Phoronix

Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16...

The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD...

Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver...

Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France...

In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week...

Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan...

Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project...

After being speculated that such a feature would surface the past few months, today's updated Steam Deck Client Beta from Valve introduces a battery charge limit control to help preserve the longevity of your Steam Deck's battery...

While there have been many Linux kernel patches being worked on for months now for Intel's upcoming Panther Lake SoCs, only seeing the first Linux kernel patches today is their Wildcat Lake platform...

A new Intel graphics/display driver feature being enabled for Linux 6.16 is LOBF: Link-Off Between Frames...

June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially -- and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet -- being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here's a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.

Sven Peter has mailed out the Device Tree "DT" updates for benefiting Apple Silicon hardware with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...

OpenRazer 3.10.3 was released on Wednesday as the newest update to this set of open-source, community-maintained and out-of-tree drivers for Razer hardware on Linux...

With the Linux 6.15-rc6 kernel release due out on Sunday, we're hitting the transition point where the focus on DRM kernel graphics drivers for Linux 6.16 is shifting from feature work to bug-fixing ahead of this next merge window. As such sent out today were drm-misc-next and drm-intel-gt-next pull requests focused on preparing various kernel graphics/display driver fixes for the new code coming to Linux 6.16. The Intel pull request today even contains a fix for aging Intel Haswell graphics...

For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system...

Going along with new AMDGPU kernel driver patches on their way to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.16, the Mesa 25.2 user-space driver code has landed the infrastructure for being able to set queue priorities as well as secure queues...

Python 3.14 Beta 1 is now available in working toward this next major Python release due out in early October...

Intel is teasing new Arc Pro graphics cards coming to market...

Last July it was announced Holly Million was stepping down as the GNOME Foundation's Exeuctive Director after less than a year at the helm. Richard Littauer took over as interim Executive Director while this week a new GNOME Foundation Executive Director was hired...

Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems...

Following his recent PremDay talk on LVFS/Fwupd, Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.9 as the newest feature release for this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems...

Raspberry Pi today announced the latest update to their Raspberry Pi OS, which continues to be based on Debian Linux and likely their last major release before migrating from a Debian 12 base to Debian 13 later in the year...

Last month was a fresh look at the Intel Lunar Lake graphics performance between Windows and Linux while this article is Microsoft Windows 11 Pro vs. Ubuntu 25.04 again but looking at the CPU performance between these competing operating systems. For additional reference, some of the recently completed AMD Strix Point Windows vs. Linux benchmarks were also included for additional insight.

Currently when building the Linux kernel for LoongArch processors there is a maximum limit of 256 CPU cores supported but with a pending patch that limit would be upped to 2,048 CPU cores...

Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has queued up a set of patches being worked on the past number of months around block write streams for making use of NVMe SSDs supporting the NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP) specification...

Intel has readied a new "qat_6xxx" driver for the Linux kernel for supporting QAT GEN6 devices with QuickAssist Technology. QAT GEN6 will presumably be found with upcoming Xeon 6 Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids processors while the Linux kernel driver should be introduced for Linux 6.16...

Going back to last year there have been patches for adapting the Intel P-State Linux driver with support for Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) as what began as an Arm big.LITTLE feature but since being explored for use by the Intel P-State driver for hybrid CPUs without SMT which for the moment means Lunar Lake SoCs. A new version of the patches were posted on Tuesday and likely to be the last refinement to this patch series...

Last week Valve introduced Proton 10.0 beta as the newest version of their Wine-derived software for Steam Play that enables countless Windows games to run well for Linux gamers on the desktop and with the extremely popular Steam Deck. Out today is another Proton 10.0 beta update with some additional bug and regression fixes over what was shipped last week...

The SpacemiT-X60 RISC-V SoC can enjoy some very healthy performance improvements with scheduler definitions now merged for the LLVM/Clang 21 compiler...

Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines...

With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.

Ampere Computing last year talked up AmpereOne M for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 192 cores up from the 8-channel DDR5 memory found with the initial AmpereOne processors. They said at the time AmpereOne M would be shipping in Q4-2024. Now half way into 2025, it looks like they quietly announced the AmpereOne M processors...

As an alternative to the likes of the Pungi tool, Kurchu is a newer project within the CentOS/Fedora space for assembling content collections or ISO images of Linux distribution builds. Kurchu is already seeing use by the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for assembling their images while additional functionality continues to be worked on for those wanting to craft their own Fedora/CentOS install images...

With Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical is planning to make use of more Rust-written system components and so far most of that talk has been about transitioning to Rust Coreutils "uutils" in place of GNU Coreutils. It's also been firmed up today that Canonical is planning on using sudo-rs by default as a replacement to sudo...

PoCL 7.0 is on approach as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that began as a CPU-based OpenCL driver implementation but with time has added support for other back-ends from Intel Level Zero to NVIDIA PTX and AMD HSA...

The Btrfs file-system looks like its new "CLEAR_FREE" feature will be ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel was AMD INVLPGB support for broadcast TLB invalidation on recent Zen cores. AMD INVLPGB use by the Linux kernel can provide for some nice performance gains while now similar support for Intel processors is coming via a kernel patch series working on Intel RAR TLB invalidation support...

Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat was at the PremDay on-premise computing conference in Paris to talk up this open-source firmware updating solution and being what customers want. The presentation video and slides are now available for those needing additional material in helping sell your organization on the benefits of LVFS/Fwupd...

Last month IBM announced the z17 mainframe powered by Telum II processors and today they announced the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 servers...

FEX 2505 is out today as the newest version of this user-space software that enables running x86_64 binaries on ARM64/AArch64 Linux hosts with great speed that a number of games and applications are enjoying much success with this emulator...

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their April 2025 status report to outline interesting changes made over the past several weeks to this innovative project...

As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks. I ended up taking things a bit further after those reviews and have now extended it to a 21-way laptop comparison of AMD Ryzen and Intel Core SoCs from the past few generations in looking at their performance on Ubuntu 25.04 across more than 200 benchmarks.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar sent out a patch series this morning to enable additional kernel features by default for the Linux default configuration "defconfig" on x86-based kernels. The defconfig improvements aim to reflect modern Linux x86 kernel use with various features commonly being enabled by distribution vendor kernels and related improvements...

Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year...

Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers...

Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64)...

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support...

The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing...

For those that happen to have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA or are shopping for a higher-end Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake desktop motherboard for Linux use, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA is the latest motherboard seeing hardware sensor monitoring support under Linux with the next version of the kernel...

The EXT2 file-system's direct access "DAX" mode is being deprecated and expected for removal at the end of 2025, after this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...