Phoronix

The NVIDIA 570.86.16 beta Linux driver was just published in time for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards hitting store shelves this morning...

In addition to the AMDXDNA driver being merged for Linux 6.14 for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs, this next kernel version is introducing another new AMD kernel driver that hasn't been previously covered on Phoronix: AMD AE4DMA...

The open-source Intel Linux Mesa graphics driver code has merged support for a "major improvement" found with next-gen Xe3 graphics... Variable Register Thread (VRT) as one of the nifty features that will help with Intel integrated and discrete graphics performance...

All of the MIPI SoundWire related updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel. SoundWire as a reminder is the standard interface for modern, small audio peripherals...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) updates have been sent out and merged for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel...

Now that the full-functioning NTSYNC driver is ready for Linux 6.14 for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives on Linux, the merge request has been opened for upstream Wine to land the NTSYNC integration on its side for in-process synchronization...

AMD today announced two new software projects to better enhance their software support for Instinct accelerators / graphics deployments within the data center: AMD GPU Operator and AMD Metrics Exporter...

Lead RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has provided some insight into the support expectations for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 "RDNA4" graphics cards...

About five years ago X.Org / FreeDesktop.org was experiencing a cloud hosting crisis with their cloud costs running out of control after losing free credits for Google Cloud and the continuous integration (CI) testing driving up expenses. They ended up switching public cloud providers over to Equinix. Equinix ended up sponsoring the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org with their cloud/hosting needs but now on short notice that is coming to an end...

PyTorch 2.6 is out today as the newest feature release to this widely-used machine learning library...

Following a discussion on the Ubuntu development mailing list, Ubuntu developers have decided to adopt Matrix for their official real-time communication channels while deprecating IRC chat...

Last week was the review embargo lift on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card while today the review embargo lifts on the GeForce RTX 5080, both of which graphics cards are officially available in the retail channel tomorrow (30 January). Due to waiting on the official NVIDIA R570 Linux driver release that is recommended for the RTX 50 series Linux gaming, today's tests at Phoronix are looking at the GeForce RTX 5080 GPU compute performance.

As expected, GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 is now available as the newest half-year feature release to this important C library for Linux systems and other environments...

Bytedance is praising eBPF as the in-kernel virtual machine for dynamic programs to help speed-up network packet processing, greater tracing and profiling abilities, and a wide-range of other purposes for these dynamic in-kernel programs. By tapping eBPF, Bytedance is reporting a 10% improvement to their networking throughput...

AMD Mesa driver guru Marek Olak has landed a new set of 48 patches into Mesa 25.0-devel Git for refactoring various AMD-related driver code to work on improving the ACO compiler support within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Canonical has been maintaining experimental/testing ISOs of Ubuntu Linux for Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops. New ISOs for testing were recently published and allow enabling more features/functionality for these ARM laptops under Ubuntu...

The Network File System (NFS) client and server changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window...

The LLVM 20 compiler stack saw its code branched from the mainline Git codebase last night as release preparations begin for what will be LLVM 20.1 as the inaugural stable release...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent out the pull request of all the driver core updates for Linux 6.14, which ends up being a big deal for those interested in the prospects of Rust drivers for the Linux kernel...

Following last month's release of ROCm 6.3.1, ROCm 6.3.2 was just tagged today from its various open-source repositories and binaries beginning to come down the pipeline. ROCm 6.3.2 is another point release but brings a decent set of refinements for this AMD graphics compute stack...

Apple is the latest CPU vendor being affected by side-channel attacks. All Mac laptops since 2022, all Mac desktops since 2023, and all iPhones / iPad Pro / iPad Air / iPad Mini models since 2021 are affected by these new SLAP and FLOP attacks...

System76 this morning announced the 2025 version of their Meerkat mini Linux PC. This new mini PC designed for Linux pairs an Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" SoC with dual 2.5G Ethernet and booting using Coreboot for a intriguing combination whether it's for a lightweight Linux desktop PC or a small office/home server...

Earlier this month the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB was announced for finally pushing the Raspberry Pi single board computers beyond an 8GB limit for RAM. This opens up the Raspberry Pi 5 to new use-cases, more multi-tasking, and other applications where 8GB of RAM / 2GB per core was a bottleneck. In my tests thus far of the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB it's been working out well and helping the performance of some workloads by reducing the memory pressure / swapping.

In addition to sending out the char/misc pull request that completed work on the NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman yesterday also sent out the USB/Thunderbolt pull request for Linux 6.14. The USB/Thunderbolt updates include new hardware support, Chrome OS improvements, and other changes...

The open-source WavPack lossless audio compression format is out with a new release today for this BSD-licensed software around this audio code container...

Following a call by Intel developers last month for making the SPIR-V back-end an official target within LLVM as a promotion to its existing "experimental" backend status, the change has now been made ahead of the upcoming LLVM 20 release...

Last week saw the new Bcachefs features and Btrfs changes land along with XFS real-time improvements for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel while overnight the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes were merged for that other exciting and actively-advancing open-source file-system...

The Z3fold allocator for compressed pages was quietly deprecated several months ago with users encouraged to use zsmalloc instead. With no one vocally objecting, the Z3fold allocator code is now being positioned for removal from the Linux kernel source tree...

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0, Hangover 10.0 is now available as this adaptation for running Windows games and applications on ARM64 Linux and other non-x86_64 CPU architectures...

The "char/misc" pull request was submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window and already merged to the Linux Git tree... As expected, the completed code around the NTSYNC driver has landed for better emulating the Windows NT synchronization primitives as a big win to Wine / Steam Play (Proton) Windows gaming on Linux...

In beginning the NVIDIA Blackwell Linux testing with the GeForce RTX 5090 compute performance, besides all the CUDA/OpenCL/OptiX benchmarks delivered last week a number of readers asked about AI performance and in particular the Llama.cpp performance with the RTX 5090 flagship graphics card. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at the GeForce RTX 5090 performance in Llama.cpp compared to prior RTX 40 and RTX 30 graphics cards.

Released last November following the AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 as their deep neural network library optimized for EPYC/Ryzen processors. ZenDNN 5.0 is their updated version of their neural network library that is compatible with the APIs from Intel oneDNN/DNNL and in turn can be used with the likes of PyTorch. It turns out ZenDNN 5.0 is capable of delivering a 400% performance uplift over their prior ZenDNN software release on the same hardware...

Hyprland 0.47 is out to begin a new week with some exciting enhancements to this visuals-focused Wayland compositor...

It's still not looking like triple buffering will land for GNOME 48 with the feature freeze set for next weekend. But that Mutter dynamic triple buffering support has been improved upon and now at least is working for direct scan-out situations as well as variable rate refresh (VRR)...

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. As usual the x86 platform driver updates are predominantly to benefit the many different Intel/AMD laptops out there with various OEM vendor features/functionality. Plus within the platform-drivers-x86 space is a growing number of AMD SoC drivers for not only laptops but also desktops/servers...

With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend...

In addition to all of the exciting "MM" changes for Linux 6.14 that were submitted by Andrew Morton's pull request, he also sent out the set of "non-MM" updates for the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. As happens with most kernel releases, there are a number of already-launched desktop motherboards beginning to see working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary...

While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security...

For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release...

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings...

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications...

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware...

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver...

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025...

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd...

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel...