Phoronix

A discussion that originally started last summer has been reignited: whether it's time to retire GlusterFS within Fedora Linux. But following discussions in recent days, there may be a new packager willing to take over but it doesn't change the fact of declining upstream activity around GlusterFS...

Maxime Ripard of Red Hat today sent out the first set of "drm-misc-next" patches of 2025 for queuing into DRM-Next until the Linux 6.14 merge window opens in the coming weeks...

For the past several months Intel Linux software engineers have been working on Intel Touch Host Controller drivers as an IP block on the PCH for handling touchscreen, touchpad, and related touch input devices. On Sunday the fourth iteration of these driver patches were sent out as these new Intel open-source drivers near the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January...

For fans of the Xubuntu derivative of Ubuntu Linux, the upcoming Xubuntu 25.04 release will feature the Xfce 4.20 desktop...

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed...

This morning I rolled out upgraded forum software to improve the forum experience and also hopefully help the overall Phoronix.com site performance with the database server being hammered recently from the forums...

Loongson's LoongArch processors for the Chinese market have been primarily for desktop systems but it looks like their workstation/server ambitions may be growing with now contributing an Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for Loongson SoCs with ECC memory...

Hot off the recent Serpent OS Alpha release and talking up new features for 2025, this original Linux distribution led by open-source developer Ikey Doherty is now demonstrating its offline rollback support with integration around its package management system...

For Marvell's line of Octeon line of data processing units (DPUs) and baseband processors, it looks like a new DPU is on the way with the CN20K silicon seeing work on enabling Linux support...

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who continues persevering with the Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver for Mesa has an exciting late Christmas present on the way... He's been hacking on Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Rusticl that works across GPU vendor drivers/hardware...

There weren't too many changes this week for the GNOME project given the end of year holidays wrapping up and many taking time off. But This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes that did get made...

LLVM development has peaked in recent years at around 37k commits per year for this huge, innovative open-source compiler stack. It was another very exciting year for this leading open-source compiler stack...

After a short break over the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back with his "This Week in Plasma" series to highlight the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes made each week...

In gearing up for the Wine 10.0 stable release that is likely to take place later in January, Wine 10.0-rc4 is out today as the newest test release to deliver the latest bug fixes...

Since Raven/Picasso APUs and Navi GPUs there is Video Core Next (VCN) as the modern unified video encode/decode block for Radeon graphics. But for those with older Radeon GPUs where there are the Unified Video Decode (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) blocks, a set of Mesa patches is looking to enhance the video acceleration support on Linux systems...

The folks at Cloudflare have published another great engineering blog post with this time covering Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) as a very interesting addition to the TCP spec. But there they acknowledge the less than ideal Linux support especially on the client side...

LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 is out for testing today ahead of the stable release of this free software office suite around the start of February...

While systemd has been around for a decade and a half, it's showing no signs of slowing down for driving new innovations to Linux for this system and service manager...

This morning the first test rebuild results of the "Plucky Puffin" for Ubuntu 25.04 were shared on the mailing list... While typically not interesting to outsiders, one interesting bit is that as a "bonus" they rebuilt the main components of Ubuntu 25.04 packages with the LLVM Clang compiler compared to the usual GCC compiler...

The GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release should be out around the very end of January or start of February. With glibc 2.41 there are many new features coming to this widely-used libc implementation by Linux systems and elsewhere...

While there was the year-end holidays, daily activity on Phoronix doesn't let up and over the course of December there were 256 original news articles around Linux/open-source on the site along with 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most as we closed out 2024...

Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he's been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls...

Merged back in 2022 for the Linux 5.19 kernel was the LoongArch port for that Chinese processor architecture derived from MIPS and inspired in part by RISC-V. Over the past two and a half years the LoongArch Linux kernel port has continued to mature while up to now it's always been about LoongArch 64-bit... But now a set of patches are looking to begin wiring up LoongArch 32-bit support for the Linux kernel...

Well known AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olak landed some nice Mesa 25.0 optimizations for Christmas and now in kicking off the new year he's managed another interesting set of patches for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...

Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA...

Queued up this week via the tip/tip.git's "x86/bugs" Git branch for the Linux kernel is AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" support as a new SRSO/Inception mitigation handling seemingly for Zen 5 processors and beyond...

With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code...

With 2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles for 2024. In addition to the three thousand original Linux/open-source news articles last year, there was 191 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by myself. AMD Zen 5 on Linux easily dominated the list of most popular articles for the year along with ZLUDA and several of the Intel Arrow Lake and Granite Rapids articles plus the Framework 16 laptop...

Last month I wrote about a Lenovo Legion Linux driver being posted for enabling more power/performance settings under Linux. Following a significant rework, a second iteration of those patches have now been posted with just being referred to as the Lenovo "Gaming Series" WMI drivers without the Legion reference...

For the Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU found within the Snapdragon X1 series of laptop chips, an Adaptive Clock Distribution "ACD" feature is currently being wired up to the open-source MSM kernel driver to help with power and performance...

Within the mainline Linux kernel has been the open-source SteelSeries HID driver while newly posted patches are tacking on support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset...

Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times...

Following the recent Serpent OS alpha builds for this original Linux distribution led by well known developer Ikey Doherty, the project has now outlined both some of their short term and longer term plans for this from-scratch Linux platform...

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop...

Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language...

During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year...

The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...

The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...

With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...

In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...

One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...

The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January...

This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises...

It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...

Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indicated nice improvement. A third iteration of those patches have already been posted as this AMD INLVPGB usage works its way to the mainline kernel...

While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, including a Valve open-source graphics driver developer now taking the top spot...

Back in early 2023 an Xtensa back-end was added to LLVM for the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa IP. Xtensa is used for DSPs, micro-controllers, and this 32-bit RISC architecture is also used for other hardware like data processing engines. Two years after the LLVM back-end was introduced, the Clang C/C++ compiler has added Xtensa target support...