Phoronix

Red Hat engineer and PipeWire lead developer Wim Taymans presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend around the state of the PipeWire project for this integral component to the modern Linux desktop...

The modern Intel "Xe" Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver as the clean successor to the i915 driver has been an experimental option for Tigerlake and newer but only for Xe2 graphics (Lunar Lake / Battlemage) and newer is it used by default. But Google at least for their Chromebook use-cases is entertaining the idea of switching over to the Xe driver rather than the long-used i915 kernel driver for Alder Lake era hardware...

Yesterday I showcased Linux 6.14 Git performance worse than Linux 6.13 and 6.12 in a number of multi-threaded workloads. Due to that initial discover being on the lone AMD EPYC Turin 2P server that is always busy running through new benchmarks for future content as well as I am being persistently short on time and constantly under pressure due to the state of the web/ad industry, I didn't expect to get around to digging deeper into the problem in the near-term. But as I ended up being able to reproduce some of the regressions on a System76 Thelio Major workstation at my desk with the still mighty powerful Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, I was able to turn around a quick bisect...

Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities...

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window wrapped up this past weekend with the release of Linux 6.14-rc1, here is a recap of all the great new features, hardware enablement, and other improvements to find with this kernel.

AMD announced today the release of Schola 1.0 as an open-source reinforcement learning library that is being made available under an MIT license and as part of their GPUOpen software collection for helping game developers...

One of the set of patches for the Linux kernel that we have been looking forward to but that wasn't wrapped up in time for the recent Linux v6.14 merge window was the work enabling use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction on Zen 3 CPUs and newer for broadcast TLB invalidation. This can lead to a nice performance bump in some workloads while the eighth iteration of those patches were posted overnight...

The Linux Foundation by way of their LF Energy initiative announced today the release of SEAPATH 1.0, a security-hardened real-time hypervisor...

Red Hat engineer Anirban Sinha presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend in Brussels on F-UKI, a new project being worked on at Red Hat as part of the confidential computing push for loading guest firmware within a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) for confidential VMs...

Google engineer Eric Biggers is known for some of his great crypto performance optimization patches to benefit the Linux kernel and his most recent patch series is yielding some very tantalizing results for AMD Zen 5 processors whether it be the Ryzen 9000 series, Ryzen AI 300 series, or EPYC 9005 server processors...

Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its "Hyper" Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code. The cURL 8.12 release is out today with Hyper stripped out...

The GNOME Mutter 48 compositor beta is now available for testing as part of this week's GNOME 48 beta milestone...

While having missed the mark last week for making it into this quarter's Mesa 25.0 release, merged for Q2's Mesa 25.1 release by Microsoft engineers are some enhancements to the Direct3D 12 video encode capabilities...

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...