Phoronix

With yesterday's stable release of the LLVM Clang 22 compiler it didn't take long for Phoronix readers to begin asking about the performance of this half-year feature update to this prominent open-source C/C++ compiler. What I am seeing so far are no big surprises with the performance largely being similar to Clang 21 across various open-source C/C++ workloads in the testing thus far. This initial round of reference benchmark results between LLVM Clang 22, Clang 21, and Clang 20 were done on an AMD EPYC Turin (Zen 5) Linux server.

Mesa 26.0.1 is now available as the first point release of this quarter's Mesa 26.0 series. Besides the usual bug fixing, Mesa 26.0.1 is more pressing than usual since it contains a security fix for possible out-of-bounds memory access in WebGPU contexts from web browsers...

The first release candidate of systemd 260 is now available for testing. Systemd 260 finally does away with System V service scripts support. Also notable to systemd 260 is the work around the new "mstack" feature...

While there are many great Linux 7.0 features with that still-young development cycle, looking ahead to Linux 7.1 this summer there's an interesting feature on track: cgroup sub-scheduler support for sched_ext...

The EPYC 9005 series for high-end Zen 5 server processors is a year and a half old and then at the lower-end of the spectrum is the EPYC 4005 series AM5 server processors that launched last year. On the embedded side is also the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. AMD has now filled the void between with the long-awaited EPYC 8005 series...

The embargo just lifted on an interesting new industry consortium... CoreCollective. The CoreCollective consortium is focused on open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem and to a large extent what Linaro has already been doing for the past decade and a half. Interestingly though with CoreCollective for open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem, AMD is now onboard as a founding member along with various other vendors...

Matthias Clasen shared an update today concerning the state of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within GNOME's GTK toolkit...

Josef Bacik, of Btrfs notoriety before leaving Meta and stepping back from kernel development last year, announced the release of Systing 1.0. Systing is a newer eBPF-tracing tool for Linux complete with AI integration...

Following the big OpenZFS 2.4 release back in December, OpenZFS 2.4.1 was released overnight to ship support for the latest Linux 6.19 stable kernel plus a variety of different bug fixes...

For those making use of the open-source FreeRDP project for your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) needs, FreeRDP 3.23 is out today with 11 CVEs addressed in taking care of various security-related issues that have been uncovered...

It's quite a mouthful but today AMD posted Linux kernel patches for preparing SEV-SNP BTB isolation support for further enhancing the security of virtual machines (VMs) for confidential computing...

Lutris 0.5.21 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Linux game manager. With Lutris 0.5.21 comes some new runners for executing games in different environments...

While System76 has been hard at work on a redesigned Thelio desktop chassis design, this hasn't slowed down their software work. Today they shipped COSMIC Epoch 1.0.8 as the newest work on their open-source, Rust-based desktop environment used by their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution as well as found in other Linux distributions too...

D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux...

Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the N4A performance against the Intel Xeon N4 and AMD EPYC N4D series.

A change merged to upstream LLVM Git yesterday for LLVM 23 is moving AMD's HIP to using the new/modern offload driver by default. This aligns with a prior change for NVIDIA CUDA and already in place for OpenMP offloading too...

Following various Intel open-source projects recently being archived with Intel formally discontinuing their development, another wave of Intel open-source projects were formally sunset on Monday...

LLVM/Clang 22.1 was released overnight as the first stable release of the LLVM 22 series. This is a nice, feature-packaged half-year update to this prominent open-source compiler stack with many great refinements...

Following last week's Plasma 6.6 release, KDE developers today shipped Plasma 6.6.1 as the first point release with an assortment of different bug fixes...

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard and Linux cryptography fame has taken a break from that to release a new version of CGIT, the lightweight web interface for Git repositories. CGIT 1.3 is the first new release in six years and comes with a lot of changes...

The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1...

Following yesterday's Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel's WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam...

The newest driver proposed for the Linux kernel's accelerator "accel" subsystem is named QDA and is a Qualcomm DSP Accelerator driver...

Intel's open-source OpenVINO AI toolkit is out with its first major release of 2026. With today's OpenVINO 2026.0 release there is expanded large language model (LLM) support, improved Intel NPU support for Core Ultra systems, and a variety of other enhancements for benefiting Intel's CPU / NPU / GPU range of products for AI...

Firefox 148 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement on Tuesday. Most notable is the new AI controls found with Firefox 148 for those wishing to disable Firefox's growing AI capabilities...

While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds' versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0.

The FreeBSD Project has published their Q4'2025 status report to outline progress made on their software, infrastructure, and other initiatives over the past quarter. Meanwhile among the work to look forward to this year in FreeBSD is getting their Rust kernel driver support up to scratch...

It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel's entire codebase as the single largest driver...

For those interested in Vulkan Video on the Intel "ANV" open-source Linux driver, merged last week to Mesa 26.1-devel were some H.265 encode fixes...

While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS...

Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux's cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities...

FFmpeg developer Lynne is most known recently for all the Vulkan Video work to this open-source multimedia library while merged today to FFmpeg is another great contribution outside the scope of that: xHE-AAC MPS212 audio decoding support...

Linus Torvalds just capped off the Linux 7.0 merge window with the release of Linux 7.0-rc1. While the big version bump is coincidental with Linus Torvalds liking to bump it after x.19, Linux 7.0 is quite heavy on new features...

There's the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell's contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years...

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4...

While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (OAC)...

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance "perf" subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors...

Timur Kristof of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has been doing a fantastic job enhancing the older AMD Radeon GPU support under Linux. Last year he made enough improvements to the AMDGPU open-source driver that older Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 dGPUs switched over to AMDGPU by default for nice performance gains, RADV Vulkan driver support out of the box, and all around better experience than using the legacy Radeon driver. He's also been fixing countless bugs affecting older AMD GPUs. There is another improvement on the way for benefiting some with aging AMD GPUs...

The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids. Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support...

For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0...

Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its "experimental" in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release...

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0...

We haven't heard much about eCryptfs in recent years for that stackable in-tree Linux file-system providing per-directory encryption support. The FSCRYPT framework has shown its strong capabilities in recent years with various file-systems, Canonical hasn't been pursuing its user home directory encryption like it did years ago for the Ubuntu desktop, and full disk encryption is the most secure approach for ensuring data security on your system. But to some surprise with Linux 7.0 there are the most patches to eCryptfs that we have seen in a while...

The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with a new release. The ollama v0.17.0 release is driven by new functionality around enhancing the OpenClaw onboarding process...

Following last week's main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round of fixes to these Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Dominating most of the code changes in this latest pull were AMDGPU fixes, including more enhancements for aging Radeon graphics processors...

AMD AOMP 23.0-0 was released overnight as the latest build of this LLVM/Clang downstream that continues to carry the very latest AMD patches focused on delivering the best support for GPU offloading to Radeon/Instinct hardware with the likes of the OpenMP and OpenACC APIs. AOMP continues to serve as a great leading-edge compiler for the best AMD GPU offloading experience until the patches ultimately work their way into upstream LLVM...

For those making use of the Ceph open-source, distributed storage platform, with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel they are introducing support for the AES256K key type...

This week marked the release of KDE's Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While Plasma 6.6 overall is in great shape, there are various bugs - including crash fixes - that have already been queued for the upcoming Plasma 6.6.1. KDE developers are also quite busy on the trek toward Plasma 6.7...

As some good news out of Intel today on the Linux/open-source side following last year's layoffs, they're hiring for some new Linux software development roles -- including for enhancing their Linux graphics driver stack that also includes a focus on Linux gaming with the likes of Valve's Proton (Steam Play)...

Drgn is the programmable debugger developed by Meta engineer Omar Sandoval that has proven quite versatile and popular with Linux kernel developers and others. After nearly two dozen releases already, Drgn v0.1 was released this week as another big step forward for this open-source debugger...