New AMD code merged today to the mainline Linux 6.16 kernel that's in-development is the introduction of the AMD-SBI driver/subsystem for primarily benefiting EPYC server platforms. AMD-SBI is for their Side-Band Interface also known as the Advanced Platform Management Link (APML)...
Merged today to Mesa 25.2 is an adjustment for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver to help with Direct3D games running under Linux with Valve's Steam Play via Proton + VKD3D...
Last month Intel software engineers began posting Linux enablement patches for Wildcat Lake. Some of those first patches were merged for Linux 6.16 while more work is forthcoming. Posted yesterday for the first time on the Linux kernel mailing list was enabling the NPU accelerator support for Wildcat Lake...
Since recently picking up a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop for Linux testing now that the Linux support is starting to evolve into better shape (albeit still with many rough corners limiting the daily usability of such devices with Linux), one of the areas I was curious about was looking at the performance of Linux binaries with GCC vs. LLVM Clang. Here are some benchmarks for those wondering how the GCC and Clang compilers are competing on the Snapdragon X Elite with the Oryon CPU cores.
Just a few days after the FEX 2506 release for that open-source emulator enabling x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) hosts, Box64 is out with its newest feature update for this open-source project with similar goals...
While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo SoCs have a nice out-of-the-box experience with modern Linux distributions for the Radeon 8050S and Radeon 8060S graphics, if going for the recently-released Linux 6.15 kernel there are some performance gains to enjoy as well as if opting for the latest Mesa 25.2 development code for the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support...
Following all of the Linux kernel graphics driver features merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel, sent out this morning were the initial batch of fixes to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code. Besides fixes to these graphics / display / accelerator drivers, there is one new feature: the AMDKFD kernel compute driver can now be enabled on RISC-V systems...
In addition to the NFS server changes for Linux 6.16 with now supporting larger I/O block sizes, the Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged this week for this next kernel version...
Following the Intel TDX host support for KVM being merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window, another batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were merged for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window...
Mesa's modern Rust-written OpenCL driver for Gallium3D "Rusticl" has closed one of the few remaining gaps with the former Clover OpenCL state tracker. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is native FP16 support...
As some extra benchmarks to put out today for the Phoronix.com 21st birthday, there is some additional data points to share on AMD Strix Halo when using Linux 6.15 stable and the early development state of Linux 6.16 Git ahead of its v6.16-rc1 tagging this weekend. The Linux kernel performance is moving in the right direction at least with this round of testing using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO SoC...
An initial patch series sent back out in April proposed PCACHE as a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of the CXL block device driver and brings some benefits over the likes of BCache and dm-writecache...
FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for improving their operating system support for laptops. While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it's still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will likely declare their wireless support as "unstable" to allow time for making future breaking modifications...
Last month I began the much anticipated AMD Strix Halo Linux benchmarking at Phoronix by testing the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 that features 16 cores / 32 threads and the very impressive Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. Coming in one step below that flagship Strix Halo SoC is the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 with Radeon 8050S graphics. Coming out today on Phoronix - coincidentally timed for the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com - is the first benchmarks of the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 along with the Radeon 8050S graphics.
For some very fun Linux benchmarking on this 21st anniversary of starting Phoronix is looking at the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 Linux performance, the 12-core Strix Halo SoC with Radeon 8050S Graphics. While there have been various benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ (PRO) 395 in recent weeks on Phoronix and other publications, the other Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs haven't been as widely seen in the industry yet. The 12-core Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 was tested within another HP ZBook Ultra G1a for a very interesting look at the high-end/premium Linux laptop/workstation performance.
Phoronix has made it another year. Today marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com with a focus on providing Linux hardware reviews. Linux hardware support is a night and day difference then to today as is the overall ecosystem with all the major hardware vendors these days having some -- often significant -- levels of interest in Linux support. No longer is it typically a worry of whether your mouse, 56K modem, WiFi adapter, or other basic peripherals working but most often just a matter of how well the performance is on Linux, whether there is LVFS/Fwupd firmware updating support, and if other non-show-stopping features are supported. We still haven't managed the "year of the Linux desktop" but it's been wild with Chrome OS and Android being based on Linux, Linux coming to dominate the server world, Linux being ubiquitous to cloud computing, and Valve revolutionizing the Linux gaming space...
Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical announced they will be sunsetting their Bazaar distributed revision control system code hosting with Launchpad. Git wins...
In addition to a number of new Rust abstractions in different Linux kernel subsystems, the main Rust infrastructure pull request was submitted and merged yesterday as we approach the end of the Linux 6.16 merge window...
Last week many Bcachefs performance optimizations, recovery work, and enhanced error messages were merged at the start of the Linux 6.16 merge window. Now ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc1 release coming on Sunday to cap off the merge window, a second round of Bcachefs enhancements and fixes were merged...
For those not liking the direction of the Linux desktop with its Wayland-first focus, the Rust-written Redox OS has begun rolling out X11 support within its Orbital display server...
Mesa 25.1.2 is out today as the newest stable bi-weekly point release to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan/video drivers widely relied upon by Linux systems...
In addition to the memory management "MM" changes merged last week that included features like Kernel HandOver "KHO" support, a second batch of MM changes were submitted and merged this week for Linux 6.16...
Greg Kroah-Hartman today released Linux 6.15.1 as the first stable point release to the Linux 6.15 kernel that first shipped a week and a half ago. Linux 6.15.1 brings an initial batch of fixes, which are particularly noteworthy if trying to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptop on Linux...
In addition to the excitement this morning of the Radeon RX 9060 XT review embargo lift, today also serves as another special day at AMD as they announced they have acquired software firm Brium...
Ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card hitting retailers tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on this latest addition to the RDNA4 family. Here are the initial Linux graphics performance benchmarks for this new $349 graphics card compared to other AMD Radeon graphics cards as well as the NVIDIA GeForce and Intel Arc competition.
Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the "linux-firmware" package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It's nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the out-of-the-box hardware support on Ubuntu Linux...
Linux kernel developers continue building out the support around the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification for benefiting modern high performance servers. With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there are more CXL features now in place...
One of the niftiest kernel innovations to be upstreamed into Linux over the past year was sched_ext for extensible scheduler behavior in allowing kernel schedulers to be implemented via BPG programs. Sched_ext can allow for interesting scheduler improvements with a variety of use-cases and showed much potential even before being upstreamed. The work on sched_ext isn't yet over though and yet more improvements landed for Linux 6.16...
The numerous hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged to Linux 6.16 on Tuesday for further enhancing the desktop hardware reporting capabilities and more with this next kernel release...
SquashFS-Tools 4.7 is out today as a big feature update to the user-space utilities for creating/modifying/extracting SquashFS read-only file-system images. SquashFS 4.7 delivers some big performance improvements and other nice enhancements...
While Linux 5.13 back in 2021 added support for the Apple Magic Mouse 2, only now with the Linux 6.16 kernel is there support arriving for the USB-C version of the Apple Magic Mouse 2 that debuted last year...
The wide assortment of x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel due out as stable in July. As is usually the case, there are a number of Intel and AMD platform updates along with a wide assortment of driver improvements primarily for laptops from the major OEMs/ODMs...
While Intel opted against implementing Hyper Threading for their latest Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors, Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) still proves very effective on the AMD side. Even though the top-end AMD Ryzen AI MAX "Strix Halo" SoCs provide 16 Zen 5 cores, the presence of SMT for 32 threads still proves worthwhile from both a performance and power efficiency perspective. Here is an on/off comparison for SMT with the flagship AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a.
AMD compiler engineer Joseph Huber is the one who ported DOOM to run on GPUs atop ROCm + LLVM libc as part of taking standard C/C++ code to run on GPUs and more recently has also been pursuing Flang/Fortran support atop GPUs. The latest in this ongoing quest is implementing efficient malloc support for memory allocation support on GPUs via the LLVM libc library...
Valve engineer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais contributed ByoWave Proteus controller support to the Linux kernel. ByoWave Proteus are some modular controller designs that can be adapted based upon the needs of the gamer and even what title you may be playing at the moment. The triggers and buttons are all repositionable for a very customized controller experience. The only downside is the modular gaming controller kit retails for $299 USD, but at least now works off the mainline Linux kernel...
This week on 5 June marks 21 years since I started Phoronix.com for providing Linux hardware reviews and open-source news. In marking the 21st birthday of Phoronix is a special Phoronix Premium offering if you wish to show your support and hopefully provide for a successful year...
One day after Steam on Linux set a recent high with the Steam Survey, a new Steam client beta is out today to fix an excruciating annoyance affecting some Linux gamers...
Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers continue working on enabling support for the Xe3 integrated graphics premiering with next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs. Today a number of additional PCI device IDs have been merged to the Mesa 25.2 code to reflect the growing family...
Kexec HandOver "KHO" was merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel as part of all the memory management "MM" changes. Kexec HandOver is providing the basis for some nifty low-level features moving forward...
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have announced TPDE as a fast and adaptable compiler back-end framework. The code is now open-source and they are talking up some very wild compile time improvements... Compiling code for x86_64 and AArch64 with TPDE can be ten to twenty times faster than using the LLVM Clang compiler...
A very convenient addition to Linux 6.16 for system administrators is reporting to user-space via sysfs counters for the number of hard and soft lock-ups as well as RCU stalls...
In April we looked at the Framework 13 updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and its great out-of-the-box performance and nice power efficiency of Strix Point. Via ACPI platform profiles the power/performance mode can be tuned if desiring a longer battery life or preferring even greater performance. Today's article is looking at that power/performance impact of the different ACPI platform profiles available on the Framework 13 motherboard with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
For those running an Network File System "NFS" server, the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel will allow optionally enabling a larger payload size that may yield better performance. Eventually the default payload size may be increased if all goes well from user feedback and testing...
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