Phoronix

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month...

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process...

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win...

Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard...

For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle...

GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...

Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO)...

KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project...

You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature...

A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz...

Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options...

Microsoft engineers released Azure Linux 3.0.20250206 overnight as the newest monthly update to this in-house Microsoft Linux distribution that is used within their Azure cloud infrastructure and a variety of other purposes at the Redmond company...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.14 is now available for testing as a rather light update for the week...

A set of patches sent out on Saturday by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello seek to adjust the Linux behavior for laptops/handhelds during AC plug/unplug events during s2idle to better match that of Microsoft Windows 11...

This week besides the drama over Apple Silicon maintainership for the upstream Linux kernel, in recent days there has also been a number of rather subtle changes to the maintainership of several Intel Linux kernel drivers...

Intel's ISPC project as the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as this C language variant for Single Program, Multiple Data programming on CPUs and GPUs is out with a new release...

This week was the dramatic decision by Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin to step down as upstream kernel maintainer for the Apple Silicon (ARM) code following friction with other kernel developers over Rust affairs within the kernel. He still intends to contribute code to Asahi Linux's downstream kernel and Linus Torvalds has already merged the patch dropping him as an upstream maintainer. Now a new co-maintainer has volunteered to help oversee the Apple Silicon code for the mainline kernel...

Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra has updated his set of patches implementing FineIBT-BHI mitigations for toughening up the FineIBT kernel protections previously introduced. This FineIBT-BHI code depends upon newly-merged code for the LLVM Clang compiler as part of the compiler defenses...

Following the release of Wine 10.1 on Friday for kicking off the new bi-weekly development releases after last month's Wine 10.0 stable release, Wine-Staging 10.1 is out today to get things moving once again for this experimental flavor of Wine...

For those continuing to make use of SysVinit as the aging init system that in the Linux world has been largely replaced by systemd, SysVinit 3.14 is out today and overcomes a long-standing limitation around the length of lines within the inittab files...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week were two competing solutions for new LLVM Clang capability / thread safety analysis to the Linux kernel. Two developers had separately been working on implementations for the Linux kernel to make use of Clang's "-Wthread-safety" functionality. Ultimately the upstream kernel will likely settle upon the superior or unified solution while already making use of these new checks is uncovering Linux kernel bugs...

Years in the making, GNU G-Golf 0.8 was released on Friday as a significant release for this GNU project. No, it's not a golfing simulator or anything like that, but rather a Guile Object Library for GNOME so that you can develop GTK applications from the Guile/Scheme programming language...

FEX 2502 is out today as the newest monthly feature release to this user-space emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on ARM64 Linux including the likes of Wine/Proton and Steam for being able to enjoy modern games on AArch64 Linux systems...

The KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop has received a lot of last minute polishing and fixes ahead of its planned release next week. Plasma 6.3 is scheduled for its stable debut next Tuesday on 11 February...

The FreeBSD 13.5 release dance has begun for closing out the FreeBSD 13 series...

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 as the newest annual stable release of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine 10.1 is out today. Wine 10.1 kicks off the bi-weekly development release cycle trek that will culminate with the release of Wine 11.0 next year...

While the GNOME project has long been closely tied to the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME's LocalSearch has decided to abandon its GStreamer use in favor of using FFmpeg/libav directly...

It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring...

Last week when RADV lead developer Samuel Pitoiset with Valve was commenting on the AMD RDNA4 state with the Mesa RADV driver it was noted that Vulkan cooperative matrix support, Vulkan Video encode/decode, and DCC support were still missing. But in the past week one of the items is now crossed off the list and another is continuing to see new patch activity...

With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I've begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 "znver5" in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.

Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code...

Despite Serpent OS development said to be slowing down to a lack of funding, they are hoping for the best and aiming to push forward with this original, from-scratch Linux distribution...

With the Linux 6.14 kernel Bcachefs has its last big planned on-disk format upgrade before removing the "experimental" tag on this copy-on-write file-system. Well, that's the hope at least. In addition to some early fixes last week, some additional Bcachefs fixes are now pending for merging to the mainline kernel while continuing to track down some other bugs...

NVIDIA on Thursday published their first public beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression "RTX NTC" software development kit...

AMDVLK 2025.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year to this official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

A year ago I raised attention about crypto-config as a new Ubuntu project for system-wide cryptography configuration. That crypto config tool continues being developed by Canonical engineers for a gradual roll-out into the Ubuntu Linux landscape...

Android and Chrome OS already are carrying the VirtIO Media driver as a means of enabling virtualization of host media devices into a guest while now patch review is underway in trying to get VirtIO Media upstreamed in the mainline Linux kernel...

After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.

While the AMDXDNA driver was merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs atop a mainline kernel build, there's still the user-space software needed for making use of the neural processing units found in Ryzen AI SoCs. AMD talked more about programming Ryzen AI NPUs last weekend in Belgium at the FOSDEM 2025 developer conference...

Intel's software engineers working on the OpenVINO AI toolkit today released OpenVINO 2025.0 that brings support for the much talked about Deepseek models along with other large language models (LLMs), performance improvements to some of the existing model support, and other changes...

LibreOffice 25.2 is out this morning as the newest half-year update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite...

Mesa 25.0-rc2 was released yesterday and it's rather boring on the changes, but that's a good thing during this bug fixing phase...

With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker...

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...