Phoronix

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...

Ubuntu developers decided a few months back to switch from IRC to Matrix for real-time communication needs. The newest fundamental shift being discussed by Ubuntu developers is shifting from mailing list discussions to Ubuntu Discourse for mailing list like written communications...

BLAKE3 as the cryptographic hashing function that is much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA-1 while being more secure than SHA-1 and MD5 is out with a new feature update. BLAKE3 v1.7 is now available for the official C and Rust code as the reference implementations to this cryptographic hash function...

The full PCI Express 7.0 specification remains on track for publishing later this year while out today is version 0.9 of the specification as the planned final draft...

Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software...

Along with the GraalVM 24 update today, Oracle has formally released OpenJDK Java 24. JDK 24 is now out under general availability status with many new features and changes...

The beta of Fedora Linux 42 is out this morning with countless improvements over the prior release. There is the near-final GNOME 48 desktop packages and a whole host of other software updates for living on the leading-edge of open-source software as well as boasting a number of new innovations that were made by Red Hat engineers...

Hopefully leading to more timely updates to the Zstd compression code within the Linux kernel is a decision to add on a co-maintainer of the in-kernel Zstandard code...

Ahead of the OpenJDK Java 24 release expected in the coming hours today, Oracle already released "GraalVM for JDK 24 Community 24.0" edition...

If you happen to have a rare ARM64 platform with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support, with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel there is set to finally be run-time SMT controls similar to the functionality long available on x86/x86_64 processors...

Theora is Xiph.Org's first released video codec designed for use with Ogg. Theora started out based on the VP3 codec. It's been over 16 years since the release of the libtheora 1.0 reference software implementation and tagged this week was libtheora 1.2 beta...

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run Llama 3, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models is out with its newest release. The ollama software makes it easy to leverage the llama.cpp back-end for running a variety of LLMs and enjoying convenient integration with other desktop software...

A pull request was opened last week for adding web browser dark mode support for Nginx error pages. Unfortunate for those who prefer browsing in dark mode and then shocked when hitting Nginx-served 404 error pages or similar, the change has been rejected...

Some 145 patches for the Rust "gccrs" front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release...

Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.

The Intel XeSS SDK 2.0.1 was published today to GitHub as their first XeSS 2.0 release being available there and their first released version since the XeSS SDK 1.3.1 update from last July. While on GitHub, the XeSS SDK remains closed-source and Windows-focused...

Raspberry Pi last year announced the RP2350 second-generation micro-controller that debuted within their $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single board computer. Today they announced the RP2350 micro-controller is now available to purchase for your own micro-controller needs...

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan Video improvements today into FFmpeg Git. In addition, there is now an FFV1 Vulkan-based decoder...

It's going to be a light week for development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, various other X.Org related components, and the dozens of other open-source projects that rely on the FreeDesktop.org GitLab for facilitating merge requests, CI testing, and related infrastructure. The FreeDesktop.org server/cloud migration has begun and may last until next weekend...

The upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 Linux OS release will be enabling NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support by default when using their packaged driver support on capable laptops...

After some 13 years of writing about GIMP 3.0 development, today is finally the day: GIMP 3.0 has been tagged and is in the process of being released...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc7 kernel with expectations of releasing Linux 6.14 stable next weekend...

Following the DXVK 2.6 release from a few days ago for Direct3D 8/9/10/11 atop Vulkan and ahead of the upcoming Proton 10.0 release for further enhancing Valve's Steam Play, out today is DXVK-NVAPI 0.9 as the NVIDIA NVAPI integration for use with DXVK...

For some newer Arm core designs, Arm is changing the Linux kernel to defaulting to enabling Kernel Page Table Isolation "KPTI" if not running on a new firmware version in order to properly mitigate a recently disclosed CPU security issue. This change has been queued up and is expected to change the default with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel...

For those that happen to have a Huawei Matebook E Go 2-in-1 laptop or have been considering these ARM laptops, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel will be better supporting these devices thanks to a new driver set to be merged...