Phoronix

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa supports GFX9/Vega graphics cards but not the later CDNA-based Instinct accelerators. However, some patches merged today for Mesa 25.2-devel did introduce some "random bits and pieces" for CDNA but not a full implementation...

While we await the formal IBM Power11 launch in 2025, IBM engineers are already working on compiler support for "future" post-Power11 processors with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

While the latest Intel Core Ultra processors have done away with Hyper Threading (HT), Intel Xeon CPUs continue supporting HT/SMT, including with their latest Xeon 6300 series budget server processors. As the new AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors also support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and can be found at the same core/thread count count as the flagship Xeon 6369P processor, it makes for an interesting look at comparing the SMT/HT performance impact and power efficiency. Here are some benchmarks showing the Xeon 6300 against the AMD EPYC 4005 in SMT performance.

Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version...

GIMP 3.1.2 was just released as the first development version on the road toward GIMP 3.2 stable...

Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources...

Support for UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting "SBAT" looks like it could be buttoned up in the mainline kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension...

Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity...

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.16-rc3 in marching toward the Linux 6.16 kernel release due out around late July...

Merged minutes ago ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release due out shortly was this week's batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates. Beyond the usual KVM fixes merged for the week, a bit of feature code was pulled in by Linus Torvalds for this post-merge-window phase...

While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance...

The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session...

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year...

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop...

XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape...

A number of AMD firmware/microcode updates were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository, including introducing the AMD Instinct MI350 series files that are necessary for the open-source Linux compute driver stack to function for those newly-announced Instinct accelerators...

Going back to January of 2023 there were the initial Intel patches for the Linux kernel introducing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). Two and a half years later, these Intel LASS patches remain in-development with today the sixth iteration of these patches having been posted...

Over the past week a number of Apple device support additions have been queued up into the HID subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel cycle...

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.318 was introduced with a new Valve extension, Vulkan 1.4.319 released this morning with another new extension...

Thirty-one years after Creative Technology introduced the Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA-based sound card, the open-source driver support within the Linux kernel continues to be worked on... Submitted today for Linux 6.16 is fixing support for this once mighty ISA sound card from the mid 90's...

Intel open-source software developers this week released OpenVINO 2025.2 as the latest update to this prominent free software AI toolkit...

There is some tension on the Linux kernel mailing list with some late Bcachefs feature work sent in as part of "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Established rules aim for only new feature code to be introduced during the kernel merge windows, which ended nearly two weeks ago for Linux 6.16, but Bcachefs wanting to be exempt to continue to allow new feature code to still land for the cycle in the name of data safety...

Microsoft announced back in May at their Build developer conference that WSL would be going open-source. Today Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.6 was released as their first new release now being an open-source project...

AMD originally released a ROCm 7.0 preview build back in May as it works to align their HIP API more closely with NVIDIA's CUDA. Last month was the big ROCm 7.0 preview announcement form AMD's Advancing AI Day in San Jose while this week is another new 7.0 preview build focused on further testing of the ROCm 7.0 HIP changes...

Code compilers like the prominent GCC and LLVM/Clang have been advertising support for the Cache Line Demote "CLDEMOTE" instruction on Arrow Lake processors as well as Lunar Lake and upcoming Panther Lake hybrid processors. Intel engineers added that compiler plumbing but was inaccurate and inadvertently missed until now with this prominent instruction not being supported there...

Following last week's release of OpenZFS 2.2.8, OpenZFS 2.3.3 is now available as the newest point release of this current stable series for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

While the results shouldn't be too surprising given the recent AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Windows 11 vs. Linux testing, when the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by the step-down AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 arrived with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, I also took the opportunity to run some Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks on that AMD Strix Halo SoC.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 2.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a nice Linux system/device firmware updating experience...

Sent out today was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes for consisting of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) core updates as well as changes to the smaller display/graphics kernel drivers plus the growing work around accelerator "accel" drivers within the kernel. Intel NPU accelerator driver changes stand out for this week's pull request ahead of Linux 6.17...

OpenBLAS 0.3.30 released this morning as the newest version of this optimized BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library for multiple CPU architectures...

Debian tag2upload reached an open beta state for allowing Debian developers and maintainers to upload by simply using the git-debpush script for pushing a signed Git tag...

Intel open-source software driver engineers have begun sending in their new kernel graphics driver feature pulls to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window coming up by early August. There is some new feature work included as part of Intel's pull requests for the weeks along with more PCI device IDs being introduced, bug fixes, and other code refactoring...

Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.4 on Wednesday as the latest bi-weekly point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems...

The first beta release of the Godot 4.5 open-source game engine is now available for testing. Notable for Linux users is the continued quest toward Wayland support at parity to X11...

Going on for several months now has been an effort to wire up cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for the Linux kernel for helping out task placement for processors with multiple cache domains such as modern AMD Ryzen/EPYC and Intel Xeon platforms. This cache-aware scheduling has shown much potential for Linux with further enhancing performance on today's interesting CPUs. Out today is the third iteration of cache-aware scheduling with an important rework...

The Zed Editor remains a popular code editor written in the Rust programming language and providing modern features for this project started by former Atom developers. One of the long sought features for Zed has been having built-in debugger capabilities and that work has finally been merged to the project's codebase...

Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday...

Back in February the Framework Laptop 12 was announced as the company's first 2-in-1 convertible laptop while still being well-built and upgrade-friendly/modular as we have come to enjoy out of their various Linux-friendly laptops. Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework Laptop 12 and thus can share our initial impressions on this Intel-powered 12-inch laptop.

The Servo browser engine project born out of Mozilla as an early Rust project and now advanced by open-source developers from various firms continues moving forward. Servo has finally scratched animated GIF support off its TODO list among other features...

AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future...

Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family...

The Arch Linux project announced this week they are working to transition their Wine and Wine-Staging packages over to pure WoW64 builds. This "Windows on Windows 64-bit" allows for 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux platforms without needing 32-bit software libraries/prefixes present and overall a big architectural win...

Alienware G-Mode / Game Shift is a feature designed to "enhance gaming performance" on select Dell/Alienware laptops with the press of a key. But at least under Linux with select laptop models it can actually regress performance compared to just running the laptop in the "performance" platform profile...

The Qt Creator 17 integrated development environment released today with a variety of improvements for this primarily C++/Qt focused developer IDE...

Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver has supported various elements of 2D image handling while the latest addition in enhancing this open-source driver's support is for sRGB images...

For those interested in Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) for power and performance telemetry data among other metrics on Intel hardware, the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel has squeezed in support for existing Lunar Lake and next-gen Panther Lake SoCs into the PMC SSRAM telemetry driver...