Phoronix

Beyond Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support, this next Linux kernel version is also beginning to remove driver code for supporting Russia's Baikal CPUs...

Back during the Linux 7.0 merge window the MMC changes were rejected by Linus Torvalds as "complete garbage" that wasn't building properly and not vetted through linux-next. He went without pulling any MMC changes for the v7.0 cycle while now for Linux 7.1 the code has been better tested and successfully merged...

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release, KDE Gear 26.04 is out today for shipping all the latest updated KDE desktop applications...

With the set of today's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a "power module" that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features...

The Linux 7.1 kernel is bringing performance improvements for Sheaves, the per-CPU caching layer introduced several kernel cycles ago (Linux 6.18) for better efficiency on today's high core count hardware. Sheaves began as an opt-in feature but since Linux 7.0 is now being used for all caches...

The SDL library widely used by cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime has now established a policy to block code contributions made using AI / Large Language Models (LLMs)...

The workqueue changes merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel are significant for today's modern high-end processors where there can be many CPU cores per last level cache (LLC / L3 cache). The new WQ_AFFN_CACHE_SHARD affinity scope can reduce some contention on such systems and help achieve greater performance...

Archinstall 4.2 is now available as the latest update to this very convenient, text-based Arch Linux OS installer...

Last month I ran benchmarks showing the very positive performance impact FRED has on Intel's new Panther Lake processors while wondering why Flexible Return and Event Deliver wasn't enabled by default yet on Linux. Hours after that story was published, an Intel engineer posted the patch to enable FRED by default with the rationale they were waiting for hardware to be publicly released in order to evaluate the performance benefit. Days after that the FRED-by-default patch hit tip/tip.git and now as of yesterday that patch is merged for Linux 7.1...

Last week after receiving the Intel Arc Pro B70 review hardware I began with some benchmarks looking at how the Arc Pro B70 compared to existing Intel GPUs on Linux with their fully open-source driver stack. Today's article features the latest Arc Pro B70 benchmarks under Linux in looking at how the performance and value compares to other NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon (AI) PRO workstation graphics cards in the lab.

Eric Engestrom stepped up again to serve as Mesa release manager for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 feature release. Mesa 26.1-rc1 was just released in kicking off the weekly release candidate dance until Mesa 26.1 stable is ready for debut in May...

A change proposal has been filed to build x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level packages alongside the existing x86_64-v1 packages for Fedora Linux...

Linux developer Qais Yousef with Google has announced the alpha release of Sched QoS as a new initiative for user-space assisted scheduling. The scheduling model in turn is based in part on Apple's quality of service classes used by iOS for classifying software as user interactive, user initiative, utility, or background tasks...

The clone3() system call in Linux 7.1 is adding three new flags for greater control over the creation of child processes...

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers...

The x86/asm changes merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a few low-level improvements...

The exFAT file-system changes have landed for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel...

As a follow-up to the news first-covered on Phoronix earlier this month about Linux 7.1 expected to begin removing i486 CPU support: it indeed happened. Linus Torvalds took the initial removal bits today without any fuss today for beginning the phase out of M486 / M486SX / ELAN kernel support...

ROCm 7.2.2 is out today as a small point release to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack. There are a few code changes but most notable is arguably on the documentation side...

Code now merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel may provide some negative performance implications for those still running modern Linux kernels on 32-bit hardware. A fundamental change can present cache line alignment and slab sizing implications for 32-bit Linux OS users but will provide for cleaner code with modern 64-bit computing...

While a lot of interesting new features and changes have been merged already for the Linux 7.1 merge window, two pull requests stand out so far for being rejected by Linus Torvalds and complete with his to-the-point commentary...

As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 in its near final state compared to Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS with its HWE stack on an ASUS Zenbook S16.

Nginx 1.30 was just released as the newest stable version of this popular web server. Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP)...

GNOME Shell 50.1 and Mutter 50.1 were released today as the first point releases in the GNOME 50 series...

X.Org Server 21.1.22 is out today and driven by five new security vulnerabilities being disclosed for the aging codebase. In turn these vulnerabilities also impact XWayland too and thus necessitating the XWayland 24.1.10 release...

Sunshine v2026.413.143228 released this week as a new feature release for this self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight, an open-source game streaming client that is an implementation of the NVIDIA GameStream protocol. Notable with this Sunshine release is Vulkan Video encode support as an alternative to using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for game streaming...

OpenSSL 4.0 was just released as a big update for this widely-used SSL/TLS and crypto library...

Merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel is overhauling the T10 PI code for generating and verifying data integrity information. In turn the new code is cleaner while also allowing for better read storage performance...

As a big helper for Valve's Steam Play with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its initial support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap Vulkan extension...

A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops...

All of the power management subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel...

Over the course of March there was much progress made on the ARM64 port of Haiku OS, the open-source operating system serving as the spiritual successor to BeOS...

Merged yesterday were all the CRC code updates for the Linux 7.1 kernel. Most notable with that pull is an ARM64-optimized CRC64-NVMe implementation that can deliver multiple times faster performance...

Jemalloc 5.3.1 was released today with next month marking four years since the prior release, jemalloc 5.3.0. While the version bump may not seem like much, jemalloc 5.3.1 comes with many performance improvements, new features, and other enhancements...

Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has introduced GreenBoost-Proton for helping Linux gaming on NVIDIA hardware...

For those that had purchased a StarBook MK VI laptop 3+ years ago over the advertised support for Coreboot, Star Labs has now delivered with a Coreboot build finally available and working for this AMD Ryzen 5000 series powered laptop...

On this first day of the Linux 7.1 merge window, among the early pull requests merged were beginning to land the various VFS pull requests submitted by Christian Brauner. Among that code merged is enabling support for user.* extended attributes on sockets...

The Spack package manager is quite popular in the HPC / supercomputer space for scientific software. Even with the more selective niche than a typical general purpose OS package manager, large language models (LLMs) have already proven capable of being useful in generating new Spack packages. But there have also been some headaches involved too for Spack developers...

Last year NVIDIA announced the new CUDA Tile programming model as one of the biggest updates ever to the CUDA platform. CUDA Tile brings a virtual ISA for tile-based parallel programming and they subsequently open-sourced the CUDA Tile IR as an intermediate representation built atop LLVM's MLIR. Now they are looking to hire additional LLVM compiler engineers to help foster their CUDA Tile initiatives...

In advance of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening, Miguel Ojeda sent out all of the Rust feature updates on Friday. This includes bumping the minimum Rust version for building the Linux kernel as well as a new experimental option that can provide better performance for Rust code within the kernel, alongside other updates...

Sent out today was an initial patch series for comment on introducing the FTRFS file-system. The FTRFS proposal is more interesting than last week's VMUFAT file-system proposal...

Mold 2.41 is out as the latest major update to this high performance linker and viable alternative to the linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects...

The open-source, Rust-based Servo browser engine has been improving its Servoshell demo browser application while one of the most promising potentials for this engine is around embedded use as an alternative to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). With the latest moves by Servo developers, they are making for a more compelling story for its use...

For those wishing to make use of modern OpenCL 3.0 capabilities on AMD APUs/SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics using Mesa's Rusticl driver, an improvement was merged this weekend to the RadeonSI driver ahead of this quarter's Mesa 26.1 release...

Nearly one year ago to the day I noted Linux developers were considering the removal of the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the kernel. They were orphaned the past decade and turning into a maintenance burden for upstream developers. But then to some surprise, a few developers stepped up to maintain the HFS(+) drivers. One year later it's proving to be a success story with more fixes for this aging Apple file-system support continuing...

Among the early pull requests sent out to Linus Torvalds even before the Linux 7.0 kernel officially released on Sunday were the Btrfs file-system updates. This feature-packed CoW file-system is seeing more performance optimizations for Linux 7.1 as well as its shutdown ioctl feature no longer being experimental and a variety of fixes...

Building off last night's release of the Linux 7.0 kernel is now the GNU Linux-libre 7.0-gnu kernel release for that downstream kernel that removes support for loading non-free-software kernel modules, blocks the loading of loadable microcode/firmware even when it means greatly reduced hardware support, and other sanitization of code in the name of software freedom...

Merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel was a power sequencing driver for PCIe M.2 connectors as part of an effort to allow describing PCIe M.2 connectors in Device Tree files. For Linux 7.1, that driver is extending support for PCIe M.2 Key E connectors...

As expected the stable Linux 7.0 kernel was just released today in marking this next kernel release. The Linux 7.0 milestone comes due to Linus Torvalds' preference of bumping the major version number after hitting X.19 as opposed to any single major change, but in any event there are a lot of great improvements and changes to find with this new kernel version. Linux 7.0 is also what's powering the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...

An out-of-bounds access within the Linux kernel has existed in mainline the past three years that could be exploited by an unprivileged user submitting a specially crafted certificate to the kernel...