Phoronix

A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds...

Vulkan 1.4.336 is out today as the first spec update in two weeks for this high performance graphics and compute API...

Ubuntu Studio is the variant of Ubuntu Linux focused on content creation and audio recording needs, video editing, and other creative workloads. Ubuntu Studio's desktop hasn't seen too many changes since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS some 13+ years ago. But Ubuntu Studio developers are now considering desktop layout changes to help modernize its appearance...

All of the PCI subsystem updates were merged last week for the nearly-over Linux 6.19 merge window. Standing out this cycle are Resizable BAR improvements as well as introducing a few new PCIe controller drivers...

Microsoft today released WSL 2.7.0, the newest version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux code that enables running Linux binaries atop Windows 11 hosts...

TheRock is an interesting open-source build platform for ROCm and HIP that has taken shape over the past year. It's become an official ROCm effort albeit still in early stages and relying on community contributions for enhancements for different consumer GPU targets and more. To date its users have largely relied on running the latest TheRock Git while today TheRock v7.10 was tagged...

An acquisition announcement that flew under the radar yesterday but then I only noticed today with a GCC MAINTAINERS file update, "with the acquisition of Ventana Microsystems by Qualcomm..." Qualcomm has acquired Ventana as a RISC-V high performance CPU start-up...

Back in October System76 announced a planned release date for Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the COSMIC Desktop... And they've made it! The new Pop!_OS 24.04 is now available for download as the long-awaited update atop an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while using their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment...

The D7VK project recently started as the Direct3D 7 API implemented atop the Vulkan API akin to DXVK and VKD3D-Proton with newer versions of Microsoft Direct3D. Today marks the D7VK 1.0 release for this project in now declaring itself "production ready" for Linux gamers...

With the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver series removing GeForce 900 series "Maxwell" and GeForce 10 series "Pascal" as part of punting it off to the latest legacy driver branch, it's time for a last look at how the mainline NVIDIA Linux driver is performing with these aging graphics cards relative to the current state of the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux drivers. In this article is a look at how the open-source and upstream Nouveau kernel driver with Nouveau/NVK Mesa drivers are performing relative to the NVIDIA 580 series with its Maxwell and Pascal support. For further perspective is also tossing in newer graphics cards too for providing a end-of-year GeForce 980 / 1080 / 2080 / 3080 / 4080 / 5080 series comparison between these different Linux drivers.

Early this year AMD announced the open-source GAIA project for "Generative AI Is Awesome" as a showcase of AI support atop their Ryzen AI NPUs and other hardware. That began as a Windows-only project but in September AMD added Linux support to GAIA but only using Vulkan acceleration for AI on Radeon GPUs. Now today GAIA 0.14 is available with "native" support for both macOS and Linux...

It was just at the end of month that Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 1 ISOs were published for the first "Resolute Raccoon" milestone. Out already is now Snapshot 2 with Canonical releasing these images ahead of their engineers having time off for end-of-year holidays...

LibreOffice 26.2 Beta 1 is now available for testing in working toward the stable release in February for this cross-platform, open-source office suite solution...

KDE Gear 25.12 is out today as the collection of the latest KDE desktop/mobile applications for running nicely on the Plasma 6 desktop...

Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the "Hornet" Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It's been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they "reintroduced" it to the Linux kernel community...

Last month the Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing extension was merged after 5+ years in development. VK_EXT_present_timing ended up debuting at the end of November within the Vulkan 1.4.335 spec update to much excitement for providing functionality to obtain information on the presentation engine's display for accurate timing information and to assist in scheduling a present to happen no earlier than a desired time. This is a big win for helping avoid game stuttering and more while now the Mesa support for it is nearly complete and could be merged soon...

Linus Torvalds merged the Device Mapper "DM" changes overnight that include one stand-out change for Linux 6.19...

Following yesterday's release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today's llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements...

The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement...

Merged today to the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0 is introducing a shader VMA allocator. Long story short this new allocator steps toward enabling Vulkan ray-tracing capture/replay support, which can come in hand for debugging issues with Vulkan ray-tracing on Intel graphics hardware under Linux and similarly to assist in optimizing for better performance...

The GNU C Library's malloc implementation is now enabling 2MB Transparent Huge Pages (THP) by default for AArch64 Linux. This is being done in the name of better performance -- a healthy 6.25% performance improvement is noted for SPEC with this change...

The newest feature to land in the cross-platform Qt toolkit is QIORing as an abstraction for Linux's IO_uring interface. This QIORing may also end up supporting Microsoft's Windows IORing implementation as well...

Given the recent release of FreeBSD 15, I started off my testing in looking at how FreeBSD 15.0 improves performance versus FreeBSD 14.3. Now it's onto the next important question: how is FreeBSD 15.0 performing relative to Linux on servers? Here are some benchmarks exploring that topic today.

AMD FSR SDK 2.1 is now available that includes their "FSR Redstone" machine learning based upscaling tech for gaming..

Turbostat is the Linux command-line utility for reporting CPU frequency / power / C-states and related performance / power management items namely for modern AMD and Intel processors. This CLI utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for Linux 6.19 has picked up a few new features...

In addition to approving Fedora Cloud switching /boot to a Btrfs subvolume, another change approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is for shipping the Budgie 10.10 desktop packages in Fedora 44...

The past several months Intel software engineers have been quite busy with LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. LLM-Scaler is a Docker-based solution for AI workloads on Intel graphics hardware to ship an optimized vLLM stack and other AI frameworks. Out today is a new LLM-Scaler-Omni release to help enhance ComfyUI performance on Intel hardware...

A performance fix has been submitted to the Linux kernel for dealing with a regression in the Slab memory allocation code...

While the Linux kernel has inclusive terminology guidelines for the past five years to replace phrases like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist, there has surprisingly been a "genocide" function within the kernel that was questioned when it was first submitted for inclusion but now removed in Linux 6.19...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" today signed off on a new feature for Fedora Cloud 44 to switch /boot to being as a Btrfs sub-volume rather than a separate partition...

The RISC-V CPU architecture changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel...

AerynOS 2025.12 is available today as the latest installment of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS...

AMD previously talked of simplifying the in-box Linux support for ROCm during the second half of 2025. So far we haven't seen any groundbreaking changes from that initiative besides AMD working on various package archives/repositories to make it easier to install the latest ROCm on different Linux distributions. But today a big announcement is now public that Canonical with next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will provide official ROCm packages along with other libraries...

The Linux Foundation today announced it's formed another foundation under its growing umbrella that extends well beyond the traditional "Linux" landscape: the Agentic AI Foundation...

With Firefox 146 released, which is exciting for delivering fractional scaling on Wayland, Firefox 147 Beta is now available and it's also quite exciting to Linux users for another reason...

Yesterday I noted some early performance regressions I've found on the Linux 6.19 kernel compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. Those initial benchmarks were on an AMD EPYC server. Since then I've seen many of the same workloads regressing similarly on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation between Linux 6.18 and Linux 6.19 Git. Given the significant impact and AMD Threadripper processors always helping out to speed-up Linux kernel build times to make for a quicker and more manageable kernel bisecting experience, here is a look at some of the results for the Linux 6.19 performance regressions.

AMD today announced their newest member of their expansive EPYC family: the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. The new AMD EPYC Embedded 2005 Series are intended primarily for networking, storage, and industrial devices while these BGA processors will likely see other interesting thin-server uses as well.

For benefiting their Azure cloud and other users of Hyper-V virtualization at large, Microsoft has rolled out a number of feature additions and improvements for their Hyper-V kernel code in Linux 6.19...

For the past 15 years the Smatch static analysis tool has been routinely run for uncovering countless bugs within the Linux kernel. Dan Carpenter who authored Smatch and has been routinely analyzing the Linux kernel with it has authored more than 5,568 patches over the years to become one of the top bug fixers for the kernel. But his funding at Linaro has been cut and the project's future now in question...

Last week saw the main set of block and IO_uring feature patches for the Linux 6.19 merge window but some additional block subsystem material was merged on Monday. There are various NVMe updates now merged plus enabling per-CPU BIO caching by default to help with file-system performance...

The Flash-Friendly File-System "F2FS" is enjoying more performance optimizations and other improvements for the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content...

The newest Mesa 26.0-devel code as of today has landed initial support for Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics into the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Adreno Gen 8 graphics so far are most notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC with its X2-85 GPU as well as the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Adreno 840 graphics...

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton...

Google engineers for the past number of months have been working on the Live Update Orchestrator as a new way of applying live Linux kernel updates. The Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" builds atop the Kexec Handover "KHO" functionality already within the kernel. Google has since been deplyoing LUO in their production environments for faster security updates to kernels, especially when involving VMs. LUO is now upstream in Linux 6.19...

Meson 1.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular cross-platform build system...

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland...

Recently there were Phoronix benchmarks looking at the Intel Battlemage GPU compute performance since last year when the Arc B580 graphics card launched as well as the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance for the B580 on Linux since launch. There was much progress on the open-source Intel Linux graphics drivers at large this year but especially for Battlemage. Following that a Phoronix Premium reader asked about seeing some fresh Llama.cpp AI benchmarks with its Vulkan back-end now for the Arc B580 compared to competing AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. Here are those benchmarks as requested.

While just half-way through the Linux 6.19 merge window, over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the current Linux 6.19 Git state compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. There are some minor performance improvements to note in a few of the tests on the first system I tested but also some regressions at this very early pre-RC1 state of the Linux 6.19 kernel...

One of the new Linux engineering initiatives out of AMD is working to further enhance Linux performance on today's large core count systems by introducing push-based load balancing...