Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format...
A patch currently residing within Andrew Morton's "MM" memory management branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is an addition by Red Hat for introducing deferred THP insertion to khugepaged. This deferred Transparent Huge Page (THP) insertion aims to help reduce memory waste on Linux with some workloads...
The XPG Alpha Wireless Gaming Mouse boasts a 16K DPI sensor and retails for $65~80 USD but turns out it doesn't even work properly under Linux without a pending kernel patch...
The SHA-256 code within the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem is in the process of being refactoring so that it's available via the crypto's library API and also opening it up to support architecture-optimized implementations...
Ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window opening up in just one month, the new Zblock allocator was queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" tree of memory management material likely destined for the next kernel merge window. Zblock is showing much potential as a compressed slab memory allocator...
Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been pursuing the Fair DRM Scheduler as a "fair" scheduling policy to help with multiple applications/processes aiming to make use of the GPU concurrently. With this week's v4 patch-set to the DRM Fair Scheduler there are some big code changes but overall looking well as a nice scheduling policy for multiple apps/games/processes wanting equal access to GPU resources...
With the Linux kernel now limiting 32-bit systems to 4GB of memory even with the "HIGHMEM" Kconfig option, an issue was uncovered where if the system was still populated with more memory than addressable by 32-bit systems, the kernel would crash. With the Linux 6.15-rc4 kernel due out on Sunday, this issue will be addressed...
A new Wayland-only feature merged for GNOME 49's Mutter is support for tablet pad relative dials. These dials found on some drawing tablets now allow for relative moment under the GNOME Wayland session when paired with recent libinput and libwacom releases...
As we near the end of April, KDE developers remain quite busy working on more enhancements for the Plasma 6.4 desktop while many of them were also meeting this week in Graz, Austria for further development and planning...
Following recent Vulkan 1.1 support within Mesa for the PanVK driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan driver support, Vulkan 1.2 is now being advertised...
This week Intel announced "200S Boost" for Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" K-Series desktop processors as effectively a new overclocking profile rolling out to existing Z890 motherboards via a BIOS update. Enabling the 200S Boost profile is said to help with low-latency workloads like gaming by allowing higher fabric / die-to-die / memory frequencies. While some Windows benchmarks have begun emerging for the Intel 200S Boost mode and some limited gains, I was curious about the performance under Linux so here are some 200S Boost benchmarks with the Core Ultra 9 285K on Ubuntu 25.04.
Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support...
While last week Intel released an update Compute Runtime for GPU compute with the OpenCL and Level Zero APIs on Windows and Linux, today they released a new preview version for readying a shiny new feature: Ultra Low Latency Scheduling "ULLS" for Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics...
GCC 15.1 was just released as the newest annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. This first stable GCC 15 release brings a COBOL compiler front-end, many C and C++ language support improvements, support for new CPUs and ISA capabilities, better Rust programming language support, debugging enhancements, and a whole lot more...
A set of Linux kernel patches posted today by longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar are looking to remove support for "ancient" 32-bit CPUs. In particular, if these patches are accepted, the Linux kernel would be ending support for old i486 CPUs as well as early i586 CPU models...
Nearly two years ago patches for casefolding / case insensitive file and folder support on Bcachefs were posted by a Valve/Linux developer. That support was upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver but it turns out that it never properly worked. Patches now set for merging into the Linux 6.15 will fix that case insensitive file/folder opt-in support so that it is now properly supported...
One of the interesting new features merged to the Linux kernel last year was the DRM Panic infrastructure so that Linux can display an error screen akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" when encountering problems. With follow-on kernel releases it's been extended to add QR code error messages and other improvements. But DRM Panic does require the support/cooperation of the different Direct Rendering Manager drivers and so far Intel graphics haven't been supported...
Intel today released a new version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch in order to apply optimizations to PyTorch for benefiting Intel's hardware. With the Intel Extension for PyTorch v2.7 release, there is support for new large language models (LLMs) as well as various performance optimizations and other enhancements...
Following the COSMIC Alpha 6 release from February, System76 today released COSMIC Alpha 7 as their last planned alpha release for this open-source, Rust-written desktop environment designed around the needs of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...
The Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point is now shipping that as detailed in our review earlier this month can provide for a very capable Linux laptop for Linux developers, creators, and enthusiasts. But for those hesitant about the high price and still weeks away before they have shipped all their pre-orders, if you are principally concerned about battery life, and/or after proven build quality backed by on-site warranty and other warranty/support options, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition ends up being a solid option for a very reliable and well-engineered laptop for Linux use. Here is a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition on Linux that is powered by Intel Lunar Lake.
A new software project covered on Phoronix last year was SCALE for natively compiling CUDA applications for AMD GPUs. This "clean room" implementation of CUDA building off the open-source LLVM codebase continues going strong and out this week is SCALE 1.3 with more features and hardware support for compiling CUDA software for AMD GPU execution...
Completely separate from the big performance regression I noted earlier this week for the Linux 6.15 Git kernel and fixed yesterday in the upstream codebase, another significant performance issue was also uncovered and fixed this week in Linux 6.15 Git...
New Linux kernel patches have been posted adding the necessary Device Tree files so that Linux is able to boot on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered Dell Inspiron 14 Plus laptop...
Mesa has supported on-disk shader cache for years to help speed-up game load times and overall system efficiencies. They had shifted from a multi-file cache layout to a single file cache for greater space savings. Steam also added support for the single-file cache. But now upstream Mesa is shifting back from the single-file cache default to the multi-file cache over performance issues...
At the end of last year the upstreaming efforts began for a Raspberry Pi HEVC decoder driver for getting H.265/HEVC accelerated decode working on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers with the mainline kernel. Nearly a half-year later that effort is still ongoing but yesterday brought the third iteration of this driver...
The latest bit of hardware enablement coming out of Asahi Linux and queued for introduction in the mainline kernel the next cycle is PCI Express (PCIe) support for the Apple M2 Pro SoC...
AMD has published as open-source their "GPU-IOV Module" used for virtualization with Instinct accelerators. It's also reported on their roadmap for bringing virtualization support to their client (Radeon) discrete GPUs...
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Rock is now available with the KDE Plasma 6 desktop shipping by default while still offering both Wayland and X11 session options. There is also now an official server edition of OpenMandriva...
The Linux 6.15 kernel has just merged a fix for the big performance regression I spotlighted yesterday on Phoronix with a huge hit to the Nginx HTTPS web server performance that could see a 3x regression from the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel code. It turns out other workloads/applications also were negatively impacted by this regression. While a stumper at first even with the bisected commit, the issue was luckily resolved very quickly.
Mesa 25.1-rc2 is now available for testing as the newest weekly test version of this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Mesa 25.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in May...
Earlier this month Canonical announced Ubuntu Linux support for the Orange Pi RV2 as a low-cost RISC-V developer board. The Orange Pi RV2 with eight RISC-V cores and 8GB of RAM costs just around $64 USD. The price point and specs were interesting that I ordered one and have been running performance benchmarks on it since for seeing how capable this is as finally an interesting, low-cost and readily available RISC-V board.
The newest open-source Linux driver being worked on by AMD engineers is a Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) solution for their Pensando networking hardware...
Back in March some ideas were talked about by Canonical engineers for Ubuntu Linux to move to Rust Coreutils and other Rust-written system components. Some of this is likely to materialize for the Ubuntu 25.10 release due out in October to allow for sufficient testing ahead of the all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release next year. Today the more solidified plans have been laid out for moving to the Rust Coreutils as a replacement to GNU Coreutils with Ubuntu 25.10...
Following a lot of work in this direction toward the end goal of removing GNOME X11 support, this milestone may finally be acheived for the Fedora 43 cycle due out by the end of the year. A change proposal has been filed for removing the GNOME X11 packages in the repository and in turn making the GNOME desktop Wayland-only on Fedora Linux...
One of the biggest surprises of last year was finding out that VMware has been working on shifting VMware Workstation from proprietary code to building atop the upstream KVM code within the Linux kernel. Following the initial patches from last October, an updated patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list yesterday for working on this transition...
The Google Pixel 4a smartphones launched in mid-2020 and now in mid-2025 it looks like we might finally be close to seeing mainline kernel support for the Pixel 4a devices and other hardware making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon 730/730G/732G SoCs...
With the Linux 6.15 kernel settling down nicely, I've been testing out the current Linux Git state on more systems in looking for any performance changes. Unfortunately this week I ran into a large performance regression affecting the Nginx HTTP(S) web server. Here's a look at that problem currently affecting Linux Git.
The April 2025 ISO update is out today for CachyOS, the Arch based Linux distribution known for its aggressive out-of-the-box performance on modern hardware...
Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver had been Vulkan 1.4 conformant for Turing and newer GPUs, but now with Mesa 25.2-devel it's Vulkan 1.4 conformant going back to Maxwell GPUs. This change is exported to be back-ported to the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release as well for those interested in using this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver...
For those that have been wondering about the Linux support and more details around the Ryzen AI Max 300 "Strix Halo" APUs on Linux, here's a brief update...
Today's Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has evolved since its launch last October. Taking the launch-day benchmarks from October with the same hardware, we are revisiting the Intel Arrow Lake performance under Linux today using the newest system BIOS and the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 for seeing how the performance has evolved roughly over the past half-year.
One of the early features being merged for what will become the GCC 16 compiler following last week's GCC 15 code branching is CPU targeting support for the XuanTie RISC-V processors...
Eugen Hristev of Linaro sent out a "request for comments" patch series today proposing kmemdump for the Linux kernel as a new means to assist in debugging driver/system problems by making it easier to dump memory for specific areas/regions...
The Linux kernel has seen safeguards for select prior Intel CPU cores due to bugs around the MONITOR/MWAIT implementation with the processors. MWAIT/MONITOR bugs was found to be the cause of annoying issues at boot for Lunar Lake laptops and also previously plagued Goldmont Atom cores. It also turns out that Ice Lake servers can be subject to similar MWAIT/MONITOR behavior...
Merged yesterday to Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is an improvement for the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing code with an eye on next-gen Xe3 graphics hardware...
Last year a patch was raised for the Linux kernel that would report outdated CPU microcode versions as a security vulnerability. With Intel routinely issuing new CPU microcode updates for security vulnerabilities and addressing other functional issues, the Linux kernel would begin warning users when recognizing that outdated CPU microcode is deployed for a given processor. That patch has now been queued into a tip/tip.git branch and thus looking like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...
With the recently released AMD ROCm 6.4 release for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware there are yet more indications around AMD's growing software ecosystem expansion. With ROCm 6.4 are additions to the HIP API for allowing linking of SPIR-V code objects, which is the intermediate representation used by Vulkan as well as with OpenCL and other Khronos APIs...
A 2021 era patch for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been revived and discussed in recent days around simplifying the memcpy and memset inlining strategies when compiling code with the "-mtune=generic" option. The patch takes the approach during that generic tuning to try to avoid branches. In doing so, some nice performance benefits are observed in some benchmarks...
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