OpenSUSE announced the beta release today of openSUSE Leap 16.0, their next-generation Linux distribution from from SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 (SLE 16) and its new base of SUSE Linux Framework One that was previously known as the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP)...
Bytedance engineers are exploring faster inter-process communication (IPC) on Linux via a new approach they call Run Process As Library (RPAL). Their initial benchmarks of RPAL are very promising for faster Linux IPC performance...
Ben Skeggs formerly of Red Hat who had been the maintainer of the Nouveau Linux kernel driver for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver support had joined NVIDIA last year and continued his engagements with the open-source Linux community. For ending out April there's a big surprise... The NVIDIA engineer posted a set of 60 patches enabling support for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs atop the open-source Nouveau kernel driver...
Firefox 138 was released yesterday and wasn't particularly exciting besides enhanced profile management and Tab Groups support... Aside from that it was a pretty basic release. In turn Firefox 139 is now in beta and that release does bring some items worth mentioning like faster HTTP/3 upload performance...
AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 was released today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan driver since the previous release in mid-March. AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 brings new hardware support, new Vulkan API extensions, and other new features...
Pixman as the open-source pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server and Cairo graphics library is out today with Pixman 0.46 as the newest feature release...
Valve and CodeWeavers today announced the much anticipated beta release of Proton 10.0 as the newest version of their downstream version of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...
Introduced last month in the Vulkan 1.4.311 spec was VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for supporting BF16 types within SPIR-V shaders. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is that BFloat16 support for Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver...
It's almost majestic: HDR display support working on the Linux desktop. If you asked me at the start of the calendar year if I'd expect to see modern Linux distributions shipping with working HDR display support in H1'2025, I would have been doubtful. But after a lot of miraculous work that landed across numerous upstream repositories over the past two months or so, everything has come together just in time for the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42. There still are apps not supporting HDR and the like, but the core infrastructure is in place and working. The past two weeks I've begun testing out the Linux HDR desktop experience with the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM 27-inch 4K display. Between the ASUS PG27UCDM's QD-OLED display and HDR support enabled under Linux, it delivers a very beautiful Linux desktop experience.
Sent out today was a batch of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window. There are a few notable changes here as part of the Direct Rendering Manager updates for the core code and smaller kernel drivers...
In addition to the recent merge to Mutter for improving fullscreen apps with direct scanout enhancements for GNOME 49, another early addition also landed today in Mutter: support for Wayland's toplevel tag protocol...
For nostalgic open-source fans, React OS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications can now work with the 3dfx Voodoo 5 driver...
On top of the Intel Xe driver changes already queued in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window, an additional set of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were mailed out yesterday...
Another round of x86 platform driver updates was sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window. Besides some fixes, there is also new hardware support making it into this week's platform-drivers-x86 updates...
MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 was released today as the first test release of this updated Apple iOS / macOS / tvOS / visionOS layer that implements the Vulkan API atop the Apple Metal drivers. With MoltenVK 1.3 there is Vulkan API 1.3 support finally in tow...
Separate from last week in uncovering a big performance regression on Linux 6.15 affecting workloads like Nginx and that regression getting fixed, I unfortunately discovered another heavy-hitting regression on Linux 6.15. This latest performance regression has been bisected and a possible fix is being thought through by the relevant party, but for the moment has yet to be fixed upstream and affects modern AMD processors.
The Trinity Desktop Environment as a long ago fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop released TDE R14.1.4 on Sunday as the newest maintenance release with various bug fixes and minor feature improvements...
With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 this month I've looked at its performance on x86_64 laptops and desktop hardware to nice gains on server. That testing so far was focused on Intel and AMD systems given my abundance of x86_64 platforms. Last week I began testing Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 on the System76 Thelio Astra powered by Ampere Altra processors. For those considering the Ubuntu 25.04 upgrade and not minding that it's not a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 25.04 is also allowing for greater performance on ARM hardware.
Another change to look forward to with GNOME 49 come September is better/faster direct scanout for more applications thanks to a change that was merged to the Mutter compositor this past week...
Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format...
A patch currently residing within Andrew Morton's "MM" memory management branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is an addition by Red Hat for introducing deferred THP insertion to khugepaged. This deferred Transparent Huge Page (THP) insertion aims to help reduce memory waste on Linux with some workloads...
The XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse boasts a 16K DPI sensor and retails for $65~80 USD but turns out it doesn't even work properly under Linux without a pending kernel patch...
The SHA-256 code within the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem is in the process of being refactoring so that it's available via the crypto's library API and also opening it up to support architecture-optimized implementations...
Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening up in just one month, the new Zblock allocator was queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" tree of memory management material likely destined for the next kernel merge window. Zblock is showing much potential as a compressed slab memory allocator...
Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been pursuing the Fair DRM Scheduler as a "fair" scheduling policy to help with multiple applications/processes aiming to make use of the GPU concurrently. With this week's v4 patch-set to the DRM Fair Scheduler there are some big code changes but overall looking well as a nice scheduling policy for multiple apps/games/processes wanting equal access to GPU resources...
With the Linux kernel now limiting 32-bit systems to 4GB of memory even with the "HIGHMEM" Kconfig option, an issue was uncovered where if the system was still populated with more memory than addressable by 32-bit systems, the kernel would crash. With the Linux 6.15-rc4 kernel due out on Sunday, this issue will be addressed...
A new Wayland-only feature merged for GNOME 49's Mutter is support for tablet pad relative dials. These dials found on some drawing tablets now allow for relative moment under the GNOME Wayland session when paired with recent libinput and libwacom releases...
As we near the end of April, KDE developers remain quite busy working on more enhancements for the Plasma 6.4 desktop while many of them were also meeting this week in Graz, Austria for further development and planning...
Following recent Vulkan 1.1 support within Mesa for the PanVK driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan driver support, Vulkan 1.2 is now being advertised...
This week Intel announced "200S Boost" for Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" K-Series desktop processors as effectively a new overclocking profile rolling out to existing Z890 motherboards via a BIOS update. Enabling the 200S Boost profile is said to help with low-latency workloads like gaming by allowing higher fabric / die-to-die / memory frequencies. While some Windows benchmarks have begun emerging for the Intel 200S Boost mode and some limited gains, I was curious about the performance under Linux so here are some 200S Boost benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K on Ubuntu 25.04.
Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support...
While last week Intel released an update Compute Runtime for GPU compute with the OpenCL and Level Zero APIs on Windows and Linux, today they released a new preview version for readying a shiny new feature: Ultra Low Latency Scheduling "ULLS" for Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics...
GCC 15.1 was just released as the newest annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. This first stable GCC 15 release brings a COBOL compiler front-end, many C and C++ language support improvements, support for new CPUs and ISA capabilities, better Rust programming language support, debugging enhancements, and a whole lot more...
A set of Linux kernel patches posted today by longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar are looking to remove support for "ancient" 32-bit CPUs. In particular, if these patches are accepted, the Linux kernel would be ending support for old i486 CPUs as well as early i586 CPU models...
Nearly two years ago patches for casefolding / case insensitive file and folder support on Bcachefs were posted by a Valve/Linux developer. That support was upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver but it turns out that it never properly worked. Patches now set for merging into the Linux 6.15 will fix that case insensitive file/folder opt-in support so that it is now properly supported...
One of the interesting new features merged to the Linux kernel last year was the DRM Panic infrastructure so that Linux can display an error screen akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" when encountering problems. With follow-on kernel releases it's been extended to add QR code error messages and other improvements. But DRM Panic does require the support/cooperation of the different Direct Rendering Manager drivers and so far Intel graphics haven't been supported...
Intel today released a new version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch in order to apply optimizations to PyTorch for benefiting Intel's hardware. With the Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.7 release, there is support for new large language models (LLMs) as well as various performance optimizations and other enhancements...
Following the COSMIC Alpha 6 release from February, System76 today released COSMIC Alpha 7 as their last planned alpha release for this open-source, Rust-written desktop environment designed around the needs of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...
The Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point is now shipping that as detailed in our review earlier this month can provide for a very capable Linux laptop for Linux developers, creators, and enthusiasts. But for those hesitant about the high price and still weeks away before they have shipped all their pre-orders, if you are principally concerned about battery life, and/or after proven build quality backed by on-site warranty and other warranty/support options, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition ends up being a solid option for a very reliable and well-engineered laptop for Linux use. Here is a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition on Linux that is powered by Intel Lunar Lake.
A new software project covered on Phoronix last year was SCALE for natively compiling CUDA applications for AMD GPUs. This "clean room" implementation of CUDA building off the open-source LLVM codebase continues going strong and out this week is SCALE 1.3 with more features and hardware support for compiling CUDA software for AMD GPU execution...
Completely separate from the big performance regression I noted earlier this week for the Linux 6.15 Git kernel and fixed yesterday in the upstream codebase, another significant performance issue was also uncovered and fixed this week in Linux 6.15 Git...
Phoronix