Beyond the continued flow of new performance optimizations via hand-written Assembly, with the FFmpeg project it's also interesting to monitor their ever-expanding scope of supported audio/video formats. The newest to land in FFmpeg Git is support for AHX audio files...
OBS Studio 32.0 stable is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop recording and screencasting software popular with game streamers and for a variety of other recording/casting purposes...
While the Rust Coreutils project has been generating a lot of interest recently from the uutils initiative, the upstream GNU Coreutils project isn't slowing down and today is out with GNU Coreutils 9.8 for shipping the newest features...
RPM 6.0 is out today as the newest major update to the RPM Package Manager as the package management system most commonly associated with Red Hat / Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia / OpenMandriva, and others...
With last week's official release of ROCm 7.0 failing to mention the AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs on the supported GPU list, a number of Phoronix readers and from elsewhere were inquiring whether or not Strix Halo works with the new ROCm release. Various AMD folks have mentioned Strix Halo with ROCm, so I decided to run some benchmarks for myself of ROCm 7.0 on Ubuntu Linux with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics on the Framework Desktop.
XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives...
Queued up into DRM-Next is a last batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window that is expected to begin next week. With this last minute Intel Xe driver activity is also a new power management knob for those wanting to run their Intel graphics slightly more efficient...
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.17-rc7 as the last planned release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel that is expected to go final next weekend...
Not to be confused with AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), but Google's PSP Security Protocol (PSP) for encryption in-transit for TCP network connections is now ready for the mainline kernel. This initial PSP encryption support for network connections is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel...
Code was open-sourced this week and posted to the Linux kernel mailing list as a "request for comments" (RFC) for a multi-kernel architecture. This proposal could allow for multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel could run on dedicated CPU Cores while sharing underlying hardware resources. This could also allow for some complex use-cases such as real-time (RT) kernels running on select CPU cores...
The past few years Google engineers have been reimplementing Android's Binder driver in the Rust programming language. Binder is a critical part of Android for inter-process communication (IPC) and now with Linux 6.18 it looks like the Rust rewrite will be upstreamed...
While years ago it was a annual ritual and closest thing to a vacation around here (even though the daily original content persisted), the Phoronix pilgrimage/meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich sadly remains on hiatus. Web publishing operations remain difficult given the state of the industry and rampant ad-block use make even daily operations tight. But for those wishing to show their support for Phoronix during this autumn/fest period, there is the annual Phoronix Premium sale special for those wishing to help the site at a discounted rate to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits...
A patch queued into the PCI subsystem's "next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window will uniformally expose the PCI device serial number of devices via sysfs for easy programmatic parsing...
Rather than needing to parse package/history log files manually and akin to functionality provided by Red Hat's DNF, a merge request is pending to add a built-in history command for APT...
When it comes to AMD's incredible Strix Halo platform, the leading laptop option is the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. The HP ZBook Ultra G1a works great overall on Linux with the main caveat being the web camera due to making use of AMD's latest SoC capabilities for offloaded image processing. The AMD ISP4 open-source driver fixes that for the ZBook Ultra G1a and is also important for future laptop models employing AMD's ISP IP...
With Bcachefs now being "externally maintained" with the upstream kernel not accepting any further feature changes for now to this copy-on-write file-system, Bcachefs is pursuing a nice DKMS experience for distributing updated file-system kernel driver support out-of-tree. Convenient DKMS Debian packages of Bcachefs are now available on Ubuntu and Debian Linux platforms...
While KDE Plasma 6.5 beta released this week, KDE developers have been busy landing last-minute minor features and fixes into this next desktop release...
Linux 6.17 is an interesting time to carry out fresh file-system benchmarks given that EXT4 has seen some scalability improvements while Bcachefs in the mainline kernel is now in a frozen state. Linux 6.17 is also what's powering Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box to make such a comparison even more interesting. Today's article is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, Bcachefs and then OpenZFS too.
Merged to Mesa Git are new contributor guidelines added to the documentation. This can help new users in submitting patches to Mesa. It also lays out a policy of allowing AI-generated/assisted code but the author submitting the code must be able to understand the code in question and take responsibility for it...
Announced last month was the Ubuntu "Dangerous" Desktop Images as a new form of the Ubuntu Linux desktop images that would ship with leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu development images... Basically, pulling in the very latest Snaps to go along with the latest Ubuntu development Debian packages...
In addition to working on optimizing the performance of Zink for workstation graphics, Mike Blumenkrantz has also been tackling support for OpenGL mesh shaders with this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan open-source driver...
In addition to AMD posting patches this week working on ACPI C4 power savings support available in some newer AMD systems, patches were separately posted this week for enabling S0ix sleep support within the AMDKFD compute kernel driver...
As announced last month, PCI Express 8.0 is aiming for 256 GT/s speeds for allowing 1 TB/s bandwidth in an x16 configuration. In working towards the goals of PCIe 8.0, the PCI-SIG announced today that the v0.3 specification has been released to members...
One of the exciting elements of Intel's Xeon 6 Granite Rapids launch last year was introducing support for MRDIMMs alongside DDR5-6400 memory support. After the Xeon 6900P series debut I posted some of the first independent DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 benchmarks. One year later, today is a fresh look at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance for Granite Rapids with new/updated benchmarks, the latest Linux software improvements, and also looking at the impact on power and thermals of MRDIMM memory.
Following the recent release of Linux Mint 22.2 as the Linux Mint project's premiere operating system currently built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, today marks the beta release of Linux Mint Debian Edition 7...
The Fedora Forge has been soft-launched for Fedora contributors to help modernize the development and collaboration tools around the Linux distribution...
A new round of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" were submitted today for the nearly-complete Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. While on the fixes stage of the kernel, the x86 platform driver changes can be interesting when it comes to new device IDs for enabling new products late in the kernel cycle...
Beyond shutting down the Clear Linux project, various Linux driver maintainers let go that have even led to some Intel drivers being "orphaned" in the Linux kernel, there is another open-source project that has ended at Intel with the developers departing the company. Though at least this project has found a new open-source home under the NumPy umbrella...
The past few months we have been intrigued by an AMD GFX1250 target added to the LLVM codebase for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is RDNA4 and GFX1250 is presumably some "RDNA 4.5" / "RDNA Refresh" part akin to GFX1150 having been for the RDNA 3.5 parts with Strix Halo / Strix Point. The prior LLVM code confirmed GFX1250 is in APU form factor but product details beyond that have been scarce. Today a new AMD GFX1251 target was merged to LLVM...
While down to AMD Austin yesterday for the Instinct MI355X and ROCm 7.0 launch, I had the chance to chat again with Anush Elangovan. As the VP of AI Software at AMD, talking with Anush is always insightful and technical in nature. One of the questions I posed him was around the length of hardware support with ROCm...
GNOME 49.0 is out today as the latest half-year feature release to the GNOME desktop that will go on to power the likes of Fedora Workstation 43 and Ubuntu 25.10...
When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I also ended up carrying out some Llama.cpp AI benchmarks as the first time exploring the AI inferencing performance between Windows and Linux for both CPU and GPU-accelerated deployments. Here are those results for exploring the Llama.cpp performance between Windows and Linux with different large language models.
Yesterday I was invited along with a small group of others to try out the AMD Instinct MI355X accelerator down in Austin, Texas. The AMD Instinct MI355X is fully supported with the newly-released AMD ROCm 7.0...
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250910 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used by Azure and other services. Azure Linux 3.0 has long been using the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel while now Linux 6.12 LTS is a new option focused on providing better hardware enablement support...
A patch making it to a TIP Git branch this week adds Linux kernel support for detecting the FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor, which will become important with today's growing server CPU counts...
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