Phoronix

Last week I provided a look at how Intel's GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today's article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" and B-Series "Battlemage" look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year... Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel...

Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel...

The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel...

The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February...

Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella...

Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers...

Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues...

In addition to new AMD CPU features being merged today for Linux 6.19, there are also some new Intel CPU features that hit Linux Git today that are worth highlighting...

Linus Torvalds just merged another set of pull requests to Git for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. With the latest round of merges, there are two separate AMD changes worth highlighting...

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors...

An important set of patches were just merged a few minutes ago to Linux Git for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel with some important performance implications...

Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the "klp-build" script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade...

TornadoVM 2.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that allows Java programs to run on heterogeneous hardware. TornadoVM targets continue to be OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V compatible devices for a range of accelerator support for use from conventional Java code...

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses...

NVIDIA today released the 590.44.01 Linux driver build as the first beta of their R590 series driver branch for Linux customers...

Evidently Canonical has been pretty pleased with the uptake of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) within enterprise/corporate environments as they are now offering Ubuntu Pro for WSL...

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited...

The big set of kernel scheduler changes were merged on Monday for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel...

Merged yesterday for the Linux 6.19 kernel were "substantial" improvements to the kernel's credential infrastructure to provide guard-based management that allows for kernel code simplification and avoiding manual reference counting across many subsystems...

The Steam Survey results are out for November 2025 and continue to be very positive for the growing adoption of Linux gaming thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame...

FreeBSD 15.0 is officially released as the newest major update to this leading BSD operating system...

SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted the Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.19 on Friday, ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release that took place on Sunday. This copy-on-write file-system continues seeing some enticing feature work and other improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it's likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release...

When it comes to AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compiler support much of the emphasis is on the LLVM/Clang compiler stack with their official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as well as having the AOMP downstream compiler fork and the like. But the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" does continue allow targeting AMD GPU targeting with its "AMDGCN" back-end and using the likes of the OpenMP API. It's not too often seeing new AMD GPU activity there for GCC but merged today is now support for managed memory...

While some Linux distributions have begun establishing AI policies, we haven't seen any communicated from the Ubuntu camp yet but will apparently be permitted at least for project infrastructure. AI is being used currently in an effort to help modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker...

Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the core Rust programming language infrastructure updates intended for the Linux 6.19 merge window. In the pull request he also notes that moving forward the minimum supported Rust version for compiling the Linux kernel will likely follow whatever the minimum Rust version currently in use by the latest Debian stable release...

Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected and withdrawn from being v6.19 material...

Among the big flow of pull requests today for this first day of the Linux 6.19 merge window are some core kernel bug handling improvements...

Fresh off Framework Computer becoming a new corporate sponsor of the LVFS / Fwupd, there is a new Fwpd 2.0.18 update for this solution that enables convenient and easy system and device/peripheral firmware updating under Linux...

Following yesterday's Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers...

The media subsystem updates were sent out this morning for the now-open Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some new Rockchip drivers and other media drivers that are new for Linux 6.19...

Due to the ongoing RAM shortages in the industry amid ongoing massive demand for AI servers,Raspberry Pi announced today they are having to raise prices on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers. They have also launched a 1GB Raspberry Pi 5 version too for those not needing much memory and wanting to keep pricing to a minimum...

It was just earlier this year that Linux developers considered dropping the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the mainline Linux kernel for being unmaintained. But then some new developers stepped up to maintain the drivers and there has been new HFS/HFS+ file-system patches each kernel cycle since. With the now in-development Linux 6.19 kernel there are some nice year-end clean-ups to these file-system drivers...

It was an eventful past month with Valve announcing the new Steam Machine, a lot of new Linux kernel activity, the continued increase of Rust programming language adoption by open-source projects, a lot of fun hardware benchmarks, and more. There were 283 original news articles on Phoronix the past month about Linux/open-source software and hardware plus another 18 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most popular content over the past month...

The good news is that Intel tonight posted a pull request for open-source Gaudi 3 accelerator support for the mainline Linux kernel! The bad news is that it's coming quite late in the product cycle, much later than the former excellent Habana Labs open-source track record, and their hopes of squeezing this code into the Linux 6.19 kernel may be dashed...

Linux 6.18 stable is now available! Linux 6.18 ushers in many new features and changes while also is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel version...

It's been an exciting weekend for Linux distribution released with new versions of Endeavour OS, CachyOS, Solus and now a new NixOS release...

With the Linux 6.18 kernel likely being released later today, here is a look at some of the features on the table for the next kernel cycle, Linux 6.19. The list is based on changes queued in various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window. There's always the possibility of last minute change of plans or objections raised by Linus Torvalds, but this should provide an early look at some of the features more than likely to be merged for Linux 6.19...

Ahead of the FreeBSD 15.0 stable release expected to be announced next week, the FreeBSD project today published their Q3-2025 status report to outline their various development accomplishments from July through September...

With the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle there are yet more Rust kernel bindings being introduced and other additions to make it possible to write more Linux kernel drivers within the Rust programming language. Among the new Rust additions expected for Linux 6.19 are making it possible to write Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus drivers in Rust...

Queued up via the Linux kernel's RDMA development Git tree is "BNG_RE" as the next-generation RoCE driver from Broadcom...

A new SoC vendor and in turn new SoC/platform support is set to premiere in the Linux 6.19 kernel with the initial Black Sesame Technologies C1200 support...

The Genode OS Framework 25.11 release was issued this weekend as the newest update to this original open-source operating system effort built around a micro-kernel design and various novel design approaches...

Making for an exciting holiday weekend night is the Algol 68 programming language front-end "ga68" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase. After COBOL language support landed in GCC 15 earlier this year, next year's GCC 16 release is adding support for the half-century old Algol 68 programming language...

In addition to the releases today of updated Endeavour OS and CachyOS, Solus 4.8 is out as the latest version of another desktop Linux distribution popular with enthusiasts...

In addition to the release today of a big refresh to Endeavour OS, CachyOS is out with their latest ISO refresh for this additional Arch Linux powered desktop OS. CachyOS for its November 2025 refresh brings installer improvements, now installs additional packages for media acceleration when capable Intel graphics are detected, handling for Bcachefs with its DKMS module, and other improvements...

With the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release expected to take place tomorrow on 30 November, here is a reminder about some of the new hardware support and other interesting features coming in this next stable version of the Linux kernel...

For those looking to improve their clipboard management experience on the GNOME desktop, Copyous is a new GNOME Shell extension serving as a new clipboard manager...