Phoronix

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors...

While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors...

Libinput 1.28 debuted today by Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer. With this updated input handling library used by both Wayland and X.Org Server environments there is now support for three-finger drag on touchpads...

Raspberry Pi's brisk pace of new hardware and software the past few months continues today... The Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector was announced today at the $25 USD price point...

The EROFS open-source, read-only Linux file-system is set to be extended with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle to support massive amounts of data to support AI model training...

Just days after marking the third birthday of the open-source project, Hyprland 0.48 released today as the newest version of this popular Wayland compositor...

The Endeavour OS enthusiast Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux is out with its March 2025 ISO refresh under the codename "Mercury Neo" for this spin featuring the latest software packages...

Coming out this week was an updated AVX10 whitepaper from Intel with the surprising decision that 512-bit floating point and integer support is no longer considered optional for AVX10.2. AVX10.2 now mandates 128 / 256 / 512-bit support and in turn also dropped the 256-bit embedded rounding support with the focus on 512-bit. The LLVM/Clang compiler had seen its AVX10 support designed around Intel's original AVX10 design assumptions and thus now is being modified to address these changes...

Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common "uvcvideo" web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel...

This past week a lot of new code for the Rust "gccrs" front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release... The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features...

The sched_ext code for extensible scheduler support and being able to quickly prototype new Linux kernel scheduling improvements continues evolving nicely since its much anticipated merging to the mainline kernel in 2024. Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window, the sched_ext feature updates were sent out today for this next kernel cycle...

Last weekend FreeDesktop.org began transitioning to their new server/cloud infrastructure after recently finding out their sponsored Equinix Metal services were shutting down. Following the complex migration process this past week, FreeDesktop.org GitLab is up and running on the Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany...

Ingo Molnar began sending out the pull requests today for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window of code areas he oversees for the Linux kernel. Among those early pulls are of the x86/build updates, which includes removing some seemingly useless CRC-32 checksum code from the kernel...

Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin next week, a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD Radeon kernel driver updates were sent out on Friday for this next kernel cycle. It's mostly about bug fixes but does contain cleaner shader support for AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics...

There is some new Wayland protocol support activity this week worth mentioning for both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops...

Ahead of the Linux v6.14 kernel expected for release tomorrow and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft began sending out his pull requests today of new code he's hoping to see merged for this next cycle. One of those interesting pulls is the work for block devices to allow for block sizes to be greater than the page size...

Haiku OS developer X512 has managed a rather impressive feat: porting NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules to Haiku. Not only did he get NVIDIA's official Linux kernel modules running on Haiku but he also ported the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver to be able to run atop the NVIDIA kernel driver interface...

KDE developers continue pushing ahead with new feature development on the Plasma 6.4 desktop to further refine Plasma 6...

Wine 10.4 is out tonight as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

AMD has been on a software / container / documentation spree recently around ROCm and today are announcing another software addition to the ROCm portfolio: AITER...

Microsoft's newest open-source contribution to the Linux kernel being proposed is... Hornet, a Linux security module (LSM) for providing signature verification of eBPF programs...

It's been over three years since the last ReactOS open-source operating system release for this platform working on API/ABI compatibility with Microsoft Windows. Today ReactOS 0.4.15 was finally published...

Ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle a few early pull requests have already been sent in to Linus Torvalds in advance of the anticipated v6.14 release on Sunday. Among those early changes for Linux 6.15 are the SLAB allocator updates that include a fix for cache randomization with kvmalloc inadvertently being inadequate due to accidentally using the same randomization seed...

With the Linux 6.14 stable kernel likely debuting on Sunday, the Linux 6.15 merge window will then open for kicking off the next development cycle. There's a lot of exciting changes and new features building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window...

Following a slew of hardware announcements in the past few months like the RP2350 shipping, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, Raspberry Pi Monitor, and Raspberry Pi 500, today they have a new software announcement. Today they formally announced "rpi-image-gen" as a new tool to help customers in crafting customized software OS images...

Submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.14 stable release expected Sunday is a lone scheduler fix for the kernel. This patch is for reverting a change made to the Linux kernel two years ago that ended up regressing some workloads with a significant performance hit...

AMD on Thursday announced GAIA for "Generative AI Is Awesome" as a means of easily running local large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI PCs with the XDNA NPU. GAIA provides an easy software demonstration for Ryzen AI capabilities but sadly for the moment is limited to Microsoft Windows platforms...

A set of eleven patches being worked on for the ASUS HID and platform drivers work to enhance the support for the AMD Strix Halo powered ROG Flow Z13 (2025) laptop as well as adding RGB control support for the ROG Ally gaming handheld...

The AMD P-State Linux kernel driver for CPU frequency scaling with modern Ryzen processors has been working out quite well and proving very effective over the prior ACPI CPUFreq generic driver use. Beyond recently being extended to becoming the default for EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, AMD P-State has recently been seeing some patches for additional feature work...

The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions...

In addition to Intel software engineers this week being busy doing a late restructuring of AVX10 support in moving away from possible 256-bit maximum vector register size (a great move and still so excited to see this materialize!), there are also Intel engineers continuing work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on the Linux kernel side...

Barring any last minute issues or hesitation by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.14 kernel is aiming for releasing as stable this coming Sunday on 23 March. Here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes to find with Linux 6.14...

Even amid the ongoing FreeDesktop.org GitLab cloud/server migration, Eric Engestrom has managed to release Mesa 25.0.2 on schedule as the newest stable release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company's official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.

Arm engineer Karunika Choo today sent out the latest patches developing a new GPU-specific initialization framework for the Panthor open-source kernel graphics driver as part of bringing up support for newer Mali GPUs...

While there is Kpatch, Ksplice, and other live patching solutions already in use for patching a running Linux kernel for deploying security updates without downtime, Google engineers are developing the Live Update Orchestrator as a new means of transitioning to a new updated kernel with minimal downtime...

Linux developer SeongJae Park has posted a set of patches for the Linux kernel's wonderful DAMON code to provide for self-tuned memory tiering that "just works" and is racking up some nice performance wins...

The Google Chrome web browser is moving away from the FreeType font rendering library and instead pursuing their Skrifa project that is written in Rust for better memory safety around handling fonts on the web...

Miracle-WM 0.5 released on Wednesday as their first update of 2025 for this Mir-based Wayland tiling window manager. With this release comes a number of new features and other enhancements...

SoftBank Group just announced they will be acquiring Ampere Computing, the leader in ARM64 server processors that has come under increasing pressure with more of the public cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon/AWS turning to their own in-house ARM64 server processor designs...

A change proposal filed for the upcoming Fedora Linux 43 development cycles hopes to establish an expectation that RPM package builds for the distribution are reproducible...

GNOME 48 is officially out as the newest stable release for this open-source desktop that will be powering the likes of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04...

A few days ago there was a batch of 145 patches merged for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to enhance the Rust "gccrs" front-end. That big set of patches merged the Polonius borrow checker and made other notable improvements. Today another 144 patches for enhancing gccrs were merged ahead of the GCC 15.1 stable release due out in the coming weeks...

Over the past year Intel has been working to prepare the Linux kernel for the end of the "Family 6" CPU era. There's been a big rework to the Intel CPU model handling within the Linux kernel given that "Family 6" has been in use since the 1990s and moving forward Intel CPUs will appear in Family 19 like Diamond Rapids along with Family 18 as part of the new CPU identification. Thus a lot of Linux kernel checks need to be reconfigured for the multi-family Intel handling. With Linux 6.15 it looks like most of that will be finally wrapped up...

AMD recently allowed me some time with their AMD Accelerator Cloud (AAC) leveraging multiple Instinct MI300X accelerators. During this brief opportunity to try out their latest software advancements with the Instinct MI300X and the ROCm compute stack, one of the most striking takeaways was their documentation improvements compared to previous forays into ROCm+Instinct compute. In addition, AMD is now offering more robust container options for easier Instinct compute deployments with more software options available and being more regularly updated.

Intel updated their AVX10 whitepaper and associated open-source compiler patches around this next Advanced Vector Extensions standard... While AVX10 had intended to allow either 256-bit or 512-bit modes depending upon processor capabilities, Intel has dropped the 256-bit-only approach and going for 512-bit everywhere. Thus it would seem to indicate that Intel E cores of the future will properly support AVX 512-bit operation!..

Patches queued up this month into net-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel merge window add support for the Airoha NPU... Not to be confused with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is all the rage these days for helping with AI, the Airoha NPU is a Network Processor Unit...

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been working on some optimizations to the DRM synchronization object "drm_syncobj" code for slightly more efficient use on the CPU side...

In addition to NVIDIA's GTC conference going on right now, they also released today an updated R570 Linux driver build...

Following Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project that he founded for bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, Asahi Lina announced today that she is pausing work on all of the Apple GPU driver development she had been pursuing for Asahi Linux with the open-source DRM kernel driver as well as Mesa contributions...