was the initial code for a major rewrite to the swscale code in providing a new framework that is faster and more maintainable/extensible moving forward...

Last month Intel posted new Linux patches for a "SoC power slider" feature premiering with upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptops. That SoC Power Slider support for the Intel int340x is now expected to be upstreamed with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

To help in accelerating the development of kernel graphics drivers and any other NPU/accelerator drivers written in the Rust programming language, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem is creating its own DRM-Rust development tree for drivers and associated Rust infrastructure...

For the Steam Survey results published last month for July it showed Steam on Linux use approaching 3%. With hitting 2.89% in July there was hope that perhaps in August it would breach the elusive 3.0% threshold not seen since the original days of Steam on Linux when the overall Steam user base was also much smaller than it is today. But that didn't pan out and Steam on Linux numbers for August are showing a small dip...

GIMP 3.1.4 is out today as the second development release treking toward GIMP 3.2. Most notable with GIMP 3.1.4 are the initial implementations of two of the main features planned for GIMP 3.2: link layers and vector layers...

With the Rust 1.90 release due out in mid-September, the Rust compiler on Linux x86_64 will begun using the LLD linker by default in order to "significantly reduce" linking times...

On Friday AMD sent out their initial batch of kernel graphics driver feature changes intended for merging to the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

Not your typical review on Phoronix today but rather a brief look at the Gentex PLACE Any Space smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. For those facing ten years on their Nest Protect smoke detectors and looking for an end-of-life replacement to these smoke detectors discontinued by Google, the Gentex PLACE smart smoke detectors are an interesting and capable alternative. Being faced by needing to find a replacement to Nest Protects myself that have now expired and finding many others in the same boat with no clear winning smart smoke detector right now, I decided to go with the Gentex PLACE and figured it worthwhile to share a bit of my experience.

A patch queued up into the Linux exFAT driver's development tree optimizes the allocation bitmap loading time. For cases of small cluster sizes on large partitions this can yield around 16x faster loading times...

The open-source Redox OS operating system project written in the Rust programming language is out with its status update covering August 2025...

For those using the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux driver "Nouveau", with a pending fix coming for Linux 6.17 and existing kernel releases it should be a much more stable and reliable experience...

Over the course of August on Phoronix were 267 original news articles and 17 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Coming somewhat as a surprise, AMD Linux testing articles and hardware reviews managed to capture all top 10 spots for the most viewed content... Something no single vendor has pulled off in the past 21 years of Phoronix. But with the launch of the Framework Desktop, AMD Krackan Point Linux testing for sub-$500 laptops, Threadripper 9000 series, and other hardware excitement, that feat happened in August...

In addition to working on new OpenCL performance optimizations, Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst just landed another important feature into Rusticl: OpenCL semaphores...

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 is one of the best supported Snapdragon X Elite laptops under Linux thus far. Thanks to active developer engagement and cooperation from Lenovo there are firmware files in upstream linux-firmware.git and Lenovo's generally robust Linux support make it one of the better choices for the Snapdragon X laptops currently out there. In further enhancing the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen6 on Linux, a new EC driver has been posted for supporting this Snapdragon powered laptop...

For those looking at assembling an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation and interested in having working system sensor monitoring support, the ASUS EC Sensors hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver is in the process of introducing support for the Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard...

Ahead of the GNOME 49 release candidate being announced in the days ahead, today marked the "49.rc" tagging of the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor components. Some last-minute user-facing changes have landed along with other improvements for polishing ahead of next month's GNOME 49 stable release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc4 as the newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 in working toward the stable release in late September...

AerynOS 2025.08 ISOs are now available as the third release of the year for this innovative Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS...