Phoronix

Released last week was the Vulkan 1.4.315 spec update and with it comes the new VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory extension for allowing device memory allocations to be zero-initialized...

For those interested in making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding with Intel graphics hardware using the Vulkan Video API, some important fixes were merged to Mesa 25.2-devel and will presumably be backported soon to existing Mesa releases...

Llamafile continues pushing forward as the interesting Mozilla project to allow easily distributing and running AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file and in a cross-platform and cross-vendor hardware manner. Llamafile 0.9.3 is out today with more enhancements to this Mozilla Ocho project...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted for the Mediatek driver in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...

After recently looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Linux performance has evolved since launch, many Phoronix readers were curious how a similar launch-day vs. now comparison would look on the AMD Zen 5 side. The article today is looking at how the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux performance has evolved since their launch last year. These numbers are put alongside the prior Intel Arrow Lake results for additional context.

Adaptived is a cause-and-effect daemon developed by Oracle that ties into their work on adaptive memory management (adaptivemm) for proactive memory handling and the OOMD out-of-memory daemon...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (formerly Sovereign Tech Fund) announced they have begun investing in GFortran for advancing this leading open-source Fortran code compiler...

With Fedora 42 having released last month, feature work on Fedora 43 continues heating up in working toward this next major Fedora Linux release due out around October...

Rustls as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language has long been showing promising performance and competitive to OpenSSL and other alternatives. In a fresh exploration of Rustls server-side performance, it's easily beating OpenSSL...

The first AMD Zen 6 patch for the Linux kernel has been queued up for submission soon to the mainline kernel...

Oracle Solaris 11.4.81 CBE is now available as the newest release of this Oracle Solaris "Common Build Environment" version that is essentially a community-supported. non-production version of Solaris intended for free / open-source software developers. Oracle Solaris 11.4.81 CBE comes after not seeing any CBE updates the past three years and now rather unexpectedly seeing this new version drop even with Solaris very rarely making any news these days...

Various Red Hat documentation pages began seeing updates yesterday along with RHEL 10.0 ISOs appearing in the customer download portal to reflect RHEL10 reaching general availability (GA) status...

It was just yesterday that Training Solo was made public as a new speculative execution CPU vulnerability affecting some Intel and Arm CPUs... Today another one is now public for Intel processors: Branch Privilege Injection...

With today's announcement of the AMD EPYC 4005P "Grado" entry-level server processors, up for review today are the EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-end Zen 5 processors for budget server builds and basic bare metal server hosting. With the prior-generation EPYC 4004 series AMD was already leading over Intel's entry-level Xeon E processors that have become rather embarrassing for the company with its stagnate line-up of low-cost server processors. Now with the AMD EPYC 4005 series, AMD is in an even stronger position and providing a total knock-out to the new Xeon 6300P competition headlined by the Xeon 6369P flagship model.

Last year AMD launched the EPYC 4004 series for taking Ryzen based processor designs into the EPYC segment for entry-level servers with ECC memory support, server designs with BMCs, and various enterprise software certifications and industry qualifications. Today they are launching the EPYC 4005 series as their new Zen 5 based offerings for entry-level / budget server deployments and other instances when not needing as much compute power or connectivity and other high-end features found with the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors.

Canonical provided a status update concerning the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite powered laptops on the recently released Ubuntu 25.04...

The Mozilla Firefox source code is now officially available on GitHub as they work to transition from their hg.mozilla.org servers...

Merged for the Mesa 25.2 release next quarter are some further enhancements to the Vulkan ray-tracing support with the RADV open-source driver for AMD's new RDNA4 graphics cards...

The Rust-written NAK shader compiler used by Mesa's NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs has merged support for SM32 as the "KeplerB" / Kepler 2.0 graphics processors...

GNU Screen 5.0.1 has been released to address several security issues...

Following Monday's public disclosure of the "Training Solo" security disclosure for this set of issues affecting multiple generations of Intel processors, new Intel CPU microcode has been released for Linux users as part of the mitigation process...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their April 2025 progress report...

The VUSec security researchers are at it again... The embargo is now lifted on another set of of security vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors as well as Arm core designs. This new vulnerability is dubbed Training Solo...

We finally have AMD's Strix Halo in the lab for benchmarking! HP has kindly sent over their ZBook Ultra 14-inch G1a mobile workstation: it's a beast being powered by the top-end AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 SoC with 16 cores / 32 threads and powerful integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, 128GB of system memory, a nice 14-inch 2.8K display, and other top-end features to provide a dominating laptop powerhouse. In today's article are the very initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Strix Halo SoC under Linux with a focus on the CPU capabilities: a separate article also out today is looking at the AMD Radeon 8060S graphics on Linux.

As shown in today's article the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux performance is incredible with its 16 Zen 5 cores delivering staggering laptop / mobile workstation performance with a 55 Watt default TDP. But that's only half the magic of Strix Halo, with the other aspect being the very capable integrated RDNA 3.5 graphics with unified memory support. Given this being an equally interesting topic for Linux users considering a Strix Halo laptop or desktop, this article is centered around the integrated Radeon 8060S graphics support and performance under Linux.

At the end of April was the open-source surprise of NVIDIA posting Nouveau Linux driver patches for their Hopper and Blackwell GPUs. This comes to complement their official (open-source but out of tree) kernel driver support for these newer NVIDIA GPUs and in the absence of the modern Rust-based NOVA Linux kernel driver not being in working shape yet on the mainline kernel. An updated version of these Nouveau driver patches for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs were posted overnight...

Queued within the development tree for the RISC-V processor code for the Linux kernel is supporting several new vendor-specific ISA extensions for SiFive RISC-V CPU cores...

Shotcut 25.05 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this non-linear, open-source video editing software...

While it took two and a half years for DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 to materialize from DragonFlyBSD 6.4, only one week passed since that recent v6.4.1 release to now see v6.4.2...

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.15-rc6 today with hopes of releasing Linux 6.15 stable in two weeks...

At the end of April I reported on a significant performance regression affecting newer AMD CPUs and was bisected to a change in the AMD SRSO mitigation handling for Zen 4/5 processors with the Linux 6.15 kernel. The fix for that significant performance regression was merged today ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15-rc6 release...

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc6 release is support for several more gaming controllers...

A number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring in recent weeks around seeing updated Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards. So for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the Arc Graphics B580 and B570 graphics cards on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how the graphics performance have improved with the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack since launch.

This week Google announced all of the accepted projects for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). There are 1,272 accepted students/projects this year for student developers working on various interesting open-source efforts over the summer...

Queued up for removal in the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle is dropping "echo", a software-based echo cancellation code within the kernel intended for telecommunications use. But it's old, unmaintained, and likely not actively used...

Intel software engineers released oneDNN 3.8 to end out the week with various new performance optimizations and more...

With the copy-on-write Bcachefs file-system considering its on-disk format now "soft frozen" and nearing the point of potentially removing the "EXPERIMENTAL" flag on it, a number of Phoronix readers have been requesting some fresh benchmarks of this open-source file-system. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks of Bcachefs and other file-systems atop the Linux 6.15 kernel being released as stable later this month. On the benchmarking block today are Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS in-tree file-systems.

KDE Plasma 6.4 embarked on its soft feature freeze this week. Thus KDE Plasma developers are now predominantly working on bug fixing and UI polishing for this next open-source desktop release...

Merged yesterday to Linux 6.15 Git and marked for back-porting to stable kernel series in the coming days is an x86 memory management fix to eliminate a window whereby TLB flushes could be inadvertently skipped...

The Servo browser engine project has published a status update outlining some of the enhancements made over the past two months for this Rust-based web layout engine. This includes hitting a notable milestone that some websites like Gmail and Google Chat can now render correctly...

The second beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing as an incremental update to this BSD operating system and ahead of the feature-rich FreeBSD 15.0 due out later in 2025...

Back in January you may recall the news of GNOME's Showtime app looking to replace Totem as the default video player. That didn't happen in time for GNOME 48 back in March but this week all the formalities were met that Showtime has been cleared to replace the outdated Totem with GNOME 49...

With modern Linux distributions beginning to see good support for HDR displays, if you have been looking to upgrade to a high dynamic range OLED monitor, one of the newest options that recently launched by Samsung is the Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF. I've been testing out the Samsung G81SF the past few weeks and it's been working out well paired with the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 to deliver a beautiful desktop experience and a great experience for Linux gamers with supporting a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.

Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16...

The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD...

Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver...

Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France...

In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week...

Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan...

Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project...