Phoronix

While late in the Linux 6.16 cycle and hitting the cut-off for when the period to queue new DRM driver feature material for Linux 6.17 ends, an additional drm-misc-next pull request was sent out today with some last minute kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle. Motivating this extra pull were the recent AMDGPU system hibernation patches...

In addition to releasing Mesa 25.2-rc1 with its many new features to test, Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.1.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for last quarter's series...

Earlier this year when the Framework 13 was updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series I ran benchmarks looking at the performance gains across different Linux distributions with Debian 13, Clear Linux, and CachyOS being the outstanding performers for that Strix Point hardware. With the recent launch of the Framework 12 2-in-1 laptop powered by Intel Raptor Lake you may be wondering what Linux distributions have the edge there. Here is an eight-way comparison of different Linux operating systems on the Framework 12 with Intel Core i5 1334U with the likes of Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Mesa 25.2 is now branched and thus under a feature freeze and with Mesa 25.2-rc1 having just been released. This marks the start of weekly release candidates until the Mesa 25.2 stable release is ready to ship sometime in August...

Similar to the 3D class header files previously open-sourced by NVIDIA for prior generation GPUs, yesterday NVIDIA carried out a similar open-source move to publish all the 3D class header files for their newest Blackwell graphics processors...

It's a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 "FSR 4" improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver...

One of the early changes for the LLVM 22 compiler stack now in development is completing the removal of support for Google's Native Client "NaCl"...

Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer...

The Intel Media Driver is out with its quarterly feature release for bringing all of the latest open-source video acceleration improvements for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. Enhancing support for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs continues to be a primary focus...

Hyprland 0.50 is out today as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor focused on delivering a lot of Linux desktop bling...

Yet more feature code continues piling in for the Mesa 25.2 release due out next month and days ahead of the feature freeze. Hitting Mesa Git this evening is now treating NVIDIA Kepler GPUs as Vulkan 1.2 conformant following the Vulkan 1.2 CTS passing with the NVK open-source driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver...

Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 feature freeze and code branching expected later this week, some additional ray-tracing optimizations were merged today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver. These latest RADV ray-tracing improvements benefit the latest Radeon RX 9000 series "RDNA4" the most but there are also some optimizations too for RDNA3 class GPUs...

The upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to be an especially nice release for users of modern Intel graphics hardware on Linux. The very latest feature being enabled for this next Linux kernel version is SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs to vastly enhance the Intel Linux graphics experience in virtualized environments...

Blender 4.5 is now officially available today as the newest feature release and one that is a Long Term Support (LTS) for this popular, cross-platform 3D modeling software...

One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom "BNGE" open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds...

The LLVM 21 compiler stack was branched today as release preparations get underway for shipping this next half-year compiler release as stable in late August or early September. In turn that now opens up LLVM 22 for development...

Last month patches were posted for porting the Linux kernel's "gconfig" graphical kernel configuration utility from GTK2 to GTK3. It looks like those patches for the GTK3-ified gconfig are ready for upstreaming come Linux 6.17...

While the Intel Media SDK with VA-API has long supported accelerated video decoding, the latest Mesa 25.2 development code has now landed support for AV1 decoding using the Vulkan Video API with the Intel ANV driver for Xe2 Battlemage / Lunar Lake graphics and Gfx125 Xe graphics too...

The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code...

Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin "BTC" as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite...

As part of work going back to 2019, an engineer on Google's Chromium OS team submitted an updated proposal on Monday for seeking to standardize the haptic touchpad support within the Linux kernel...

Making it into the RADV Vulkan driver ahead of this week's Mesa 25.2 feature freeze is experimental support for the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. The Vulkan host image copy extension was worked on by Valve and others for letting applications/games copy data between the host memory and images on the host processor without having to first stage via a GPU-accessible buffer...

The LTTng tracing toolkit is twenty years old this year and it's seen significant adoption by different hyperscalers and other notable organizations like IBM and Sony and Siemens beyond basic end-users and administrators for system tracing/debugging. While having many successes over the past two decades, the kernel modules remain outside of the kernel tree. Even with around four different upstreaming attempts to get the LTTng code into the mainline kernel, it still has not happened. A fifth attempt began today but still looks like it could be an uphill battle...

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is enabling Panther Lake graphics out-of-the-box. Now going along with that Linux 6.17+ support out-of-the-box, the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan user-space drivers are also ready to declare their Xe3 Panther Lake graphics support by default...

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop...

A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.

Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures...

New feature patches posted for review today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working to implement the NVMe specification's Controller Data Queue (CDQ) functionality within the NVMe storage driver...

In addition to last minute feature work on the latest AMD RDNA4 graphics cards ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching, there's also some new fixes going into Mesa for the open-source Radeon driver code... Coming in this Monday morning by surprise are some fixes for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series approaching two decades old as well as a fix for the Radeon HD 4000 graphics processors...

Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching / feature freeze expected later this week, last minute feature additions and other changes continue landing in the codebase for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. One of the additions today worth mentioning are continued Vulkan Video improvements for AMD Radeon graphics...

One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article. But now the ability is coming to optionally disable VRT...

The Linux Mint developers have put out their monthly status update to outline their work in recent weeks. Over the course of June, Linux Mint developers were primarily focused on Linux Mint 22.2 with the beta release expected soon...

Debian's annual Debian Conference "DebConf" started this morning and runs all week in Brest, France...

As we approach the stable Linux 6.16 kernel release later this month, Linux 6.16-rc6 is out today as the newest weekly test candidate...

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system is out with its "July 2025" update for providing the latest innovations for this performance-optimized, feature-rich Linux distribution...

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware...

Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release...

Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company...

Last month when the Fairphone 6 smartphone was announced, same-day Linux support patches were posted for this modular and repair-friendly smartphone. That Linux support code with the Device Tree (DT) files have been under review and out today is the second iteration of those enablement patches...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS had a busy month of June with a number of enhancements made to this OS. Haiku just published their convenient monthly recap that highlights all of the interesting changes made the past month to this open-source OS...

GStreamer 1.27.1 released this week as the first development version toward the GStreamer 1.28 release coming later in the year. GStreamer 1.27/1.28 is bringing a lot of modern feature enhancements for this widely-used multimedia library...

Ahead of tomorrow's Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release a number of Bcachefs file-system fixes were merged...

It's been a while since there have been any new patches in the Wine-Staging experimental area to note. More patches though have continued working their way from Wine-Staging to upstream/mainline Wine while this weekend Wine-Staging 10.12 is out at 292 patches atop upstream Wine and containing two new patches...

In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel...

NVIDIA software engineers ended out the week by releasing a new beta of their RTX Neural Texture Compression (NTC) SDK. The RTXNTC software is NVIDIA's interesting solution for compressing material texture sets with very promising results for helping to reduce game data sizes moving forward...

On top of this week's release of the GNOME 49 Alpha, other application improvements and more came about in the past few days...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap of all interesting things and fixes merged for the week to Plasma...

Wine 10.12 has been uncorked as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

The AMD engineering led work on Attack Vector Controls for the Linux kernel could be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel with the remaining patches now being queued within a TIP branch...

With the feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 25.2 expected to take place next week and kick off the release process for this quarterly Mesa 3D version to debut as stable in August, I've begun running more benchmarks of this latest code on popular GPUs. As it pertains to the newest AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics processors, the most exciting area with Mesa 25.2 are the Vulkan ray-tracing improvements. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the upcoming Mesa 25.2 performance for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card on Linux.