Phoronix

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code...

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered...

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2...

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15...

Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl...

An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends...

There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases...

What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today those GNU Compiler Collection patches have been merged to prepare for AVX10.2 always having 512-bit support available...

Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)...

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors...

While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors...

Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads...

Raspberry Pi's brisk pace of new hardware and software the past few months continues today... The Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector was announced today at the $25 USD price point...

The EROFS open-source, read-only Linux file-system is set to be extended with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle to support massive amounts of data to support AI model training...

Just days after marking the third birthday of the open-source project, Hyprland 0.48 released today as the newest version of this popular Wayland compositor...

The Endeavour OS enthusiast Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux is out with its March 2025 ISO refresh under the codename "Mercury Neo" for this spin featuring the latest software packages...

Coming out this week was an updated AVX10 whitepaper from Intel with the surprising decision that 512-bit floating point and integer support is no longer considered optional for AVX10.2. AVX10.2 now mandates 128 / 256 / 512-bit support and in turn also dropped the 256-bit embedded rounding support with the focus on 512-bit. The LLVM/Clang compiler had seen its AVX10 support designed around Intel's original AVX10 design assumptions and thus now is being modified to address these changes...

Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common "uvcvideo" web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel...

This past week a lot of new code for the Rust "gccrs" front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release... The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features...

The sched_ext code for extensible scheduler support and being able to quickly prototype new Linux kernel scheduling improvements continues evolving nicely since its much anticipated merging to the mainline kernel in 2024. Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window, the sched_ext feature updates were sent out today for this next kernel cycle...

Last weekend FreeDesktop.org began transitioning to their new server/cloud infrastructure after recently finding out their sponsored Equinix Metal services were shutting down. Following the complex migration process this past week, FreeDesktop.org GitLab is up and running on the Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany...

Ingo Molnar began sending out the pull requests today for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window of code areas he oversees for the Linux kernel. Among those early pulls are of the x86/build updates, which includes removing some seemingly useless CRC-32 checksum code from the kernel...

Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin next week, a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD Radeon kernel driver updates were sent out on Friday for this next kernel cycle. It's mostly about bug fixes but does contain cleaner shader support for AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics...

There is some new Wayland protocol support activity this week worth mentioning for both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops...

Ahead of the Linux v6.14 kernel expected for release tomorrow and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft began sending out his pull requests today of new code he's hoping to see merged for this next cycle. One of those interesting pulls is the work for block devices to allow for block sizes to be greater than the page size...

Haiku OS developer X512 has managed a rather impressive feat: porting NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules to Haiku. Not only did he get NVIDIA's official Linux kernel modules running on Haiku but he also ported the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver to be able to run atop the NVIDIA kernel driver interface...

KDE developers continue pushing ahead with new feature development on the Plasma 6.4 desktop to further refine Plasma 6...

Wine 10.4 is out tonight as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

AMD has been on a software / container / documentation spree recently around ROCm and today are announcing another software addition to the ROCm portfolio: AITER...

Microsoft's newest open-source contribution to the Linux kernel being proposed is... Hornet, a Linux security module (LSM) for providing signature verification of eBPF programs...

It's been over three years since the last ReactOS open-source operating system release for this platform working on API/ABI compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Today ReactOS 0.4.15 was finally published...

Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle a few early pull requests have already been sent in to Linus Torvalds in advance of the anticipated v6.14 release on Sunday. Among those early changes for Linux 6.15 are the SLAB allocator updates that include a fix for cache randomization with kvmalloc inadvertently being inadequate due to accidentally using the same randomization seed...

With the Linux 6.14 stable kernel likely debuting on Sunday, the Linux 6.15 merge window will then open for kicking off the next development cycle. There's a lot of exciting changes and new features building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window...

Following a slew of hardware announcements in the past few months like the RP2350 shipping, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, Raspberry Pi Monitor, and Raspberry Pi 500, today they have a new software announcement. Today they formally announced "rpi-image-gen" as a new tool to help customers in crafting customized software OS images...

Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit...

AMD on Thursday announced GAIA for "Generative AI Is Awesome" as a means of easily running local large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI PCs with the XDNA NPU. GAIA provides an easy software demonstration for Ryzen AI capabilities but sadly for the moment is limited to Microsoft Windows platforms...

A set of eleven patches being worked on for the ASUS HID and platform drivers work to enhance the support for the AMD Strix Halo powered ROG Flow Z13 (2025) laptop as well as adding RGB control support for the ROG Ally gaming handheld...

The AMD P-State Linux kernel driver for CPU frequency scaling with modern Ryzen processors has been working out quite well and proving very effective over the prior ACPI CPUFreq generic driver use. Beyond recently being extended to becoming the default for EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, AMD P-State has recently been seeing some patches for additional feature work...

The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions...

In addition to Intel software engineers this week being busy doing a late restructuring of AVX10 support in moving away from possible 256-bit maximum vector register size (a great move and still so excited to see this materialize!), there are also Intel engineers continuing work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on the Linux kernel side...

Barring any last minute issues or hesitation by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.14 kernel is aiming for releasing as stable this coming Sunday on 23 March. Here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes to find with Linux 6.14...

Even amid the ongoing FreeDesktop.org GitLab cloud/server migration, Eric Engestrom has managed to release Mesa 25.0.2 on schedule as the newest stable release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company's official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.

Arm engineer Karunika Choo today sent out the latest patches developing a new GPU-specific initialization framework for the Panthor open-source kernel graphics driver as part of bringing up support for newer Mali GPUs...

While there is Kpatch, Ksplice, and other live patching solutions already in use for patching a running Linux kernel for deploying security updates without downtime, Google engineers are developing the Live Update Orchestrator as a new means of transitioning to a new updated kernel with minimal downtime...

Linux developer SeongJae Park has posted a set of patches for the Linux kernel's wonderful DAMON code to provide for self-tuned memory tiering that "just works" and is racking up some nice performance wins...

The Google Chrome web browser is moving away from the FreeType font rendering library and instead pursuing their Skrifa project that is written in Rust for better memory safety around handling fonts on the web...

Miracle-WM 0.5 released on Wednesday as their first update of 2025 for this Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager. With this release comes a number of new features and other enhancements...

SoftBank Group just announced they will be acquiring Ampere Computing, the leader in ARM64 server processors that has come under increasing pressure with more of the public cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon/AWS turning to their own in-house ARM64 server processor designs...