Phoronix

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times...

Back in December Linux kernel patches were posted by a Meta engineer for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found with Zen 3 and newer processors. The Linux kernel would use INVLPGB for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. After these patches went through 14 rounds of review since December, it looks like this AMD broadcast TLB invalidation support is now ready for the mainline Linux kernel!..

Raspberry Pi has been on a spree lately with many new product launches such as the Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi Monitor, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, and Compute Module 5 in the past few months. Today the company announced an expansion of their offerings in the Compute Module 4 line-up...

Rustup 1.28 is out today as the newest version of this official tool that is the Rust project's recommended means of installing the Rust programming language support...

Last September the USB Implementers Forum quietly published an update to the USB 2.0 specification... The Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" supplement to provide for better performance with significantly higher data rates to USB 2.0 while maintaining the low-voltage electrical interface...

Open-sourced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an open-source, soft processor core of Power ISA 3.0 and intended for use on FPGA boards and then there was seemingly short-lived work to fabricate a Microwatt chip and Microwatt also found its way for use within a BMC implementation. Linux 5.14 added support for this soft CPU core while the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle is set to introduce SMP support for Microwatt...

The newest upstream-focused work around AMD SEV for Secure Encrypted Virtualization with EPYC server processors is a set of patches to better optimize cache flushing...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc5 kernel as the Linux 6.14 stable kernel approaches toward release later in March...

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA...

Back in 2023 ONNX and AMD announced TurnkeyML as an "AI insights toolchain". There hasn't been too much news about TurnkeyML since then and they now describe the project itself as a "no-code AI toolchain" while this week brought the release of the big TurnkeyML 6.0 software...

Back during January Steam on Linux dropped by 0.23% to a 2.06% marketshare while overnight the numbers were published for February 2025.....

A pull request was sent out on Friday that could potentially land for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel to transition ARM's kernel entry code from some architecture-specific Assembly over to using the generic entry code path. It means more unification and transitioning some Assembly code over to C, but it also comes with some hits to performance...

Following the official SDL 3 release back in January, SDL 3.2.6 was released this weekend as the newest iteration of this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer that is commonly leveraged by cross-platform games...

Last month I wrote about new code slated to be added for Linux 6.15 that would provide a cross-driver/standardized means of reporting to user-space over hung GPUs. For the likes of the AMD and Intel graphics drivers initially, user-space will be notified via this new wedged event when a GPU is hung in case user-space wants to take additional actions to try to recover the GPU or at least properly note the troubled state of the GPU. There are now proposed patches under review for further extending this functionality...

Last week AMD sent out a big batch of new graphics driver code for Linux 6.15 including new GPU support, OEM i2c support for RGB lighting and other features, and other updates. Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code targeting the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window was sent out on Friday...

A fix was merged to the Linux 6.14 kernel on Friday -- and also for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels over the coming days -- for fixing an annoying problem with Intel Core 2 processors. The problem, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2019, could lead to system stalls and boot delays for those still using Intel Core 2 CPUs with modern distributions...

While a shorter month, there were still 263 original articles published on Phoronix during February. A lot of exciting hardware in the lab to notable open-source milestones and interesting kernel developments made for an interesting month besides the usual battle over ad-blockers and pressure on the web publishing industry...

Racing toward the GNOME 48 finish line, developers have remained busy squeezing some remaining bits into place for this big open-source desktop release...

With the Plasma 6.3 desktop settling down and the early bugs being addressed, KDE developers have begun spending more time on feature work toward the Plasma 6.4 release...

Chinese AI company DeepSeek made public this week 3FS, a Linux FUSE-based file-system intended for allowing better AI training and inference performance...

NVIDIA engineers closed out February by releasing the NVIDIA 570.123.01 Vulkan beta driver for Linux and on the Windows side was the NVIDIA 572.63 driver release...

Patches were posted today for the Linux kernel implementing new drivers for web camera image signal processing (ISP) for supporting new, unspecified AMD Ryzen laptops...

One month ago FreeDesktop.org/X.Org experienced a new cloud crisis with Equinix Metal shutting down and losing access to all the FreeDesktop.org cloud/hosting resources at the end of April. FreeDesktop.org GitLab powers not only the X.Org projects but also Mesa, Wayland, and countless other Linux desktop open-source projects. Fortunately, it looks like they will have a new solution in time...

NetworkManager 1.52 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used system network service and network configuration tool suite for Linux systems...

The embargo is over! We finally can share details on the exciting Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards powered by RDNA4 that will be available from Internet retailers next week.

AMD has been investing a lot into the ROCm compute stack to make it a more formidable contender against the NVIDIA CUDA software ecosystem. From better documentation and improved application/API coverage to expanding their range of supported AMD GPUs, there's been a lot going on. So with this morning's much anticipated Radeon RX 9070 series launch announcement ahead of product availability next week, you are probably wondering about Radeon RX 9000 series support for ROCm too... Here's what I know so far...

An AMD engineer presented earlier this month at the Vulkanised 2025 conference in Cambridge (UK) around the work they are pursuing for AI using the MLIR intermediate representation, IREE, and the role that Vulkan/SPIR-V can play for AI acceleration across AMD's wares as well as other hardware...

Current GNU Compiler Collection release manager Richard Biener of SUSE provided an update concerning the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release...

Just ahead of the AMD RDNA4 GPUs launching, the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has expanded a performance optimization technique for existing RDNA3 graphics processors...

When seeing a new AMDVLK release was just tagged on GitHub and just a few hours to go until the Radeon RX 9070 series announcement, I was hoping it was going to be a new driver officially rolling out their new RDNA4 GPU support. Today's AMDVLK 2025.Q1.2 driver was not for officially introducing RDNA4 but does bring Strix Halo support and other improvements...

Intel initially detailed Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) back in mid-2023 as extensions to double the number of general purpose registers and add other performance features. In the time since they have done a lot preparing the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers for the new APX ISA features while finally today they sent out an initial set of patches for preparing the Linux kernel for APX processors...

In a surprising announcement, Electronic Arts announced today that they have open-sourced Command and Conquer Red Alert under the GPL license along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and related titles...

A set of patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today propose the introduction of a Linux Motion Control "LMC" subsystem for drivers that could control devices like CNC machines and 3D printers...

SUSE's Agama project is their modern OS installer featuring a web-based UI that will serve as the installer of SUSE/openSUSE in future releases moving forward. Agama 12 is now available as the newest iteration of this operating system installer and there is also now a public road-map concerning future development plans...

Going into beta just under one month ago was the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux driver that brought initial support for GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" graphics cards as well as Vulkan driver improvements, Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) support with multiple displays, GPU overclocking exposed by default, and various other refinements to this official NVIDIA Linux driver. Out today is the NVIDIA 570.124.04 stable Linux driver release...

Merged yesterday to FFmpeg Git is an initial AV1 RTP packetizer and depacketizer in working to support the tentative AV1 RTP specification...

The FreeBSD project this morning published their quarterly status report that outlines all of the interesting OS improvements and other changes made during Q4'2024...

Entering beta last year was the Fish Shell 4.0 release that migrated its codebase from C++ to Rust. Out today is the first stable 4.0 release for the Rust-ed version of the popular Fish Shell...

Merged today for Mesa 25.1 is introducing a new previously AMD-internal library to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver dubbed GMLIB. This GMLIB code is being used by RadeonSI in conjunction with Radeon GPUs having the Video Processing Engine (VPE) hardware to deal with HDR video on Linux...

Over the past few months there's been an in-progress patch series by Arnd Bergmann for cleaning up the x86 32-bit kernel support for running on x86_64 CPUs. After the third iteration of the patches were posted this week, these x86 32-bit CPU clean-ups were shuffled into the tip/tip.git "x86/cpu" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window...

Mike Blumenkrantz as the lead developer of Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation and working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics team has been spending much time recently optimizing for OpenCL with the Rusticl Gallium3D driver...

Git maintainer Junio C Hamano announced Git 2.49-rc0 today as an early preview release for the next version of this widely-used, distributed version control system...

Last week I published an article looking at the power efficiency of 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" using the modern AMD P-State driver and the Power Profile options. The AMD P-State driver being used by default now for the EPYC 9005 series processors on Linux 6.12+ and paired with Power Profile option tuning can deliver a nice boost to server energy efficiency with only modest impact to the performance. Today's article are some complementary numbers I carried out recently on a Supermicro server looking at more of the Power Profile Selection options.

More RadeonSI Gallium3D changes worth mentioning have landed today in Mesa 25.1 Git for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack...

Following the various Intel graphics driver feature updates sent out earlier this week in building up the new kernel graphics/display driver features for Linux 6.15, another prominent pull request was sent out yesterday with additional material...

FineIBT-BHI as a means of tougher kernel defenses for fending off Branch History Injection (BHI) looks like it will be ready for upstreaming in next month's Linux 6.15 merge window...

Adding to the flurry of open-source work recently around the merged Wayland color management protocol for supporting HDR, the Mesa Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) code has added support for this protocol...

A "request for comments" patch series sent out on Monday is working on Spectre mitigations for BPF programs using speculation barriers...

Earlier today Framework Computer held a virtual and in-person event to announce their 2nd gen offerings in the form of a mini-ITX desktop powered by the new Ryzen AI Max SoCs, a 2-in-1 convertible laptop with the Framework Laptop 12, and Ryzen AI 300 series SoC/motherboard options for the Framework Laptop 13...

Following the recent Rust drama within the Linux kernel that came out in part because Christoph Hellwig expressed objections to Rust bindings for the DMA mapping helpers that he is a maintainer of, Hellwig has now stepped down as one of the DMA mapping helper maintainers...