For those dealing with exFAT formatted storage devices under Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel has a big optimization for yielding much faster delete performance when making use of the "discard" mount option...
With Q1 drawing to an end, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source news and Linux hardware reviews around AMD during the quarter on Phoronix. With 109 AMD news articles so far this quarter around their Linux software/hardware efforts and another 20 AMD Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles, they continue firing on all cylinders for pushing both their client and server wares forward outside the confines of Windows...
Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025...
Greg Kroah-Hartman on Sunday submitted all of the "char/misc" patches for the Linux 6.15 merge window for this random catch-all area of the kernel with small drivers and other random/obscure hardware support...
Last week PostgreSQL merged support for IO_uring that can provide for "considerably faster" performance of this popular open-source database server. Over the weekend some additional improvements were merged to the asynchronous I/O "AIO" code to PostgreSQL, including introducing a new batch mode that can also provide a performance win...
Cloud Hypervisor began as an open-source Intel software project more than a half-decade ago with an emphasis on security and cloud deployments while leveraging the Rust programming language. With time its scope has broadened a lot as has its industry adoption. With time it added ARM64 support and recruited AMD, Ampere Computing, Microsoft, and others as its supporters while being folded into the Linux Foundation. The latest expansion for the project is introducing experimental RISC-V 64-bit support...
The in-development Linux 6.15 kernel is continuing to enhance its support for MIPI's SoundWire specification for small audio peripherals with this two-pin, low-complexity audio interface...
All of the Rust programming language infrastructure updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel have now been submitted. In addition to a lot of technical Rust improvements for the Linux kernel, this cycle also marks the first time Rust Linux maintainer Miguel Ojeda has taken a pull request directly from another contributor as they prepare to work out sub-trees for the Rust ecosystem...
The Arch Linux powered CachyOS is out with its March 2025 update that delivers a number of new features for this OS that is popular with open-source enthusiasts and power users for its out-of-the-box performance optimizations and extensive tuning...
Google's Ozone Wayland support continues to improve for benefiting the Chrome/Chromium web browser. The newest addition merged this past week is support for the xdg-session-management protocol...
IO_uring continues maturing while being one of the greatest innovations within the Linux kernel in the past number of years. With Linux 6.15, IO_uring is getting even more interesting with introducing network zero-copy receive support. With this new code a 200G link could be saturated off a single CPU core in a recent demonstration...
The first quarter of 2025 is already drawing to a close... It seemed like Q1'2025 flew by but when looking back at all the Mesa 3D graphics driver activity, there was a heck of a lot accomplished in this area of the open-source landscape. Open-source Vulkan drivers continued advancing feverishly, Mesa code continues to be adapted to new platforms from Windows to Haiku OS, and all the big vendors continue being involved in open-source GPU drivers in one form or another...
While the upstream MIPS architecture is at a dead-end due to RISC-V, the Linux kernel code for the MIPS CPU architecture continues to improve for all the existing MIPS-based platforms out there. With Linux 6.15 there is new work for enhancing the Mobileye EyeQ6 SoC support...
With the first quarter quickly drawing to a close, here's a look back at the most popular Intel Linux news of the quarter. There's been excitement with the Battlemage discrete graphics cards with their open-source driver, early work on Xe3 graphics, AVX10.2 dropping the optional 512-bit features to make it mandatory now (thankfully!), and a lot of exciting upstream Linux kernel improvements...
Samsung used to sell web cameras for their smart TVs for use with living room video chatting with the likes of Skype. Samsung no longer supports Skype on their TVs (goodbye Skype!) or these devices but if you happen to have one laying around or buy one used for cheap, it's now possible to use these Samsung TV cameras as a standard web camera under Linux...
All of the PCI subsystem feature updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. This includes some new drivers from AMD and Intel-Altera as well as various other PCI changes...
Earlier this month brought the Theora 1.2 beta release coming 16 years after Theora's libtheora 1.0 release for this video codec designed by Xiph.Org for use with Ogg audio. Theora is derived from the now rather ancient VP3 video codec, but for those continuing to enjoy content in Theora format, today brings the version 1.2 library...
Within This Week in Plasma, KDE developer Nate Graham notes the great excitement in KDE bug fixing this week/ KDE developers have lowered their HI/VHI priority bug counts down to "their lowest numbers ever numbers" in addition to working on new Plasma 6.4 features over the past few days...
The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he's unhappy with some new "hdrtest" testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the "turds" it leaves behind and this code "needs to die" at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers...
The big pull request was sent out today of the numerous Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. There are new drivers, a lot as usual for the AMD Radeon and Intel kernel graphics drivers, and a lot of other changes throughout for advancing these open-source kernel graphics/display drivers...
While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.
Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices...
The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets...
Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages...
Set to be merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel is the very initial NOVA driver core code that will be incrementally built up over time in succeeding kernel versions. For Linux 6.15, this open-source NVIDIA kernel driver isn't of any use for end-users as it's just the very preliminary pieces to begin crafting the foundation for the driver that is leveraging the NVIDIA GSP found with Turing and newer hardware. In preparation for future kernel cycles, the NOVA skeleton driver pieces were posted for review yesterday to begin fleshing out more of the driver's design...
The many SoC and DeviceTree updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There's a lot on the ARM hardware side plus some additions for RISC-V and various interesting new device/board additions...
Ubuntu 25.04 beta is set to be released today and thus this week I've begun testing out the latest Ubuntu 25.04 builds on different systems for seeing how this six-month Ubuntu Linux update is looking compared to the prior Ubuntu 24.10 release. In this first Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarking article is a look at the performance using an AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics.
It's not only FreeDesktop.org that has been transitioning to new infrastructure this month but separately, Kernel.org is now receiving hosting and CDN needs provided by Akamai...
Linux 6.15 keeps getting more exciting... The big Zstd update has landed! The in-kernel Zstandard compression code is finally re-based against the newer upstream state that brings better performance as well as new APIs for allowing Intel QAT acceleration by Intel hardware offering QuickAssist Technology. This Zstd code is relied upon by Btrfs transparent file-system compression and other in-kernel users for compression/decompression...
The printk changes submitted for the Linux 6.15 kernel introduce a new "NULL_TTY_DEFAULT_CONSOLE" Kconfig build-time option for allowing the null TTY to be the default for those building the Linux kernel without virtual terminal (VT) support...
As a very exciting improvement for the open-source PostgreSQL database server, it has merged initial support for making use of IO_uring on Linux servers for asynchronous I/O and can provide for some nice performance improvements...
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has submitted all the feature updates slated for Linux 6.15. There is a lot of new audio hardware support and other enhancements that are now merged for this next kernel release...
Earlier this month Mesa deprecated the Clover OpenCL driver in favor of the modern Rust-written Rusticl Gallium3D state tracker. Clover is expected to be removed in Q3's Mesa 25.2 release while today the RadeonSI driver has decided to preemptively remove its Clover support...
NVIDIA has published new Vulkan beta driver builds for Windows and Linux that introduce VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for BFloat16 "BF16" support within shaders...
Submitted today for upstreaming into the Linux 6.15 kernel is support for the Versal NET SoC, an addition to the AMD/Xilinx Versal family that doesn't appear to have been talked about much publicly yet but should be an interesting addition to their product line-up...
Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party...
While there is a lot of exciting new x86_64 CPU features coming with Linux 6.15, there is also some of the not so fun changes too: namely the "x86/bugs" pull request to bring the latest CPU security mitigation work to the mainline kernel...
The x86 platform drivers co-maintainer Ilpo Jarvinen sent out the pull request today of all the feature additions set for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. As usual, most of the platform-drivers-x86 material is around improvements to benefit modern Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops...
AerynOS 2025.03 is now available for this Linux distribution that began life as Serpent OS as a new original distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame...
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