Phoronix

It's "Patch Tuesday" and Intel is out with new CPU microcode for Linux users in addition to making public 30 new security advisories that affect a range of Intel products...

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation...

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.

While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...

Intel on Monday released version 0.1 of their Low Power Mode Daemon, the open-source daemon in development for several years now for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core (Ultra) CPUs under Linux...

System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop...

New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU...

The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers' Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver...

The SDL3 library that is popular with cross-platform games for abstracting various software/hardware features has implemented render batching for its built-in rendering API. This render batching is successfully wired up now for Direct3D 11/12, Apple Metal, and Vulkan APIs for more efficient graphics rendering...

While there is already AMDXDNA as one of the few currently mainline drivers in the accelerator "accel" subsystem for supporting AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, another AMD accel driver is on the way: amd_vpci. The new amd_vpci driver patches were posted today for review as AMD continues to further expand their diverse offerings in the ecosystem...

EasyEffects is the open-source application formerly known as PulseEffects that transitioned to using native PipeWire filters for providing simple audio effects on the Linux desktop. EasyEffects makes it easy to apply different audio effects like bass enhancer, compressor, pitch shift, reverberation, and many more. With this week's release of EasyEffects 8.0, the user interface has been rewritten in Qt / QML / Kirigami rather than GTK4...

Following yesterday's release of Rust Coreutils 0.4, GNU Coreutils 9.9 is now available as the latest update to this set of core utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms...

Google Cloud today is rolling out their N4D compute instances that are optimized for cost/price-performance and geared for general purpose workloads. The N4D instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors and offer very nice performance and value over their prior-generation general purpose VMs.

Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution's select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it's been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.

Firefox 145 release binaries are now available. Most notable with this release is what's not there: the 32-bit Linux builds are no more...

Whenever seeing Linux kernel mailing list patches from Google engineer Eric Biggers it tends to be about performance optimizations to the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem. That was once again the case on Sunday with the newest patch series providing some nice gains...

Tecent engineers have been working on addressing long-standing inefficiencies within the Linux kernel scheduler code around over-subscribed virtualized environments...

Fish 4.2 is now available as the latest version of this popular shell on Linux, macOS, and other systems...

While LoongArch 64-bit is already part of the GCC compiler for the past several years, LoongArch 32-bit is now being proposed for the GNU Compiler Collection...

For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristof of Valve's Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing "Radeon" driver. This can mean better performance, Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using that older Radeon driver...

Rust Coreutils continues moving fast on their goal "toward full GNU compatibility" with the GNU Coreutils. The uutils project announced Rust Coreutils 0.4 this evening with better compatibility, performance optimizations, and other improvements...

As we work toward the stable Linux 6.18 kernel release expected around the end of December, out today is the Linux 6.18-rc5 test kernel...

Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change...

Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the "Rapid Charge" USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver...

For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images...

AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window...

For what began as an Intel open-source project focused on delivering a modern VMM for cloud workloads and written in Rust is seeing increasingly more exposure on AArch64 and Microsoft Windows platforms. In fact, Intel remains largely inactive now with Cloud Hypervisor after their lead maintainer left the company last year and has now been one year since seeing any significant contributions from Intel to this open-source project...

For those dealing with SquashFS compressed, read-only file-systems, a new version of the user-space tools were released this week...

Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc5 kernel due out on Sunday is a partial fix for a performance regression observed on IBM POWER hardware...

Ryzen AI Software as AMD's collection of tools and libraries for AI inferencing on AMD Ryzen AI class PCs has Linux support with its newest point release. Though this "early access" Linux support is restricted to registered AMD customers...

AMD has begun their open-source compiler enablement upstreaming effort for Zen 6 processors! The first "Znver6" patch was sent out on Friday in preparing for new instructions to be found with these next-generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors...

Released one Friday was the newest version of oneDNN as this library started off by Intel and now officially under the UXL Foundation umbrella for serving as building blocks for deep learning software...

The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland's color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series...

On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that "just work" without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files...

KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components...

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted...

In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a "reduced motion" accessibility option...

It's been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days...

Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month...

Hyprland 0.52 is available today as the latest feature update for this alternative Wayland compositor...

It has been two years already since the Linux Containers project forked Canonical's LXD project as Incus. Now joining the Incus family is IncusOS as an immutable Linux OS built atop a Debian base with OpenZFS file-system support and designed around running containers with Incus...

Posted last month were new Linux kernel scheduler-related patches rewriting the MM CID management code. The main takeaway for end-users from this set of 19 Linux kernel patches from an Intel engineer was seeing 14~18% improvement in a PostgreSQL database benchmark but that more benchmarks were needed. Curiosity got the best of me and I recently tested these patches on an AMD EPYC server to seeing some very enticing results for this in-development code.

DXVK is an important piece of Steam Play (Proton) that over time expanded to supporting Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 and even D3D8 too. Meanwhile VKD3D-Proton delivers Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. Now there is a fork of the DXVK project working to bring Direct3D 7 support atop Vulkan...

New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing...

A new driver planned to be sent to the mainline Linux kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window is yet another new contribution from Microsoft...

Vulkan 1.4.332 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API specification. Besides a number of documentation clarifications/corrections, there is one new extension this week in the name of AI / machine learning...

Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code...

Last week Canonical announced Ubuntu "architecture variants" with initially supporting "amd64v3" optimized packages built using the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. For this initial debut in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive an initial subset of packages are built using that higher feature level that can assume AVX/AVX2 and other more recent CPU ISA additions. More details on that and some initial desktop benchmarks can be found within the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 Benchmarks article. Complementing that are some Ubuntu Server 25.10 benchmarks carried out on an AMD EPYC "Turin" server of the base amd64 packages versus amd64v3...

Just days after the Archinstall 3.0.12 release for this text-based Arch Linux installer, Archinstall 3.0.13 is now available to deliver a new feature. That new feature is a text-based interface for being able to connect to a WiFi network within Archinstall...

With Intel having sunset Clear Linux, when it comes to aggressive out-of-the-box Linux performance there is the Arch Linux based CachyOS as the leading contender. Given the recent releases of Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora Workstation 43, if you are curious about the out-of-the-box performance here are some fresh benchmarks of all three using the Framework Desktop.