Phoronix

As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader...

With Linux 6.14-rc1 released I have begun trying out the new development kernel on a few systems locally. At least for high core count hardware tested thus far, Linux 6.14 at the moment during this early testing phase is sporting some performance regressions within some multi-threaded workloads.

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux...

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg...

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled...

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with a new status report to highlight the progress their developers made over the course of January...

Merged this week to FFmpeg Git for this widely-used open-source multimedia library are a number of NVIDIA video encoding "NVENC" improvements for benefiting the new GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics processors...

The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for years has been a great feature for Ubuntu users to be able to easily fetch and run the newest upstream kernel whether it's the latest stable kernel version, one of the weekly release candidates, or even the very leading-edge daily Git kernel builds. Sadly for months now this service has been out of order...

Initially merged back for the Linux 6.13 kernel was EXECMEM_ROX support for module text on x86_64 systems. With this caching of large ROX pages it can help with lowering TLB instruction pressure and enhancing performance. But this EXECMEM_ROX support that was contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up being reverted in the final days of Linux 6.13. The revert came due to bugs and not having any Linux x86 maintainers signing off on the code. This code has been getting into shape for trying again with the mainline kernel...

For those wondering whether Debian 13 would see the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop packages given the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" development freezes, it looks like this updated GNOME release will be squeezed in...

Igalia engineers Jose Maria Casanova Crespo and Maira Canal presented at FOSDEM this past weekend in Brussels around the efforts by this open-source consulting firm to further enhance the 3D performance out of the Raspberry Pi single board computers...

Serpent OS is the original Linux distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame and has been pursuing its own package management system and new innovations in the Linux distribution landscape. While there has been recent success and new development builds coming out, feature development on Serpent OS is expected to slowdown now due to a lack of project funding...

In addition to the FreeBSD Foundation funding work on s0ix sleep state support as part of their initiative to improve FreeBSD's support for modern laptops, they have also been funding work on a number of other objectives, including better WiFi driver coverage. A milestone now being achieved for 2025 is getting a proof-of-concept Intel 802.11 a/b/g WiFi driver support working for this BSD operating system...

Red Hat's Kpatch, Oracle's Ksplice, and SUSE's kGraft are the most well known solutions currently for Linux kernel live-patching primarily for applying security patches to running Linux servers. It wasn't on my bingo card for insurance giant GEICO working baking their own Linux kernel live-patching solution, but they announced it this weekend and it will soon be open-source...

Cloud Hypervisor 44 is now available as the newest version of this security and cloud minded Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that operates atop Linux's KVM and the Microsoft MSHV Hypervisor...

Three more PCI device IDs were added today to the Intel open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver code for Battlemage that could be for future higher-end products or along the lines of Data Center GPU Flex Series or other products...

Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position...

Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is proposing "Faux Bus" as a new "fake" bus solution for simple devices...

Mozilla Firefox 135 release binaries are now available for those wanting to grab the latest browser release right away...

Christian Schaller as Red Hat's Director of Software Engineering outlined in a blog post today some of the areas they will be focusing on this year with Fedora Workstation development. Additionally, they will be hiring at least two more Linux desktop engineers this year at Red Hat...

FreeBSD is working on S0ix standby power state support for better handling modern Intel and AMD laptops running this popular BSD operating system...

Fwupd 2.0.5 is out today as the newest update to this open-source solution for system and peripheral/device firmware updating under Linux...

Sound Open Firmware 2.12 is now available to succeed the SOF 2.11 release from last September. Sound Open Firmware as a reminder is an open-source audio DSP firmware solution and related SDK/tooling. SOF started out as an open-source Intel project and has successfully evolved into an excellent multi-vendor initiative and platform agnostic...

Intel on Friday released an updated user-space driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found with Core Ultra SoCs. This user-space driver code works with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver for opening up the Intel NPU for helping speed-up AI workloads on Linux...

Red Hat engineers have released Tuned 2.25 as the newest version of their alternative to power-profiles-daemon and similar for adaptive performance tuning and monitoring. Tuned ships with various profiles and different capabilities for tuning Linux systems from laptops on battery life up through HPC servers and enterprise storage...

Yesterday just prior to the Linux 6.14-rc1 release were some last minute changes to the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc1 to cap off the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The CachyOS Linux distribution that is built atop the rolling-release Arch Linux distribution and has developed a following with enthusiasts and gamers is out with its newest monthly update...

GNU Binutils 2.44 was released today as the newest version of this set of binary utilities that is important to the GNU toolchain...

The open-source Rust CUDA project has been "rebooted" to get back onto the effort of allowing NVIDIA CUDA compute kernels to be coded within the Rust programming language...

On Saturday was the GNOME 48 feature freeze and landing during the final moments of this feature development period was new High Dynamic Range (HDR) code for Mutter and the toggling within the GNOME Control Center...

The first release candidate working towards the stable release of LLVM 20 is now available for testing...

It's been a while since having anything new to report on the 0 A.D. open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game but this week marked the 0 A.D. Alpha 27 release that they also hope will be their last alpha version...

This Week in GNOME is out with its newest development summary as we embark on the GNOME 48 feature freeze...

The Steam on Linux marketshare ended 2024 with a 2.29% against Windows at 96.1% and macOS at 1.61%. The Steam Survey numbers for January were posted this evening and they show a sizable dip for the Linux gaming use but there are also other odd discrepancies with the updated monthly figures...

GTK developers have been holding another hackfest this week for the annual FOSDEM developer conference happening this weekend in Brussels. GTK developers are working toward the GTK 4.18 stable release and continuing to think more about GTK 5...

Merged on Friday to the Linux 6.14 kernel were the Kbuild feature changes for this cycle. Most notable with these kernel build changes is the introduction of the gendwarfksyms tool that is used as part of the ongoing Rust programming language push within the Linux kernel...

During the month of January on Phoronix were 292 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 13 featured-length Linux hardware reviews and other multi-page benchmark specials. Here's a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source news and content over the past month...

The RISC-V CPU architecture feature updates have now been submitted and merged for the nearly-over Linux 6.14 merge window...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly recap of all the interesting KDE Plasma changes for the past week. With less than two weeks until the Plasma 6.3 stable release, Nate Graham began his weekly update by remarking that the Plasma 6.3 desktop is "looking pretty good!"..

While Wine 10.0 recently debuted with the initial Wine Wayland driver, that native Wayland support is still in early form with various limitations and yet-to-be-implemented features... One of the newly-opened merge requests for filling in another gap is clipboard support for the Wine Wayland driver...

Red Hat engineers have been working on Nova as an open-source driver successor to the Nouveau driver for upstream NVIDIA GPU support within the Linux kernel that can be used with the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. Unlike the prior larger RFC patch series, sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today were some small patches for introducing "NOVA-Core" that would serve as the initial base for this modern NVIDIA Linux kernel DRM driver. Over time and succeeding kernel releases, the NOVA code would be built up until ultimately becoming a usable state for end-users...

While we are approaching the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window with Linux 6.14-rc1 expected on Sunday, the fun isn't over quite yet... Among other last minute pull requests today were a set of patches to work on better optimizing the TLB flushing scalability for modern Intel and AMD x86_64 processors...

As another last minute change for GNOME 48 ahead of its feature freeze this weekend, the default font of the GNOME desktop has changed...

Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5's full 512-bit data path support compared to the "double pumped" approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.

The Servo open-source browser engine written in Rust has published some of their development statistics and other figures for 2025. Additionally they have shared their planned roadmap for 2025...

Along with other Intel TDX changes and AMD SEV updates separately sent out for thei n-development Linux 6.14 kernel, there is the usual hearty batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization updates too...

One of the important pieces of open-source software still working toward proper Wayland support is the Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" that in turn is depended upon by software like Steam, OBS Studio, Spotify, and many other software packages for having an in-app browser-type experience. The good news is there has been some recent progress on native Wayland support for CEF...

The FUSE code within the Linux kernel for enabling file-systems in user-space has a new performance capability up its sleeve with now supporting IO_uring communication between kernel and user-space...

All of the Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) driver updates were merged this week as we reach the end of the Linux 6.14 merge window...