Phoronix

Adding to the busy week of Linux distribution releases from Ubuntu 25.04 to Manjaro 25.04 and Fedora 42, TrueNAS 25.04 debuted today as a major step forward for this open enterprise storage platform...

Following the recent benchmarking of Ubuntu Server 25.04 in its near final state compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases, I turned my attention to Fedora Server 42. On the same AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Fedora Server 42 compared to the prior Fedora Server 41 and other Linux distribution releases for seeing how Fedora 42 is competing with other Linux distributions on this 5th Gen AMD EPYC dual socket server.

With the newest Mesa 25.1-devel Git code merged today the Panfrost Gallium3D and PanVK Vulkan drivers for Arm Mali open-source graphics are supporting Mali 5th Gen gen 1 (v12) and gen 2 (v13) devices...

Fedora 42 is out today as a fabulous update to this prominent leading-edge Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. I've been running Fedora 42 on several systems already -- including upgrading my main production system to it -- and it's been working out very well. Fedora 42 is packed full of new features and software updates making it a great H1'2025 Linux operating system release...

There's the possibility raised that the mainline Linux kernel might remove its file-system kernel drivers for Apple HFS and HFS+ this year...

The Intel Video Processing Library GPU Runtime "VPL-GPU-RT" as the run-time component to the Intel VPL API for video processing with a variety of video encoders/decoders and filters is preparing to end mainline support for Intel graphics prior to Tiger Lake...

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle...

In addition to yesterday's alpha release of the semi-immutable Majaro Summit distribution, Manjaro Linux has now resolved Manjaro 25.0 as the newest version of this (non-immutable) Arch Linux based desktop operating system...

Oracle today debuted the newest version of their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel "UEK" designed to be paired with their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system as a heavily-patched version of the Linux kernel. With today's release of UEK 8 they have rebased atop the current Linux 6.12 long-term support codebase...

After nearly one and a half decades after the packaging request was made, GNOME Shell Frippery extensions have finally worked their way into Debian via the unstable archive for offering a GNOME2-like desktop experience...

For fans of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, the distribution team announced the public alpha release of Manjaro Summit: a new semi-immutable flavor along similar lines to Fedora Silverblue, Nitrux, Aeryn OS, openSUSE Aeon, and others...

The work talked about back in January for improving the 32-bit PAE Linux kernel code for Physical Address Extensions to better jive with the code around Page Table Isolation (PTI) for mitigating the Meltdown vulnerability could soon be merged...

Earlier this month I looked at the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics with Strix Point between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 Linux. The testing showed the AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics on the open-source Linux driver up to around 96% the performance of Radeon Software on Windows. The most frequent question that came up from that most recent round of benchmarking was wondering how the Intel Xe2 graphics on Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" now compares between Windows 11 and Linux given that both drivers have been maturing the past several months. Here's the story of the Xe2 graphics between Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 while using a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop.

Being worked on for a while now by engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google has been Kexec HandOver "KHO" as a means of allowing some kernel state to be retained when Kexec'ing into a new kernel such as for maintenance/security updates. The KHO patches in recent days were queued up into Andrew Morton's "MM" staging area leading to hope that this work is ready for mainlining with the Linux 6.16 kernel cycle this summer...

A decade after Intel acquired FPGA maker Altera for $16.7 billion and recently working to make Altera an independent company, Intel announced today it has sold 51% of its Altera business in a deal that values that business at $8.75 billion...

The first Linux patch was posted today by an Intel engineer that explicitly mentions "Bartlett Lake" in opening the door for any other Linux kernel patches explicitly catering to Bartlett Lake processors...

After various commits to Mesa 25.1 in recent days in preparing for a new paired context registers feature of AMD RDNA4 (GFX12 graphics), the feature today is wired up for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release. This feature has the possibility of helping performance for new AMD RDNA4 hardware but the performance benefits at this time aren't clear...

Sent out as a request for comments today is a patch series implementing PCACHE, a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of code originally designed for the CXL block device driver but ultimately is useful outside the context of Compute Express Link as well...

While LLVM LLD and Mold are two popular linkers on Linux systems with the latter being known for its impressive speed and much faster than GNU LD and Gold, this past week Qualcomm open-sourced a new linker: ELD...

One week after the Linux 6.15 merge window was capped off, the Linux 6.15-rc2 release is now available in rolling up all of the early fixes that were collected over the past week...

Last year work on KDE's Amarok music player was resurrected after a six year development hiatus. With the return to Amarok development it was ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 5. At the end of last year Amarok 3.2 released with initial Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 support while retaining Qt5/KF5 support. Now out today is the Amarok 3.3 beta to drop that prior-generation support...

While the Linux 6.15 merge window ended just one week ago and there is a month and a half until it will debut as stable, a notable feature has already been queued into a "next" branch for the follow-on Linux 6.16 cycle. For those making use of modern Intel Xeon processors with virtualization, the Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for KVM virtualization looks like it will finally be mainlined...

One month after GIMP 3.0 was finally released for this popular image editor ported to GTK3 and many other changes, Pinta 3.0 has now been released. Pinta as a reminder is the open-source image editing program inspired by Paint.NET. With the Pinta 3.0 release the image editor has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita...

It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption...

Originally posted back in 2022 were Linux kernel patches for Qualcomm USB audio offloading for Qualcomm SoCs with an audio DSP that can take responsibility for issuing transfers to the USB host controller to free up system resources. After going through 38 rounds of code review the past 2+ years, it looks like Linux 6.16 will finally mainline this Qualcomm USB audio offloading support...

An interesting merge this weekend to the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) that is widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions is Wayland multi-seat support. This addition also comes with a developer working on Valve's Linux graphics efforts...

The Linux 6.16 kernel this summer will likely see the new SNP SVSM vTPM driver introduced for further enhancing the AMD EPYC confidential computing capabilities atop the mainline Linux kernel...

A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines...

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma space with the start of a big new feature landing for the Plasma 6.4 desktop...

In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around "Qt Weld" that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration...

One of many Linux kernel patch series that NVIDIA has been working on recently to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel are the adjustments needed for Linux running on their newest Smart Switch networking products for the data center...

GNOME 48 made Decibels the desktop's official audio player and in doing so also became the first GNOME core application written in the TypeScript porting language. There's now a second core app for GNOME written in TypeScript...

After several ROCm 6.3 point releases, AMD today rolled out ROCm 6.4 as the next update to their open-source GPU/accelerator compute stack and ahead of their big Advancing AI event in June where they will talk about future ROCm work...

So far my testing this week of the Linux 6.15 kernel in its early, post-RC1 state has been going well. No major upsets, yet to uncover any significant performance regressions, and overall has been going smoothly with the many new features/changes in Linux 6.15...

Intel graphics driver engineers today sent out their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the next Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

With both Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing this month you may be curious how these two Linux distributions are competing for performance. Well, it's a very tight race for common Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware. In this article are some benchmarks looking at clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 on AMD Strix Point.

For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance...

With being just one week past the Linux 6.15 merge window, a lot of fixes have been flowing into the mainline tree as is usual for the early stages of the kernel cycle. Merged overnight were a number of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes that include some notable alterations for the Intel and AMD Radeon kernel graphics drivers...

The Haiku OS open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has issued their newest monthly development report...

Earlier this week IBM announced the z17 mainframes powered by Tellum I processors. But months prior we've seen IBM patches for an "arch15" target for SystemZ within the open-source compilers that we expected was z17. IBM has now confirmed such and has begun updating the open-source compilers to acknowledge this z17 compiler support...

Merged today was this week's batch of x86 fixes ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc2 release on Sunday. Notable with these x86 fixes are landing several patches to fix and clean-up the Spectre Return Stack Buffer "RSB" mitigation handling as well as introducing a new document to clarify the overall state and current mitigations...

Well here is a pleasant surprise, especially for those that recall the days long ago where Fedora Linux releases tend to be notoriously delayed... Fedora 42 is cleared for releasing next week Tuesday, 15 April, in meeting its "early target" release date...

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver for the current Linux 6.15 kernel cycle is EU Stall Sampling support as a new feature found with Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics. EU Stall Sampling is used for exposing information/reasons why execution units are stalled for helping to debug performance issues. Now that the kernel support is ready to go with Linux 6.15, merged to the Mesa 25.1 development code is the user-space support for this performance debugging feature...

In addition to the upcoming GCC 15 stable compiler release bringing a COBOL language front-end, much better Rust support, revamped AVX10 support, and other shiny new language features and hardware supports, there are also some more fundamental usability improvements for developers...

For those that are curious about the Linux support and performance of the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 laptop processor, I've recently been testing it out within a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (AMD) laptop. Up today are benchmarks of the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 within the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 up against an assortment of other recent Intel and AMD laptops all while running the near-final state of Ubuntu 25.04.

While the Linux 6.15 merge window only ended last weekend, new feature material is beginning to queue for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.16 kernel cycle kicking off in late May or early June. A few notable patches so far have been submitted by way of DRM-Misc-Next...

Google engineers earlier this year detailed an AMD CPU microcode signature verification vulnerability. For local users with administration/root privileges, it could lead to loading malicious CPU microcode patches on the system. Initially AMD Zen 1 through Zen 4 were affected but the Google security engineers since discovered Zen 5 also could be impacted. BIOS updates are rolling out to address this signature verification issue while the Linux kernel is also being patched for microcode protections on Zen 5...

A change merged yesterday to the Intel Mesa graphics driver code lessens a restriction around the amount of system memory (RAM) that can be used by processes for the Vulkan system heap. This will allow more games/apps to work with the Intel integrated graphics that previously exceeded the driver-enforced limits but at the risk of running into broader out-of-memory behavior if under too much memory pressure...

Gzip 1.14 released earlier today as the first new release to this widely-used file compression format on Linux systems and other platforms...

While there are efforts underway to effectively kill the Linux virtual terminal "VT" console by punting the functionality off to user-space, it's not dead yet and a new patch series out on Wednesday aims to enhance the modern Unicode handling by the Linux VT...