Phoronix

On this 34th birthday since the Linux kernel was announced, coincidentally there's a new patch series out there for one of the oldest drivers: the floppy disk driver...

Stemming from a request by a Phoronix Premium reader wondering about some fresh historical kernel performance comparison numbers, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance of the LTS and latest stable Linux kernel versions going back to Linux 5.15 LTS in 2021. For testing an AMD EPYC Milan-X server was used for compatibility back through Linux 5.15 LTS with some rather impressive results for testing these major Linux kernel releases of the past four years.

Red Hat's performance team is now shipping TuneD 2.26 as the latest feature release for this tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux systems to monitor and adaptively adjust the power/performance characteristics of different system components and more...

Meson 1.9 released this weekend as the newest feature update to this build system / build automation tool that works well across different software platforms. With Meson 1.9 there is enhanced Rust support, introducing Swift and C++ code interoperability, and other enhancements to this increasingly used alternative to the likes of CMake and Autotools...

The Open Platform for Enterprise AI "OPEA" that is a sub-project of the Linux Foundation and backed by a wide variety of different organizations to provide open solutions for Generative AI announced today their newest GenAI code examples...

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel will begin upstreaming hardware enablement for the ASPEED AST2700 as the next-gen baseboard management controller "BMC" that will likely appear in the majority of future generation servers...

The Linux Foundation used Open-Source Summit Europe 2025 happening in Amsterdam to announce the formation of the Developer Relations Foundation "DRF". Separately, they also announced from Amsterdam that DocumentDB has joined the Linux Foundation...

Linux 6.17 is one step closer to release with Linus Torvalds having issued Linux 6.17-rc3 already today to currently traveling in Europe...

Popular Arch Linux based distribution CachyOS is out today with its August 2025 ISO refresh...

It's wild to think that the ARM Cortex-A72 was already announced ten years ago as the ARM core design that went on to appear in the Raspberry Pi 4, AWS Graviton server processor, and various other SoCs. ARM Cortex-A72 based hardware remains in widespread use and finally by the end of 2025 there will be a mainline Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver in the mainline Linux kernel for this core...

The open-source upstream driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno X1-45 that is used by the Snapdragon X1 Plus 8-core SoC appears ready for the mainline kernel and could be all aligned for the upcoming Linux v6.18 kernel cycle...

Linux IO_uring and block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe this week queued the patch series for multi-shot support with provided buffers. Thus the feature should go in for Linux 6.18 as another nice enhancement to the wonderful IO_uring kernel innovation...

A patch series posted overnight that is part of a larger planned rework for the kernel to introduce a "Swap Table" is poised to bring significant real-world performance gains to the Linux kernel...

For those that happen to have an HP Victus 16-r1000 gaming laptop or considering one with the 14th Gen Intel Core CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics, the Linux support is now slightly better off thanks to the HP-WMI driver adding fan and thermal profile support for the Victus 16-r1000 series...

Google is preparing a field trial with the Chrome web browser of accelerated video decoding under Wayland/Linux as a step toward rolling it out by default for a better video playback experience on the Linux desktop with Wayland-based environments...

Nearly a decade after the Tegra X2 SoC shipped in the likes of the Jetson TX2, the Pascal-based GP10B GPU has received a patch for allowing GPU re-clocking within the open-source Nouveau driver...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his customary weekend blog post to summarize all the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the week. Most exciting in recent days is Plasma 6.5 receiving an initial system setup wizard...

Glycin 2.0 Beta 3 was released this week for the GNOME project providing a Rust-based library for decoding, editing, and creating images and associated metadata. Glycin is in turn used by a growing number of GNOME components for imaging needs...

The first release candidate of OpenZFS 2.4 is now available for testing of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA's GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Released on Thursday were new Ubuntu X1E "Concept" install images for installing the modified Ubuntu 25.04 environment on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops...

FFmpeg 8.0 is now available! FFmpeg 8.0 is a magnificent update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library and with this new version is the introduction of an OpenAI Whisper filter for automatic speech recognition, many Vulkan Video improvements for greater GPU-accelerated video handling, and a number of CPU performance optimizations...

The Servo browser project has published a monthly status report to outline all of the interesting changes made to this interesting, Rust-based browser layout engine over the past several weeks. Development continues moving along with Servo as more critical functionality continues to be added as well as new performance optimizations and other features to make it a compelling option for future embedded web use and more...

FreeRDP as one of the leading open-source / free software implementations of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is out with a new release. While FreeRDP 3.17 is primarily focused on shipping bug fixes, there is one noteworthy addition: fullchain support...

Earlier this month Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of their Project Battlematrix initiative. This is a Docker container effort to deliver speedy AI inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P support and more...

In addition to this week seeing Apple SoC DT updates prepped for Linux 6.18 and Apple laptop lid events and power button driver patches posted for review for the mainline Linux kernel, published today on the Linux kernel mailing list are the request for comments (RFC) on patches for enabling USB3 support with Apple Silicon M1 / M2 SoCs...

Earlier this month we looked at the Linux laptop performance of AMD's Krackan Point using the Ryzen AI 5 340 within a HP OmniBook 5 that can be found for as low as ~$450 during sales. For six Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics, Krackan Point worked well as a budget Linux laptop option. For those wondering how the Linux vs. Windows 11 performance compares for the budget HP OmniBook, here are some benchmarks.

Following the recent Apple SMC driver upstreaming to handle rebooting Apple Silicon Macs under Linux, the latest code volleyed on the kernel mailing list for review is support for handling laptop lid events and power buttons. Plus Apple sensor monitoring driver support too...

Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware...

VKD3D 1.17 made its debut this morning as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API implementation...

The open-source Panthor Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver providing the modern kernel graphics driver support for recent Arm Mali GPUs will be supporting a number of additional GPU models with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

The first Linux kernel patches specific to their next-gen Vera Rubin NLV144 "VR144NVL" were posted today to the public Linux kernel mailing list...

David Rosca who started out as a contractor for AMD working on their open-source video encode/decode capabilities for Linux formally joined the company earlier this summer. He's continued to be quite busy plumbing numerous enhancements into their accelerated video support on Linux, which includes RADV with Vulkan Video...

The Libre-Chip project led by Jacob Lifshay has received a grant from NLNet to develop a prototype/proof-of-concept processor design that can be high performance but not vulnerable to speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre...

Systemd 258 is nearing release with many big changes to this init system / service manager. Systemd 258-rc3 was released today with some last minute fixes while also now adding that the next release, systemd 259, will face increased Linux system requirements...

AMD's GPUOpen team just released the FidelityFX SDK 2.0 development kit and with it is now the inclusion of the FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling tech to complement the existing FSR 2 / FSR 3 support...

Following the release of Mesa 25.2 from two weeks ago, Mesa 25.2.1 is out now as the first point release. Mesa 25.2.1 is quite heavy on bug fixes and some other notable back-ports from Mesa 25.3-devel...

MoltenVK 1.4 is available today for this Vulkan portability implementation that layers the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers for allowing Vulkan games/apps to run across macOS, iOS, and tvOS devices...

With the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are aiming to have a better ARM64 experience with their generic desktop ISO thanks to a new improvement they have been working on called Stubble...

LibreOffice 25.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source office suite that is one of the most comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux and other platforms...

Given the promising AMD Strix Halo benchmark results on Linux 6.17 following the recent merge window and early regression fixes landing in the kernel, I was curious to see how Linux 6.17 was fairing on more powerful AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a brief look at some of the performance improvements found running EPYC 9005 "Turin" with the latest Linux 6.17 development kernel compared to Linux 6.16 stable...

One of the new hardware drivers expected to appear in the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year is the "us144mkii" USB sound driver for supporting the TASCAM US-144MKII USB audio interface...

AMD's GPUOpen HIPRT 3.0.9ba63f3 released today as the first update since HIPRT 2.5 shipped near the beginning of the year. HIPRT is AMD's ray-tracing library built around their HIP Interface for making it easier to enable ray-tracing workloads for HIP-based software like Blender...

Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser...

While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...

Tinygrad 0.11 is out as the newest version of this deep learning framework maintained by Tiny Corp...

As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage...

One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs. Given all the interest recently around Strix Halo and the Framework Desktop as well, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance between these different OpenCL driver implementations for the Radeon 8060S Graphics.

Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs...

While the Linux v6.17 merge window only wrapped up earlier this month, Apple Silicon DeviceTree "DT" updates have already begun queuing for the Linux 6.18 merge window that will happen in October...