Phoronix

KDE developer David Edmundson has published a lengthy blog post today outlining the long-standing challenges they have with the SDDM display manager, unimplemented features they want out of a log-in manager, and acknowledging GNOME's GDM as a "gold standard" for display managers. While not yet an official project, they have begun working on a new KDE Login Manager for improving the situation...

The Linux 6.15 kernel is set to remove support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those server platforms from around two decades ago that used the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture processors. IBM Cell Blades at the time powered a few supercomputers but these IBM QS20 / QS21 / QS22 platforms are no longer relevant and the IBM Linux kernel maintainers no longer even have these platforms available/running. With no apparent users remaining, it's time to say goodbye to the IBM Cell Blades from the mainline kernel...

Intel engineers today released LPMD 0.0.9, the newest version of their open-source Low Power Mode Daemon for Linux systems to optimize active idle power consumption on Intel Core processors...

With the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel there are two new features worth mentioning...

Among other Linux Virtual File-System (VFS) changes submitted and already merged for Linux 6.15 was a set of minor performance optimizations around VFS file operations...

Merged today for the recently-opened Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the "x86/core" changes that are particularly heavy on new feature work for both Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 processors. This is easily quite one of the most significant Intel/AMD CPU set of updates in a given kernel cycle in quite some time...

XZ 5.8 is out today as the first notable feature release since last year's malicious backdoor in XZ 5.6 inserted by a then-co-maintainer of the project. XZ 5.6.2 was out last May while XZ 5.8.0 is now stable today for bringing new features to this lossless data compressor project...

MPV 0.40 was just released as the newest version of this open-source media player derived from MPlayer/MPlayer2. With the MPV 0.40 release there is support for HDR videos on Wayland using the new color management protocol along with a variety of other new features...

Earlier this month for launch-day there were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU compute benchmarks. The graphics/gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 5070 on Linux were held up by waiting for a new R570 Linux driver release with proper support for this new Blackwell graphics card. Last week that new Linux driver arrived in the form of the NVIDIA 570.133.07 Linux build. That new NVIDIA Linux driver is working out great with the GeForce RTX 5070 Founder's Edition and in this article are some initial Linux gaming/graphics performance benchmarks for that new graphics card competing with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series.

Fwupd 2.0.7 brings the newest plug-ins and expanded hardware support for being able to update a variety of system and device/peripheral firmware under Linux...

Over the past week a lot of new Rust "gccrs" code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality...

An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing... Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors...

In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version...

The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA's Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell...

The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD's INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores...

Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux...

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code...

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered...

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2...

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve...

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15...

Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl...

An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends...

There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases...

What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today those GNU Compiler Collection patches have been merged to prepare for AVX10.2 always having 512-bit support available...

Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)...

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...