Phoronix

While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security...

For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release...

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings...

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications...

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware...

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver...

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025...

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd...

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel...

All of the Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window...

The SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer is a modern web UI driven installer for the SUSE/openSUSE Linux distributions. It's modern, sports a cleaner UI and underlying architecture, and supports more features. The Agama 11 installer update was released this week in preparing for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta with this new installer as well as new openSUSE Leap 16 builds...

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. The EFI updates this cycle aren't the most exciting but the kernel has finally bid farewell to the long obsolete UGA graphics protocol support...

This week saw an updated KDE Plasma 6.3 beta release and more bug fixing taking place there while also beginning to see early feature work toward the follow-on Plasma 6.4 desktop...

Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version...

The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too...

Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API...

While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.

Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer...

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel...

While there are many exciting new features in the GNOME 48 Alpha as well as a new app with Decibels becoming the official audio player, there isn't a new official video player for this desktop release...

In addition to the Bcachefs features and new Btrfs code for Linux 6.14, the XFS file-system changes were merged on Thursday for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Now that NVIDIA is rolling out the "Blackwell" GPU driver support, it looks like the NVIDIA Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations will soon be moving to a legacy driver branch...

It's not only AI start-ups running into space and power capacity bottlenecks but the Fedora Project has been pushing the limits of its main data center and is preparing for a move to a new data center to allow for more physical space and power capacity. In turn one item mentioned is allowing space for possible RISC-V build systems for Fedora...

The GNOME 48 Alpha release was issued this morning for helping to test this updated desktop environment debuting as stable in March...

Building off last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 beta, Oracle today published the Oracle Linux 10 Developer Preview for a first glimpse at this next RHEL10-derived operating system...

The Linux x86 32-bit PAE kernel support for Physical Address Extensions allows addressing more than 4GB of memory for those still running 32-bit processors or otherwise opting to still run a 32-bit OS. While the Linux x86 32-bit specific code rarely sees new improvements in the past number of years, a set of patches were posted today in looking to enhance the x86 32-bit PAE mode...

Earlier this month was the release of the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta while today a second beta was issued...

All of the power management feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel were sent out earlier this week and subsequently merged. As we've been seeing with recent Linux kernel releases, AMD continues investing a lot into their AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for better power efficiency on Ryzen processors and since the prior kernel also now being used with the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors too...

For those making use of the source-available Redis in-memory key-value database, the upcoming Redis 8.0 will offer better performance on today's high core count systems and servers...

With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced...

Following the unboxing embargo earlier this week for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, today the review embargo lifts for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition...

The crypto subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.14 kernel. Notable this time are new x86_64-specific optimizations for the AES-GCM and AES-XTS algorithms. Benefiting the most from these new x86_64 optimizations are recent AMD processors...

Newer laptops pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows have begun adding a "Copilot" key for launching Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant or other "chatbot" software. With the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel, that key will be mapped out correctly so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop...

The Tuned software from Red Hat is a daemon for Linux monitoring and adaptive performance tuning as an alternative to the likes of power-profiles-daemon. Tuned ships with various profiles and allows different features for tuning the Linux system performance for HPC compute, enterprise storage, balanced battery for laptops, and dozens of other scenarios. Red Hat this week debuted the first release candidate of the upcoming Tuned 2.25...

Along with other VFS pull requests for Linux 6.14 to introduce STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN, adding a new mountinfo program, VirtualBox guest support for ARM64 VMs, and faster /proc/kcore reading, another VFS pull for this new kernel brings a minor performance optimization...

With the newest code merged for Mesa 25.0, the Panfrost PanVK driver is exposing Vulkan 1.1 support on Arm Valhall "v10" graphics processors...

The Landlock Linux security module that was added to the mainline Linux kernel four years ago for unprivileged application sandboxing and similar access controls has a rather weird update for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel: Land lock can now deal with "weird files"...

With Debian 13 due out in the coming months, the Debian 13 artwork/theme was recently announced as well as the Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 release. The latest is the freeze dates for Debian 13.0 being announced today...

In an Intel blog post today they outlined their desire for a more modular PC design to enhance repairability and reduce e-waste. It's very much along similar lines of the Framework Computer upgradeable and easily serviceable laptops. With some luck hopefully we will be seeing more modular PC designs moving forward...

Archinstall 3.0.2 was just tagged as the newest version of this quick and easy, text-based installer for the Arch Linux operating system...

In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled...

Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.

An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities...

Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results...

Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available...

Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online...

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released...

Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors...