Phoronix

Last month I posted benchmarks showing the performance when using the new 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver on Linux using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This optimizer driver allows tuning the "amd_x3d_mode" for indicating your prefereoce for the CCD with the higher frequency or larger cache size. For some additional insight into the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver performance impact on Linux, here are benchmarks looking at the difference while using the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D.

Two separate patch series updated this week for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack is the still-ongoing work around the DRM sharpness property for the new adaptive sharpening filter with Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics and then separately is the work to bring VRAM Self Refresh (VRSR) over to the modern Xe kernel driver...

Among the changes that landed this week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the memory management "MM" updates, of which there are several notable patch series included...

For those looking into some insight around the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) utilization with modern Core Ultra systems, pending Linux patches will finally introduce the ability for user-space to obtain the current NPU frequency...

Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn't until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel's staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements...

All of the Device Mapper "DM" changes have been merged to mainline for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel...

Rust 1.86 is now available today as the latest version of this popular programming language...

Not to be confused with the modern Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, but IBM's Coherent Accelerator Interface "CXL" / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface "CAPI" support was stripped away today from the mainline Linux kernel...

Linux power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki last week sent out the assortment of ACPI/PM material for the new Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. The AMD P-State driver continues to be heavy with its code churn and there have been various other optimizations and code clean-ups. The CPUIdle Menu governor also received some performance tuning worth mentioning...

Back in late February when Framework announced a slew of new hardware products they will be launching next year, they also teased the Framework Laptop 12 as a new, smaller laptop while continuing to be modular/upgradeable. They announced today that Framework Laptop 12 pre-orders will begin next week...

Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn't even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to those desktops losing focus on X11 support or if they are just too bloated. So for adding some additional context, here are some graphics/gaming benchmarks on the same system hardware/software when adding in the Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1 X11 desktops.

This morning's Intel TDX update reminded me that I still hadn't gotten around to digging into the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. Here is a look at the KVM changes this cycle that continue to be particularly heavy on Intel and AMD virtualization improvements...

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for providing hardware-backed isolation and confidential computing support for virtual machines (VMs) on modern Xeon processors is about to become more reliable and potentially faster for some workloads...

Qt 6.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform graphics toolkit...

KDE Plasma 6.3.4 shipped this morning as the newest monthly point release for the Plasma 6.3 desktop...

Intel's original DG1 discrete GPU was principally a development vehicle on the path to DG2/Alchemist. It did appear with the Iris Xe Max laptop dGPU in very few configurations but surprisingly it's taken until now where the Intel Linux graphics driver is set to remove the experimental "force_probe" flag on these pre-Alchemist discrete GPUs...

Merged last week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were a big set of scheduler updates...

The Steam Survey results for February showed a 0.61% drop for Linux gaming marketshare following a 20.8% increase to the Chinese use, which was yet another month of such wild swings attributed to a large influx in Simplified Chinese survey respondents. The March results for Steam Survey were published this evening and show the Linux marketshare more than recovering now that the English survey results have shot back up...

There were 281 original news articles on Phoronix during the month of March along with another 14 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured-length articles and benchmarks. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux and open-source content over the past month, in case you missed any of the interesting hardware launches, open-source software milestones, kernel changes, and other milestones...

While Fedora 42 isn't being released until later in the month, already a number of new features for Fedora 43 have been granted approval by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

All of the FUSE updates have been sent in for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel for supporting file-systems in user-space...

No, it's not at all an April Fools' Joke or anything along those lines... An Intel open-source engineer just posted the patch series entitled "hide the disgusting turds" for the Linux kernel...

For those interested in the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, there's another option to consider for Linux use soon with pending patches: the ASUS Zenbook A14...

Merged today for the Mesa 25.1-devel graphics driver code and also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.0 OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is another new Intel Battlemage device ID...

As part of the various areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, on Sunday he sent out the driver core updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel. The driver core changes this cycle aren't too notable except for revising the Rust bindings now that more developers are attempting to use them...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel last week was the big set of hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates with new hardware support as well as a few new sensor drivers...

As the last planned article of the quarter, here is a look back at the most popular Phoronix content from Q1'2025 with 822 original news articles and 40 featured articles / Linux hardware reviews written by your's truly. There were interesting hardware launches from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA this quarter along with a never-ending pace of new open-source software innovations and the unfortunate ongoing drama within the free software community...

While the first quarter is coming to an end, there has already been immense progress this year to the Wayland protocols and compositors along with associated Linux desktop software for embracing this alternative to legacy X11/X.Org. From HDR color management seeing much adoption this quarter to Wine Wayland becoming more viable and the large number of Wayland compositors maturing, it was a pretty incredible quarter...

The perf tools changes were merged today for the Linux 6.15 kernel. Most notable this cycle for the wonderful perf tooling is introducing the notion of latency profiling by leveraging kernel scheduler information. This latency data will be further useful for Linux software engineers working to optimize system latency/performance...

The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux...

The consulting firm 3mdeb's Dasharo open-source firmware distribution derived from Coreboot could soon feature improved integration under Linux thanks to a pending ACPI platform driver...

It's been just over one year since the Linux Foundation and partners announced Valkey as a fork of Redis. Following the release of Redis 8.0 in September for this in-memory key-value database, Valkey 8.1 is out today...

For those dealing with exFAT formatted storage devices under Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel has a big optimization for yielding much faster delete performance when making use of the "discard" mount option...

With Q1 drawing to an end, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source news and Linux hardware reviews around AMD during the quarter on Phoronix. With 109 AMD news articles so far this quarter around their Linux software/hardware efforts and another 20 AMD Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles, they continue firing on all cylinders for pushing both their client and server wares forward outside the confines of Windows...

Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025...

The Mozilla Firefox 137 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release set for Tuesday...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Sunday submitted all of the "char/misc" patches for the Linux 6.15 merge window for this random catch-all area of the kernel with small drivers and other random/obscure hardware support...

Last week PostgreSQL merged support for IO_uring that can provide for "considerably faster" performance of this popular open-source database server. Over the weekend some additional improvements were merged to the asynchronous I/O "AIO" code to PostgreSQL, including introducing a new batch mode that can also provide a performance win...

Cloud Hypervisor began as an open-source Intel software project more than a half-decade ago with an emphasis on security and cloud deployments while leveraging the Rust programming language. With time its scope has broadened a lot as has its industry adoption. With time it added ARM64 support and recruited AMD, Ampere Computing, Microsoft, and others as its supporters while being folded into the Linux Foundation. The latest expansion for the project is introducing experimental RISC-V 64-bit support...

The in-development Linux 6.15 kernel is continuing to enhance its support for MIPI's SoundWire specification for small audio peripherals with this two-pin, low-complexity audio interface...

All of the Rust programming language infrastructure updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel have now been submitted. In addition to a lot of technical Rust improvements for the Linux kernel, this cycle also marks the first time Rust Linux maintainer Miguel Ojeda has taken a pull request directly from another contributor as they prepare to work out sub-trees for the Rust ecosystem...

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS is out with its March 2025 update that delivers a number of new features for this OS that is popular with open-source enthusiasts and power users for its out-of-the-box performance optimizations and extensive tuning...

Google's Ozone Wayland support continues to improve for benefiting the Chrome/Chromium web browser. The newest addition merged this past week is support for the xdg-session-management protocol...

IO_uring continues maturing while being one of the greatest innovations within the Linux kernel in the past number of years. With Linux 6.15, IO_uring is getting even more interesting with introducing network zero-copy receive support. With this new code a 200G link could be saturated off a single CPU core in a recent demonstration...

The watchdog subsystem changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.15 merge window that is now at the mid-way point...

The first quarter of 2025 is already drawing to a close... It seemed like Q1'2025 flew by but when looking back at all the Mesa 3D graphics driver activity, there was a heck of a lot accomplished in this area of the open-source landscape. Open-source Vulkan drivers continued advancing feverishly, Mesa code continues to be adapted to new platforms from Windows to Haiku OS, and all the big vendors continue being involved in open-source GPU drivers in one form or another...

While the upstream MIPS architecture is at a dead-end due to RISC-V, the Linux kernel code for the MIPS CPU architecture continues to improve for all the existing MIPS-based platforms out there. With Linux 6.15 there is new work for enhancing the Mobileye EyeQ6 SoC support...

Shotcut 25.03 is now available for this open-source and cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework...

With the first quarter quickly drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Intel Linux news of the quarter. There's been excitement with the Battlemage discrete graphics cards with their open-source driver, early work on Xe3 graphics, AVX10.2 dropping the optional 512-bit features to make it mandatory now (thankfully!), and a lot of exciting upstream Linux kernel improvements...

Samsung used to sell web cameras for their smart TVs for use with living room video chatting with the likes of Skype. Samsung no longer supports Skype on their TVs (goodbye Skype!) or these devices but if you happen to have one laying around or buy one used for cheap, it's now possible to use these Samsung TV cameras as a standard web camera under Linux...