Phoronix

In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled...

Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.

An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities...

Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results...

Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available...

Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online...

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released...

Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors...

Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors...

The second of three planned betas for the Qt 6.9 cross-platform UI toolkit is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in March...

The FreeBSD Foundation has begun receiving funding to work on zero-trust builds / reproducible builds. The work will hopefully be wrapped up in time for the major FreeBSD 15.0 release...

In addition to the Wine 10.0 stable release today, making the day very exciting as well for Linux gamers is the first official SDL 3.0 release!..

In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel...

On the first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window there were a number of new AMD CPU features submitted. That's continued today with so far having the new "amd_node" driver to talk about for splitting up the modern Zen-era code and more of the legacy AMD Northbridge code from the pre-Zen days...

As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver software...

Along with recently announcing the Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard computer and the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB (review still forthcoming; the 16GB model only arrived last week), the Raspberry Pi Monitor debuted last month as their first foray into displays. For $100 USD you get a 15.6-inch 1080p display that is simple but pairs well with the Raspberry Pi 400/500 or just the single board computer or any other HDMI-connected device for that matter.

Serpent OS as the modern, from-scratch Linux distribution being led by well known open-source developer Ikey Doherty has started on a new project: disks-rs. The disks-rs project is intended to deal with file-systems, installation / partitioning, and block device management in a safe and effective manner from the Rust programming language...

Adding to the plethora of new hardware support coming with the Linux 6.14 kernel is enabling upstream support for the FPGAs found on the Intel-powered AAEON UP single board computers that are targeted for makers, hobbyists, and various industrial uses...

The big networking subsystem feature pull was sent out this morning for the Linux 6.14 merge window...

Over the past week there has been an uptick in patches pertaining to RDNA4's GFX12 graphics engine within the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for Mesa 25.0 to benefit Linux systems...

Intel's upstreaming work around the next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" processors continues for the Linux kernel. Among other code being prepped for submitting during the Linux 6.14 merge window, on Monday the thermal driver updates were focused on enabling support for Intel Panther Lake processors...

In addition to merging a number of the pull requests yesterday for the start of the Linux 6.14 cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds did merge some of his own new code as well. While his time these days working on new kernel code itself is more limited with managing the ever-growing upstream kernel community, he has managed some notable items in recent times like addressing ARM64 kernel annoyances and some performance optimizations...

The x86/cache updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel are extending the Resource Control "resctrl" code for Intel Resource Director Technology / AMD Platform Quality of Service to have the capability of total memory bandwidth monitoring...

As a follow-up to yesterday's article around the on-disk format changes and other feature work on Bcachefs for Linux 6.14, the changes ended up being merged without issue for this next kernel version. That came after the Bcachefs changes were rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle due to a Code of Conduct (CoC) committee decision...

On this first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window to kick off the new kernel development cycle there are a few pull requests around new AMD CPU features worth noting...

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 6.13 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.13 is out today as this downstream kernel from FSF LA that strips out code pertaining to the ability to load non-free drivers/microcode and other elements not deemed within the standards of the Free Software Foundation, even when it means removing/disabling hardware support and features...

An engineer from AMD by way of their Nod.ai acquisition is seeking feedback from the community around what other Radeon graphics cards you would like to see supported by the ROCm support on Linux. This community wishlist extends to ROCm Windows support as well but at least there the HIP Rutime/SDK on Windows already supports more consumer GPUs than Linux...

After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here's a look at what's ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Following the Bcachefs pull requests being rejected during the Linux 6.13 cycle by the kernel's Code of Conduct committee, the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is kicking off with a big pull request so that the upstream kernel can get back into sync with the latest development code for this cycle. This pull also contains the last anticipated major on-disk format upgrade prior to the removal of the "experimental" flag for this copy-on-write file-system...

Open-source developers are working on allowing the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to support the "Cyan Skillfish" graphics processor IP found within the Sony PlayStation 5 APU as well as the AMD BC-250 mining cards...

Earlier this month at CES was the announcement of the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series. Among the first of these consumer Blackwell GPUs is the GeForce RTX 5090 flagship graphics card that is set to retail for $1999 USD. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder's Edition graphics card arrived at Phoronix a few days ago to begin Linux testing.

The Linux 6.14 kernel will enable the VirtualBox guest drivers to be built for ARM64 Linux virtual machines (VMs)...

For the Linux 6.13 cycle the Rust code was hitting a "tipping point" with more Rust kernel drivers expected soon. For Linux 6.14 there is indeed a lot more Rust code being primed for this next kernel version...

Intel software engineers overnight published their new quarterly release of the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel, the collection of the company's patches against this open-source multimedia library for enhancing the Intel GPU acceleration support while the patches work their way for upstream FFmpeg...

Ingo Molnar sent out the big batch of scheduler enhancements bright and early today for helping kick off the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The "TURNIP" open-source Vulkan API driver within Mesa for supporting Qualcomm Adreno graphics is now able to expose accelerated ray query support for ray-tracing with newer Adreno GPUs...

Among the VFS pull requests sent out this weekend in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window formally opening were the VFS direct I/O (DIO) updates that introduce a new STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN field for addressing a possible performance pitfall...

As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025...

The pid_max tunable for the maximum number of process IDs allowed simultaneously was increased by default back in 2019 with systemd. But that increase breaks a long held assumption by some user-space software that pid_max or the process ID would not be greater than 65,535. To now better workaround such outdated user-space software, a set of patches for the Linux 6.14 kernel will allow adjusting the pid_max limit on a per PID namespace basis to help cope with such software hitting such artificial limits and without having to lower the overall system limit...

Ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable kernel expected to be released later today, there is a last minute fix for the EEVDF CPU scheduler...

Following the release a few days ago of GNU Coreutils 9.6, the Rust Coreutils "uutils" project as a re-implementation of these core utilities within the Rust programming language is out with a fresh update...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been sent out in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening...

The VFS mount pull request was sent out today in advance of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening. One of the changes here is adding a new mountinfo program to the Linux kernel source tree...

Thanks to Valve, another Xbox 360-compatible game controller will see support with the upstream XPad input driver with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel...

Christian Brauner of Microsoft began sending out his various pull requests today of new material for the Linux 6.14 kernel in advance of the merge window expected to open next week. One of the interesting pull requests is carrying the work of Omar Sandoval for faster /proc/kcore reads that can help with debugger performance...

GDB 16.1 was tagged today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for helping debug a variety of programming languages on numerous different CPU architectures and platforms...

An interesting open-source announcement out of Intel this week is that they have open-sourced their P4 software for their line of Tofino programmable Ethernet switches...

It was a busy week in the GNOME space with many packages checking in their "48.alpha" releases for the GNOME 48 Alpha milestone. Plus there has been some additional exciting GNOME developments for the week...

Technical BSD conferences aren't quite as common as the many Linux conferences these days. For the BSD conferences that do happen they tend to be more general in nature than carrying a desktop focus. But being announced this week was GhostBSDCon 2025 as a forthcoming developer conference largely focused on desktop use of this FreeBSD-derived distribution...

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.3 Beta, there's been a lot of bug fixing happening ahead of the stable release due out next month for this open-source desktop...