Phoronix

KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel...

Last week I provided a look at the Intel Xeon 600 series Hyper Threading performance with the Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor for HT/SMT on and off. That was interesting while another reader request was to look at the CPU core scaling performance for this high-end workstation processor. Here are those benchmarks for showing the performance, power, and frequency/thermal impact of the Xeon 678X when limited to 6 cores, 12 cores, 24 cores, 48 cores, and then the 48 cores + HT default configuration.

Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2024 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary...

AMD's compiler team is proposing a new LLVM Clang compiler option, -fenable-readonly-thp for implementing instruction Transparent Huge Pages "iTHP" at compile and link-time. With -fenable-readonly-thp, they are finding more performance out of SPEC CPU, Geekbench, and other workloads from the arranging of 2MB segment alignment at link time and allowing the executable text range can be promoted to huge pages...

Earlier this month when benchmarking six Linux distributions on the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", the performance was strangely slow on Fedora Workstation 44. When digging further into it, the performance loss was with Fedora 44 using Tuned-PPD by default where as other Linux distributions default to Power Profiles Daemon. Ultimately, after Red Hat engineers got involved, was found to be a bug within the Intel P-State kernel driver exhibited by Tuned-PPD. The latest Linux kernel already has a fix in place and will be back-ported to Fedora 44...

Intel is preparing to introduce a new Linux driver named "BFF" for dealing with aging processor silicon where bits may become stuck over time...

Armbian as the Debian/Ubuntu-derived distribution that provides an optimized platform for ARM and RISC-V single board computers is out today with a major update...

The Linux kernel's FUSE code for enabling file-systems in user-space is enjoying some nice speed boosts with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel...

LibreOffice 26.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature update to this leading open-source alternative to Microsoft Office...

The AMD GFX1250 IP is what's used by the new Instinct MI450 series accelerators. That's been around within the Linux kernel, AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, and related codebases the past year. Interestingly merged yesterday is a new "gfx1250-strict" target...

A SiFive engineer posted patches today for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adding -mtune=native -mcpu=native support for the compiler on RISC-V...

All of the PCI/PCIe subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel were merged this week...

Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren't yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option...

Last year a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on a single physical machine. Each kernel with "multikernel" Linux can run on dedicated CPU cores whole sharing the underlying hardware resources. Linux 7.0-mk2 released today with the kernel patched for this multi-kernel behavior...

COSMIC Epoch 1.7 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based open-source desktop environment with development led by System76...

LLVM 23.1 was released today on-schedule as the first stable release of the LLVM 23 series as the H2'2026 update to this open-source compiler stack...

The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce's xfwm4 window manager into "xfwm4-gl" for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating...

The latest criticism of the increased burden placed on open-source software project maintainers caused by AI / LLM agents is around too many bug reports effectively causing a "denial of service" attack on project maintainers...

With the Btrfs pull request for Linux 7.3 having delivered more performance optimizations with some ~3x and ~5x gains mentioned in specific areas, I was eager to test out the new Btrfs performance on the in-development kernel. In today's article are some benchmarks of Btrfs on Linux 7.2 stable compared to Linux 7.3 Git with some very enticing performance gains confirmed in various workloads.

Apple today unveiled the M6 as their first 2nm SoC design while also introducing the M5 Ultra as their first quad-die product...

The pull requests for the existing Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver as well as the new modern "NTFS" drivers have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel cycle. Besides bug fixes, most notable among these NTFS file-system drivers are Windows System Compression "WOF" read support for the modern NTFS driver...

The Linux Device Mapper "DKM" framework for mapping block devices to higher-level virtual block devices doesn't see any major new features for Linux 7.3 but there are many bug fixes, including code clean-ups carried out by AI...

The in-development Linux 7.3 kernel is marking Nova Lake Xe3P graphics as stable in being enabled by default and no longer hidden behind the "force probe" flag. While on-by-default, there still are some features that have yet to land like the DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM functionality...

KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted all of the sound feature updates last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides the continued AI/LLM-generated patch churn, the sound code for Linux 7.3 sees a lot of new hardware support...

The HID subsystem updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel merge window. Among other hardware additions, the 2026 Valve Steam Controller is seeing initial kernel driver support...

A patch series being worked on for the ath11k mainline wireless networking driver for Qualcomm WiFi 6 / 802.11ax chipsets is yielding 7x lower latency or 2.2x throughput at identical latency...

The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel's internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it's being further restricted...

While Firefox 152+ already offers experimental JPEG-XL support, Mozilla formally announced today their plans for officially shipping JPEG-XL image format support in the Firefox web browser...

Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions.

GNU Emacs 31.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular text editor...

VKD3D 2.1 was released today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet as the upstream Wine project for getting Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API...

Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric...

With the in-development Linux 7.3 is support for discovering and enumerating support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions. Plus there are improvements to its control flow integrity Shadow Stack handling, CPU context switch support for QoS tagging, using UEFI runtime services for restart and powering off, and other improvements...

Merged last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel were all the hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver updates for Linux 7.3, which included supporting several more ASUS desktop motherboards, a few AIO liquid cooling products, more Lenovo system support, and per-CCD temperature monitoring on AMD EPYC 9005 server processors...

Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection...

The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default...

Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility...

The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system...

An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4...

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements...

The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries...

There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons...

The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS...

The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness...

In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel...

A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system...

In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics...

The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!..