Phoronix

While fresh off the GNOME 48 release, GNOME desktop developers aren't slowing down and there's been some interesting activity to report this week...

The big pull request was sent out today of the numerous Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. There are new drivers, a lot as usual for the AMD Radeon and Intel kernel graphics drivers, and a lot of other changes throughout for advancing these open-source kernel graphics/display drivers...

While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.

Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices...

The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets...

All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support...

Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages...

A two year old Intel Mesa merge request was finally merged for Mesa 25.1 today for enabling functionality on DG2/Alchemist GPUs and newer...

All of the HID subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window...

Set to be merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel is the very initial NOVA driver core code that will be incrementally built up over time in succeeding kernel versions. For Linux 6.15, this open-source NVIDIA kernel driver isn't of any use for end-users as it's just the very preliminary pieces to begin crafting the foundation for the driver that is leveraging the NVIDIA GSP found with Turing and newer hardware. In preparation for future kernel cycles, the NOVA skeleton driver pieces were posted for review yesterday to begin fleshing out more of the driver's design...

The many SoC and DeviceTree updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There's a lot on the ARM hardware side plus some additions for RISC-V and various interesting new device/board additions...

The Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" beta is now available for testing ahead of the official release set for 17 April...

Ted Ts'o at Google has sent out the EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel...

Ubuntu 25.04 beta is set to be released today and thus this week I've begun testing out the latest Ubuntu 25.04 builds on different systems for seeing how this six-month Ubuntu Linux update is looking compared to the prior Ubuntu 24.10 release. In this first Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarking article is a look at the performance using an AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics.

It's not only FreeDesktop.org that has been transitioning to new infrastructure this month but separately, Kernel.org is now receiving hosting and CDN needs provided by Akamai...

Linux 6.15 keeps getting more exciting... The big Zstd update has landed! The in-kernel Zstandard compression code is finally re-based against the newer upstream state that brings better performance as well as new APIs for allowing Intel QAT acceleration by Intel hardware offering QuickAssist Technology. This Zstd code is relied upon by Btrfs transparent file-system compression and other in-kernel users for compression/decompression...

The printk changes submitted for the Linux 6.15 kernel introduce a new "NULL_TTY_DEFAULT_CONSOLE" Kconfig build-time option for allowing the null TTY to be the default for those building the Linux kernel without virtual terminal (VT) support...

As a very exciting improvement for the open-source PostgreSQL database server, it has merged initial support for making use of IO_uring on Linux servers for asynchronous I/O and can provide for some nice performance improvements...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has submitted all the feature updates slated for Linux 6.15. There is a lot of new audio hardware support and other enhancements that are now merged for this next kernel release...

Earlier this month Mesa deprecated the Clover OpenCL driver in favor of the modern Rust-written Rusticl Gallium3D state tracker. Clover is expected to be removed in Q3's Mesa 25.2 release while today the RadeonSI driver has decided to preemptively remove its Clover support...

NVIDIA has published new Vulkan beta driver builds for Windows and Linux that introduce VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for BFloat16 "BF16" support within shaders...

Submitted today for upstreaming into the Linux 6.15 kernel is support for the Versal NET SoC, an addition to the AMD/Xilinx Versal family that doesn't appear to have been talked about much publicly yet but should be an interesting addition to their product line-up...

Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party...

While there is a lot of exciting new x86_64 CPU features coming with Linux 6.15, there is also some of the not so fun changes too: namely the "x86/bugs" pull request to bring the latest CPU security mitigation work to the mainline kernel...

The x86 platform drivers co-maintainer Ilpo Jarvinen sent out the pull request today of all the feature additions set for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. As usual, most of the platform-drivers-x86 material is around improvements to benefit modern Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops...

The Linux Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel...

AerynOS 2025.03 is now available for this Linux distribution that began life as Serpent OS as a new original distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame...

KDE developer David Edmundson has published a lengthy blog post today outlining the long-standing challenges they have with the SDDM display manager, unimplemented features they want out of a log-in manager, and acknowledging GNOME's GDM as a "gold standard" for display managers. While not yet an official project, they have begun working on a new KDE Login Manager for improving the situation...

The Linux 6.15 kernel is set to remove support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those server platforms from around two decades ago that used the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture processors. IBM Cell Blades at the time powered a few supercomputers but these IBM QS20 / QS21 / QS22 platforms are no longer relevant and the IBM Linux kernel maintainers no longer even have these platforms available/running. With no apparent users remaining, it's time to say goodbye to the IBM Cell Blades from the mainline kernel...

Intel engineers today released LPMD 0.0.9, the newest version of their open-source Low Power Mode Daemon for Linux systems to optimize active idle power consumption on Intel Core processors...

With the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel there are two new features worth mentioning...

Among other Linux Virtual File-System (VFS) changes submitted and already merged for Linux 6.15 was a set of minor performance optimizations around VFS file operations...

Merged today for the recently-opened Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the "x86/core" changes that are particularly heavy on new feature work for both Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 processors. This is easily quite one of the most significant Intel/AMD CPU set of updates in a given kernel cycle in quite some time...

XZ 5.8 is out today as the first notable feature release since last year's malicious backdoor in XZ 5.6 inserted by a then-co-maintainer of the project. XZ 5.6.2 was out last May while XZ 5.8.0 is now stable today for bringing new features to this lossless data compressor project...

MPV 0.40 was just released as the newest version of this open-source media player derived from MPlayer/MPlayer2. With the MPV 0.40 release there is support for HDR videos on Wayland using the new color management protocol along with a variety of other new features...

Earlier this month for launch-day there were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU compute benchmarks. The graphics/gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 5070 on Linux were held up by waiting for a new R570 Linux driver release with proper support for this new Blackwell graphics card. Last week that new Linux driver arrived in the form of the NVIDIA 570.133.07 Linux build. That new NVIDIA Linux driver is working out great with the GeForce RTX 5070 Founder's Edition and in this article are some initial Linux gaming/graphics performance benchmarks for that new graphics card competing with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series.

Fwupd 2.0.7 brings the newest plug-ins and expanded hardware support for being able to update a variety of system and device/peripheral firmware under Linux...

Over the past week a lot of new Rust "gccrs" code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality...

An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing... Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors...

In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version...

The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA's Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell...

The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD's INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores...

Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux...

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...