Phoronix

While down to AMD Austin yesterday for the Instinct MI355X and ROCm 7.0 launch, I had the chance to chat again with Anush Elangovan. As the VP of AI Software at AMD, talking with Anush is always insightful and technical in nature. One of the questions I posed him was around the length of hardware support with ROCm...

GNOME 49.0 is out today as the latest half-year feature release to the GNOME desktop that will go on to power the likes of Fedora Workstation 43 and Ubuntu 25.10...

When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks I also ended up carrying out some Llama.cpp AI benchmarks as the first time exploring the AI inferencing performance between Windows and Linux for both CPU and GPU-accelerated deployments. Here are those results for exploring the Llama.cpp performance between Windows and Linux with different large language models.

Yesterday I was invited along with a small group of others to try out the AMD Instinct MI355X accelerator down in Austin, Texas. The AMD Instinct MI355X is fully supported with the newly-released AMD ROCm 7.0...

Systemd 258 is out today as stable as the latest major feature release to this Linux init system and service manager...

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250910 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used by Azure and other services. Azure Linux 3.0 has long been using the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel while now Linux 6.12 LTS is a new option focused on providing better hardware enablement support...

A patch making it to a TIP Git branch this week adds Linux kernel support for detecting the FreeBSD Bhyve hypervisor, which will become important with today's growing server CPU counts...

Intel shipped the Compute Runtime 25.35.35096.9 as their newest monthly feature update to this open-source GPU compute stack for their integrated and discrete graphics wares for providing OpenCL and Level Zero support...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team is the one who has been driving the development forward on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver. While traditionally focused on getting OpenGL games running over Zink, recently he has taken to optimizing Zink for workstation graphics...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project published a new blog post to outline some of their latest development activity. One of the areas they have been focusing on in the performance department has been for addressing much slower git status performance compared to Linux...

The big set of Rust DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent out to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel. Most notable with this pull request is merging the Tyr driver, the new open-source and Rust-based DRM driver for Arm Mali GPUs...

AMD engineers have begun ironing out ACPI C4 support for the Linux kernel in order to provide greater power savings on newer AMD Ryzen platforms that have begun to support this deeper sleep state...

Next week marks one year since the launch of the Xeon 6900P series Granite Rapids server processors. Given the occasion and a new server in the lab, here is a look at how Intel's Granite Rapids top-end Xeon 6980P server processors are performing one year after the original introduction with a production-grade server platform as well as incorporating all of the Linux software improvements over the past year.

Overnight the AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags began appearing within the public Git repositories. Now AMD ROCm 7.0 is officially released as a very significant step forward for AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for better competing against NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem...

It's beta day for Fedora 43 and the release media is ready for testing!..

As a pleasant surprise waking up this morning is AMD ROCm 7.0 release tags beginning to appear on GitHub, indicating the likely imminent official release of the ROCm 7.0 compute stack as the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct software stack aimed to be the open alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem...

Fedora 43 Beta is releasing today as we work toward the official release in either late October or early November. I have been testing out the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta candidate to great success on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" powered Framework Desktop. Here are some benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 42 compared to the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta.

Queued up in the past few days to the USB subsystem's "usb-next" Git branch are the Intel USBIO drivers for Linux 6.18. These drivers are needed to support the web cameras on various newer Intel laptop models...

Patches were posted this past weekend for enabling the mainline Linux kernel to run on the Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC of A0 silicon on the Blackhole P100 and P150 PCIe accelerator cards...

Godot 4.5 is out today as the latest update to this leading open-source and cross platform game engine...

After being in the works for the past two years and going through 18+ rounds of code review, AMD ABMC looks poised to be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel...

The Alliance for Open Media announced today that they will be launching the next-generation AV2 video codec at the end of 2025...

To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux...

The maintainer of the libxml2 project announced he is stepping down from this widely-used open-source library without any replacement maintainer yet determined...

It's been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.

Canonical announced today that they will formally support the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and also make it available via the Ubuntu repositories...

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit...

Prominent KDE developer Jonathan Riddell who was formerly involved with Kubuntu and then KDE Neon, served for a while on KDE Plasma release management, and other significant contributions over the years announced he's stepping away from the KDE world...

Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps...

Back in late 2023 ASRock announced AI QuickSet to make it easier to get up and running with AI workloads on their hardware under Windows or Linux. Today they announced their second incarnation of that as "AI QuickSet WSL" as making it quicker and easier to setup AMD ROCm under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and streamlining the deployment of various AI Linux software packages under WSL...

CRIU is for Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace to be able to freeze a running container or app, preserve its state to disk, and later restore said running workload. A few years ago we saw AMD working on being able to checkpoint/restore running ROCm workloads. As seemingly the first work in a while on the matter by the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers, there are some new CRIU elements coming for Linux 6.18...

The latest tranche of Rust code ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is now ready to go and has been queued into a TIP branch ahead of the merge window...

For fans of open-source projects embracing the Rust programming language, merged for the LibreOffice 26.2 development code for this open-source office suite is "Rustmaker" as a Rust code maker for UNO integration with this open-source office suite...

The second alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 is now available for testing ahead of its planned official release in December...

The newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 is now available as we work toward the stable kernel release around the end of September...

It's unfortunate the number of significant Linux engineering losses at Intel this year. Beyond the staffing reductions throughout the company, seeing the loss of Linux engineering talent and many of their open-source contributors outside of kernel space too has been especially hard hitting to see. Intel for years has been very well regarded for their prolific open-source contributions and typically leading early hardware enablement within the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, and related components. There's another hit to the Intel Linux team with one of their USB4/Thunderbolt maintainers departing the company...

The input subsystem fixes for the week were sent out on Saturday ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc6 kernel due out later today. Notable with this batch of "fixes" is enabling support for the high-end FLYDIGI APEX 5 gaming controller...

Adding to the list of feature caveats around the different Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops and the varying Linux state is video acceleration support. But patches were posted this week by a Linaro engineer enabling hardware accelerated video playback for two X Elite laptop models...

The Samsung Exynos 7870 Octa SoC released back in 2016 on a 14nm process and powered by eight Arm Cortex-53 cores and a Mali T830 GPU. Finally now for late 2025 there is open-source display driver happenings going mainline for this aging SoC...

The Rust-based open-source operating system project Redox OS published a blog post today outlining their development priorities for the remainder of 2025 and then onward to 2026...

Earlier this week I wrote about Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer likely coming for Linux 6.18. The sheaves patches have been queued into the "slab/for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window. Patches posted now by Google are showing the Linux Sheaves code having a massive beneficial impact for large AMD systems...

Cloud Hypervisor 48.0 is now available for this Intel-started, open-source and Rust-based VMM focused on modern cloud workloads. Cloud Hypervisor continues to tailor to Windows and Linux guests while emphasizing security and cloud-native workloads...

Last month I wrote about initrd support potentially being on its way out of the Linux kernel. For years Linux developers have wanted to phase out the classic initial RAM disk support from the Linux kernel and it looks like that day may finally be near with patches having been posted for removing the support...

Ahead of the GNOME 49 stable release expected on Wednesday, libadwaita 1.8 released this week to incorporate all the enhancements made over the past six months to this GTK4 library that provides GNOME-specific widgets and features...

Following yesterday's release of the bi-weekly Wine 10.15 development release, Wine-Staging 10.15 is out with 300 patches atop the upstream Wine codebase...

In the past few months at Intel between layoffs / corporate reorganizations and some deciding to pursue job opportunities elsewhere, there have been unfortunate impacts to their Linux engineering resources. Intel over the summer lost some prominent Linux engineering talent and in turn has even led to upstream Linux drivers being orphaned along with other driver maintainers departing and various other staffing changes. Unfortunate for Intel, another notable Linux name has left the company...

Wine 10.15 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux as well as powering Valve's Proton for Steam Play...

Last month I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc A-Series graphics between the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers for Linux systems. The aging i915 driver is the default for the Alchemist GPUs but there is "experimental" support with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver. There were some performance advantages for the Arc A-Series if switching over to that newer driver option. Similarly, there are advantages with Meteor Lake too when moving from the i915 to Xe Linux drivers. Here are benchmarks to quantify that advantage.

A few days ago I wrote about Intel fixing some Panther Lake Xe3 graphics performance issues ahead of launch. The downside of those performance optimizations for Panther Lake was that they led to longer shader compilation times. The good news though is that some separate improvements were merged now for Mesa 25.3 to help enhance the Intel graphics shader compilation performance...

While Linux Mint 22.2 was just released one week ago, Linux Mint developers are planning for a Linux Mint 22.3 update before year's end...