Phoronix

Last year AMD and Intel as part of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group announced ChkTag for x86 memory tagging across processors to better fight buffer overflows and use-after-free errors. In preparing for ChkTag with future processors, Intel has begun adapting their Linear Address Masking (LAM) support to more nicely jive with it...

Intel yesterday sent out their first "drm-xe-next" pull request to DRM-Next of new Xe kernel graphics driver improvements they have readied for their eventual upstreaming into the Linux 7.1 kernel...

AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder "rocprof-trace-decoder", a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack...

A Linux driver has been published for the ARCTIC Fan Controller to be able to read fan speeds under Linux as well as setting the PWM fan speed for each of the ten fans supported by this controller. Making this driver all the more exciting is that ARCTIC Cooling is directly working on this driver rather than just being a community/third-party creation. Furthermore, ARCTIC Cooling is working on getting this driver to the upstream Linux kernel...

Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing...

The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with "full fat" cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows for a 400 Watt TDP compared to the 500 Watt EPYC 9755. Today's benchmarking is comparing the EPYC 9745 and EPYC 9755 performance and power difference.

An important default kernel behavior change worth noting in advance for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is that the system will attempt to power-off automatically if encountering any fatal ACPI errors. Up to now the Linux kernel has just logged ACPI fatal errors...

Last week with my ongoing testing of the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel I found nice performance improvements for PostgreSQL and other workloads when testing on a 128-core AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" server. Curious if those wins were due to optimizations focused on better scalability with today's "big" servers, I also ran some comparison Linux 7.0 benchmarks on the smaller AMD EPYC 4005 class servers too. Some nice wins carried over...

Work is underway by 9elements on porting Coreboot plus AMD openSIL to the first-generation Ryzen 7000 series Framework 16 laptop and is expected to be followed by a similar port to the Framework 13 Gen1 laptop too...

Zlib-rs as the Rust programming language implementation of Zlib from the Trifetca Tech Foundation is out with a shiny new release (actually, releases) today...

ASUS desktop motherboards have been seeing broader sensor monitoring support on Linux in recent years. ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors have been seeing more support added thanks to the open-source community with new additions to the likes of the ASUS-EC-Sensors driver and other hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver code. This is continuing for Linux 7.1...

Armbian 26.02 has been released released for this Debian-derived Linux distribution primarily focused on supporting a range of Arm and RISC-V platforms. With Armbian 26.02 there is yet more new boards added while moving to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and also adding a RISC-V Xfce desktop install option...

Intel kicked off the new month by releasing the latest version of LLM Scaler vLLM (llm-scaler-vllm) as their Docker-based solution for running vLLM on Intel Battlemage GPUs for AI inferencing...

Valve just published the latest Steam Survey monthly figures to provide insight on various software and hardware trends across this dominant gaming ecosystem. One of the most interesting measurements is the monthly changes in the size of the Linux gaming marketshare...

AMD is using Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week to announce new Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series products, including Ryzen AI PRO 400 desktop processors...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.0 is now available for testing...

A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default...

There's been a recent lull in activity around the open-source Linux driver for ASUS devices with the HID interface used for supporting various features. But developer Denis Benato who has worked on the ASUS Armoury Linux driver and the like is working on advancing the ASUS HID driver for Linux systems...

During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing...

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline "The 64-bit Hurd is Here!" GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development...

Last July Intel sadly ended their Clear Linux distribution amid cost-cutting measures at the company. Clear Linux for a decade served at the forefront of Linux performance innovations and was consistently the fastest out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 distribution until Intel ended the Linux distribution without any advanced notice for its users. Intel had kept up the ClearLinux.org website online to download the final releases and access other technical content and forum discussions, etc. Sadly, that too was recently taken offline...

AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution...

A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors...

The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers...

The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications...

For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4...

KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month...

If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME's infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs...

Catching me by surprise today was a new Intel CPU microcode drop "20260227" for Linux users/administrators outside of their typical Patch Tuesday alignment for CPU microcode releases...

Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what's described as a "a massive update with no understatement" to this Wayland compositor...

For those looking to build a rackmount-ready server or workstation that can handle up to an SSI-EEB motherboard and capable of fitting a large liquid cooling setup, the RM4A is a new option from SilverStone that can fit up to a 360mm radiator while still fitting an SSI-EEB motherboard and up to eight expansion slots within 4U size constraints.

While at the end of February, today Intel released the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release as well as the latest VPL GPU Runtime for their media stack...

Canonical put out a new blog post today highlighting their RISC-V work over 2025 that included switching to the RVA23 profile baseline for Ubuntu 25.10 and moving forward. Now with RVA23-compatible RISC-V hardware coming to market this year, Canonical is talking up the RISC-V possibilities when paired with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...

If all goes well, Mesa developers are hoping to reach a consensus or at least some common ground on an AI policy in March. Mesa is the latest open-source project making considerations around the growing activity around AI coding agents and the like and how to deal with them for this project that is crucial to the Linux desktop and open-source 3D graphics drivers at large...

Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday...

Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS...

Canonical today released LXD 6.7 as the latest feature update to this system container and virtual machine manager commonly used in Ubuntu Linux environments...

The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes...

On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improved UX...

Microsoft has published a new version of its open-source DirectX Shader Compiler. Besides adding Shader Model 6.9 production support, making this DX Compiler update interesting to us are the SPIR-V back-end improvements and enhancing interoperability with Vulkan drivers...

For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 "Penryn" was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support on Ubuntu 26.04 development. On a geo mean basis over the past 18 years from Penryn to Panther Lake, the performance was at 21.5x in over 150 benchmarks. At the most extreme was a 95x difference going from Intel's 45nm Penryn to the 18A Panther Lake.

The Linux kernel continues seeing more open-source kernel drivers emerge for supporting different AI accelerators / NPUs. The newest open-source driver breaking cover today is from NXP and is for enabling their Neutron neural processing unit...

While the Linux 7.0 feature merge window ended this past weekend and that next kernel release won't debut as stable until April, there are already features out on the horizon that are being positioned for likely merging into the Linux 7.1 kernel assuming no issues appear or objections raised by Linus Torvalds. One of the features already looking like it will be submitted for Linux 7.1 is supporting extended attributes on sockets...

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.20 with continuing to advance firmware updating on Linux systems...

Merged yesterday to Mesa 26.1 for the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" is ZCULL support for more efficient rendering and bringing some small performance gains to this open-source NVIDIA driver stack...

Merged to Mesa 26.1-devel this week is a minor improvement to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver providing some slight enhancements to DirectX 12 games running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton...

AlmaLinux as one of the leading, modern and community-minded alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues enjoying very nice growth. In their 2025 Year In Review they provided a look at their growth with now having more than two million systems per week checking in for software updates...

Building off January's GStreamer 1.28 release with many new features, GStreamer 1.28.1 was released today as a point release bringing various fixes and minor additions to this open-source multimedia framework...

Following the Firefox 148 release with the new AI controls, Mozilla promoted Firefox 149 to beta today...

The b4 tool used for managing patch workflows to the Linux kernel has been seeing a lot of work recently on b4 review as the text user interface (TUI) to help expedite the patch review process for the Linux kernel. The b4 review TUI has been integrating AI agent code review helpers powered by the likes of Claude Code too for trying to help enhance the efficiency for Linux kernel patch reviews. That b4 review work is quickly approaching a pre-alpha state...