Phoronix

A bit of time has passed since having any exciting performance improvements to report on within the GNU C Library "glibc" but that changed today with another nice x86_64 optimization for modern CPUs...

FFmpeg 8.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this widely-used, open-source multimedia library...

The Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" to allow for custom CPU scheduling policies as BPF programs continues enabling new functionality. Queued up in the sched_ext development code ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 cycle is the new SCX_ENQ_IMMED capability for enabling tighter control over when tasks land on a CPU...

Since last week's Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo". Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape.

The past several years Imagination Tech has been investing in an upstream and open-source DRM kernel graphics driver as well as a PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa. Their Mesa focus has exclusively been on the PowerVR Vulkan driver with the plans all along to use the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. With next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release, that goal is being realized with Zink now working nicely atop the PowerVR Vulkan driver for in turn achieving open-source OpenGL support on PowerVR...

A round of Intel graphics driver updates were sent today to DRM-Next in staging ahead of April's Linux 7.1 merge window. The changes in this pull aren't too particularly exciting with a lot of code refactoring and other work, but there are preparations made for supporting UHBR DP tunnels...

The work by Derek Clark on enhancing the Lenovo Legion Go gaming handheld support for Linux continues panning out nicely. The latest driver effort, the creation of the Lenovo Legion Go and Go S Series HID Drivers to help with controller configuration, is set to be introduced in Linux 7.1...

The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lite users...

A four year old optimization idea for the RADV driver was scratched off the TODO list last week for next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release...

Last week yet more AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window happening in April...

We are down to about one month to go until the Linux 7.0 stable release and out today is Linux 7.0-rc4...

Kent Overstreet today released Bcachefs 1.37 as the newest feature release to this out-of-tree file-system driver and user-space tooling for this next-gen, copy-on-write file-system...

Merged to mainline yesterday for Linux 7.0 were yet more Rust changes in preparing for upcoming Rust releases as well as enhancing the kernel build reproducibility when engaging the Rust code...

This week's "sched/urgent" pull request was sent out today of scheduler updates for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. Notable this week are fixing some hangs as well as a possible performance regression on large systems...

In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop...

SuperTux 0.7 officially released overnight for this nostalgic open-source game now seeing its first new release since December 2021. SuperTux 0.7 brings many significant improvements for this open-source game inspired by Super Mario...

An open-source, independently developed Linux kernel module called GreenBoost aims to augment the dedicated video memory on NVIDIA discrete GPUs with system memory and NVMe storage. The intent here with GreenBoost is a CUDA caching layer to more easily run larger AI models for LLMs that otherwise won't fit solely in your graphics card's dedicated vRAM...

Just under one year since the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release, GIMP 3.2 is out today as the first feature release building off the GIMP 3.0 foundation...

Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie...

This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn't a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop...

OpenRazer 3.12 was just released today as the newest update to these independently-maintained, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic GUI, OpenRazer allows for a pleasant experience for the Razer gaming peripherals under Linux...

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches bring a few improvements to the AMDXDNA accelerator driver used for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs. Plus some new panel additions and various other minor Direct Rendering Manager driver changes...

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android...

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver...

GNOME OS as the Linux-based OSTree-using distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default...

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages...

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems...

While the Linux support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake is largely in good shape as shown in my numerous articles over the past month and a half, there are occasional missing remnants landing in the kernel. As the latest example, or the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel, the unified Panther Lake C-States table is being added for the Intel Idle driver...

After going through five rounds of review under a Request For Comments (RFC) flag, today the latest round of Kernel API Specification Framework patches were sent out with the RFC flag removed...

Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window...

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands...

FreeRDP as this open-source and cross-platform Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is out with FreeRDP 3.24 to ship new security fixes as well as other improvements...

A fix is on the way to the Linux 7.0 kernel today for addressing an idle power issue with AMD RDNA4 GPUs reporting high power consumption and full utilization even after being "idle" following compute workloads like Llama.cpp...

For going along with the Intel IVPU kernel accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel is the Intel NPU driver support in user-space. Released yesterday was the Intel NPU Driver 1.30 milestone for advancing the Intel NPU user-space support on Linux with this open-source support for Core Ultra SoCs...

GNOME's GitLab infrastructure has already been using Anubis for a while to help fend off bots and AI scraper traffic from wreacking havoc on their server resources and also their hosting budget. GNOME recently began redirecting some GitLab traffic to their GitHub repositories as another step in dealing with bots/scrapers. Now they have taken an added step of using the commercial, closed-source Fastly in their battle with bots...

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage...

Last year TrueNAS unified their SCALE and CORE offerings as part of solidifying their enterprise storage efforts around Linux from their prior FreeBSD base. This year the developers at iXsystems have another change in store with announcing TrueNAS Connect as a new bridge for accessing TrueNAS enterprise storage features without having to invest in their hardware...

The AppArmor Linux kernel security module used notably by Ubuntu Linux and currently maintained by Canonical has been affected by several vulnerabilities made public today...

The cpupower tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has squeezed in a few improvements today for the ongoing Linux 7.0 development cycle...

Google has shared exciting news with us today that they are bringing their Chrome web browser to ARM64 Linux devices...

The first release candidate of systemd 260 arrived in late February with the new mstack feature, dropping System V service scripts support, and other changes. A week after that systemd 260-rc2 released with a few more changes and now another week later is systemd 260-rc3...

AMD today released ZenDNN 5.2 as the latest versio nof their deep nueral network library that now introduces their next-generation runtime architecture. ZenDNN 5.2 is designed to deliver better performance and geater scalability over earlier versions of this AMD library that began as their take on Intel's open-source oneDNN...

Over the past month on Phoronix there have been a lot of benchmarks of Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of Panther Lake not explored yet is around the CPU security mitigation impact, which is the focus of today's benchmarking. The performance tests today are not only looking at the impact of the Core Ultra X7 SoC at its default versus running in a "mitigations=off" configuration but also comparing the overall CPU security mitigation impact with the run-time toggle going back all the way to Intel Haswell era laptops.

EndeavourOS Titan is out today as the latest ISO refresh for this Arch Linux powered distribution. There is a lot of updates as part of this routine ISO refresh as well as some new tooling and GPU driver integration enhancements...

Introduced with Linux 6.19 was the long in development DRM Color Pipeline API while it's not the end of the road yet on enhancing the Linux desktop for modern high dynamic range (HDR) displays and color pipeline handling. AMD engineer Harry Wentland has more improvements pending for the AMDGPU driver as well as example compositor/desktop-side integration with KDE's KWin...

AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced today the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) optical scale-up consortium...

In Mesa 26.1 the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has finally landed support for the VK_KHR_copy_memory_indirect extension that was introduced to the Vulkan API last year...

Mesa 26.0.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly stable point release for this set of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems...