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Updated 2025-07-04 12:15
LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 Brings Many Open-Source Office Suite Improvements
LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 is out for testing today ahead of the stable release of this free software office suite around the start of February...
systemd Saw A Record Number Of Commits In 2024
While systemd has been around for a decade and a half, it's showing no signs of slowing down for driving new innovations to Linux for this system and service manager...
Canonical Experimented With Rebuilding Its Ubuntu 25.04 Packages Under LLVM/Clang
This morning the first test rebuild results of the "Plucky Puffin" for Ubuntu 25.04 were shared on the mailing list... While typically not interesting to outsiders, one interesting bit is that as a "bonus" they rebuilt the main components of Ubuntu 25.04 packages with the LLVM Clang compiler compared to the usual GCC compiler...
GNU C Library glibc 2.41 Release Coming Soon With Many New Features
The GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release should be out around the very end of January or start of February. With glibc 2.41 there are many new features coming to this widely-used libc implementation by Linux systems and elsewhere...
Intel Battlemage, Raspberry Pi 500 & Linux 6.13 Excited Linux Users In December
While there was the year-end holidays, daily activity on Phoronix doesn't let up and over the course of December there were 256 original news articles around Linux/open-source on the site along with 24 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here's a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most as we closed out 2024...
KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" Started To Provide Nice Home Assistant Integration
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has recently been cleaning up some scripts he's been using personally for a few years to enhance the integration between the KDE desktop and Home Assistant for open-source home automation. This work has evolved into the KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" and is currently in a pre-alpha state for enhancing the support between KDE and home automation controls...
Patches Proposed To Begin Plumbing 32-bit LoongArch CPU Support For The Linux Kernel
Merged back in 2022 for the Linux 5.19 kernel was the LoongArch port for that Chinese processor architecture derived from MIPS and inspired in part by RISC-V. Over the past two and a half years the LoongArch Linux kernel port has continued to mature while up to now it's always been about LoongArch 64-bit... But now a set of patches are looking to begin wiring up LoongArch 32-bit support for the Linux kernel...
32 Patches Merged For More Unification Between RadeonSI OpenGL & RADV Vulkan Drivers
Well known AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olak landed some nice Mesa 25.0 optimizations for Christmas and now in kicking off the new year he's managed another interesting set of patches for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...
Linux Patches Updated For Experimental Arm Morello That Combines Arm + CHERI ISA
Arm today sent out their third iteration of their Linux kernel patches for adding Arm Morello platform support to the kernel: an experimental extension of Armv8.2-A paired with the CHERI v7 ISA...
Linux Prepares AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" Support For Zen 5 CPUs
Queued up this week via the tip/tip.git's "x86/bugs" Git branch for the Linux kernel is AMD "SRSO_USER_KERNEL_NO" support as a new SRSO/Inception mitigation handling seemingly for Zen 5 processors and beyond...
Fedora Stakeholders Talk Of Forking Intel's Compute Runtime To Maintain Older Hardware
With the Intel Graphics Compiler having dropped Ice Lake and older support and in turn the Intel Compute Runtime dropping Ice Lake and older to just focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support, Fedora packagers and other stakeholders have been grappling with how to handle the situation. For Fedora 42 there's been a proposal for updating to the newer Intel Compute Runtime code for benefiting the more recent Intel graphics hardware while in recent days there's been talk of forking the legacy code...
AMD Zen 5 Captivated Linux Reader Interest In 2024
With 2024 in the books, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles for 2024. In addition to the three thousand original Linux/open-source news articles last year, there was 191 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by myself. AMD Zen 5 on Linux easily dominated the list of most popular articles for the year along with ZLUDA and several of the Intel Arrow Lake and Granite Rapids articles plus the Framework 16 laptop...
Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers Updated For Enabling Extra Functionality Under Linux
Last month I wrote about a Lenovo Legion Linux driver being posted for enabling more power/performance settings under Linux. Following a significant rework, a second iteration of those patches have now been posted with just being referred to as the Lenovo "Gaming Series" WMI drivers without the Legion reference...
ACD Power/Performance Feature Being Worked On For The GPU Within The Snapdragon X1
For the Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU found within the Snapdragon X1 series of laptop chips, an Adaptive Clock Distribution "ACD" feature is currently being wired up to the open-source MSM kernel driver to help with power and performance...
Linux "steelseries" Driver Being Extended For The SteelSeries Arctis 9 Wireless Headset
Within the mainline Linux kernel has been the open-source SteelSeries HID driver while newly posted patches are tacking on support for the SteelSeries Arctis 9 wireless gaming headset...
Steam On Linux Ends 2024 With A Nice Boost To Its Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use At 74%
Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times...
Serpent OS To Explore Offline Rollbacks & Tools As A Service
Following the recent Serpent OS alpha builds for this original Linux distribution led by well known developer Ikey Doherty, the project has now outlined both some of their short term and longer term plans for this from-scratch Linux platform...
X.Org Server Development Hit A Decade High For The Number Of Commits In 2024
To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop...
GCC Patches Posted For Half-Century Old ALGOL 68 Programming Language
Mere hours into 2025 and some news I didn't expect to be writing about... An Oracle engineer has posted a set of patches implementing an ALGOL 68 programming language front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). These are work-in-progress patches for the half century old niche programming language...
The Most Popular Linux & Open-Source News Of 2024
During the course of 2024 there were 3,021 original news articles written on Phoronix around Linux and open-source topics... Fresh content each and every day, 99% of which was written by your's truly. It was quite an eventful year with a lot of excitement in kernel space, hardware vendors continuing to ramp up timely new hardware support, the never-ending drive for maximum performance optimizations, the continued Rust-ification of the open-source world, and much more. Here is a look back at the most popular news on Phoronix over the past year...
Linux "hid-universal-pidff" Driver Proposed For Fixing More Quirky Devices
The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...
Zlib-ng 2.2.3 Rings In The New Year With ~17.8% Faster Inflate For AVX2
Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...
RISC-V Made Nice Software Progress In 2024 While Interesting Hardware Still Rare
RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...
Arch Linux Had A Great Year With Valve's Continued Backing, EndeavourOS & CachyOS Boost
The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...
The Linux Kernel Hit A Decade Low In 2024 For The Number Of New Commits Per Year
With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...
Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 Brings RISC-V & Drops i386 Installer
In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...
ZLUDA v4 Released For Initial CUDA Support On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...
Samsung Galaxy S20 & S9 With Exynos 9810 Support Coming To Linux 6.14
The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January...
Microsoft Continued With Many Linux & Open-Source Announcements In 2024
This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises...
Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops
It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...
AMD INVLPGB Linux Patches Updated For Broadcast TLB Invalidation
Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indicated nice improvement. A third iteration of those patches have already been posted as this AMD INLVPGB usage works its way to the mainline kernel...
Mesa Saw Fewer Patches This Year But Valve's Contributions Took The Top Spot
While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, including a Valve open-source graphics driver developer now taking the top spot...
Clang 20 Compiler Adds Support For Xtensa CPU Target
Back in early 2023 an Xtensa back-end was added to LLVM for the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa IP. Xtensa is used for DSPs, micro-controllers, and this 32-bit RISC architecture is also used for other hardware like data processing engines. Two years after the LLVM back-end was introduced, the Clang C/C++ compiler has added Xtensa target support...
FreeBSD Collaborating With AMD, NetBSD 10.0 Release & Other BSD Highlights Of 2024
While predominantly covering Linux-related news and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix, the BSDs hold a special spot. Here's a look back at some of the most exciting BSD milestones and FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD project news of 2024...
Xfce 4.20, COSMIC Alpha & LXQt 2 Led Alternative Open-Source Desktops In 2024
In addition to all the GNOME advancements and KDE excitement with shipping Plasma 6 this year, other alternative open-source desktop environments enjoyed much success too this year... System76's Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution reached alpha form, Xfce 4.20 released earlier this month, LXQt 2.0 and 2.1 debuted, and other improvements too...
Deadline Scheduling Policy Being Experimented With For Linux Graphics Drivers
Tvrtko Ursulin with Igalia sent out a "request for comments" patch series today working on a deadline scheduling policy for the DRM scheduler that is used across different Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics drivers...
Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC
As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.
Cloudflare Makes Open-Source h3i For HTTP/3 Testing & Debugging
Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...
Mesa's Terrific Year With Better Vulkan Ray-Tracing, NVK Progress & Same-Day Vulkan 1.4
The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!..
RadeonSI Driver Now Uses ACO By Default For Pre-RDNA GPUs
As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
Updated Serpent OS Alpha Brings Few Fixes To This Original Linux Distribution
Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution...
AMD's GPUOpen Vulkan Memory Allocator Now Supports Vulkan 1.4
AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL...
xxHash 0.8.3 Brings Runtime Vector Extension Handling For x86/x86_64
Meta's Yann Collet of Zstd fame is rounding out 2024 by releasing xxHash 0.8.3 as the newest update to this extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm. The xxHash fast hash algorithm pushes for RAM speed limits and with the v0.8.3 update brings more enhancements...
Linux 6.13-rc5 Released To Cap Off Linus Torvalds' Birthday Week
The holiday between Christmas and New Year's is... Linus Torvalds' birthday on 28 December. Capping off the Linux creator's 55th birthday week is the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel release...
Benchmarking The AMD INVLPGB Linux Kernel Patches For Better Performance
Last weekend a Meta engineer posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. The Linux kernel can in turn invalidate TLB entries on remote CPUs without needing to send IPIs and without having to wait for remote CPUs to handle those interrupts. Synthetic benchmarks shown in that patch series were very promising and thus I carried out some benchmarking over the holidays of this AMD INVLPGB support for the Linux kernel.
KDE Amarok 3.2 Music Player Released With Initial Qt6/KF6 Support
Back in April was the release of the Amarok 3.0 music player for KDE after a six year hiatus and their first version ported to using the Qt5 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 5. Now in ending out 2024, the Amarok team has released an updated version of this open-source music player that provides initial support for the Qt6 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 6...
Kdenlive Preparing For An Exciting 2025 With Background Removal Tool & More
The KDE app Kdenlive that is a very popular and featureful open-source video editor is preparing for an exciting 2025...
Faster USB Performance For xHCI DbC Coming With Linux 6.14 Plus A 10 Year Old Bug Fixed
Thanks to work from Intel engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle will feature faster USB xHCI DbC performance for debug performance and a few other missing xHCI bits being addressed. Plus there is a fix for a rare 10 year old USB bug report...
Ubuntu's Great Year From 24.04 LTS To Focusing More On Performance Optimizations
From my independent monitoring, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty great year. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipped and has been well received across enterprises, Canonical engineers have been focusing more on performance optimizations for Ubuntu, and there has been other interesting changes like their new commitment to always ship the latest upstream Linux kernel version as of Ubuntu release time. Plus they have continued with various GNOME desktop improvements, Ubuntu on servers continues with steady traction, and all-around was a pretty exciting year for the Ubuntu camp...
Fish Shell Outlines Their Successes & Challenges Going From C++ To Rust
Earlier this month the Fish Shell 4.0 went into beta with the C++ code ported to Rust. Now with most of the Fish Shell code transitioned to Rust, the project put out a blog post this weekend outlining the successes and challenges they have encountered in porting their large C++ codebase to Rust...
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