Phoronix

Last month Intel's open-source Linux software engineers began sending out Xe3P_LPD display support in preparation for display capabilities with Nova Lake. Now being built out atop that is further functionality with the most recent talking point being DisplayPort 2.1 Advanced Link Power Management (ALPM)...

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source operating system project is out with its October 2025 status report. Most notable is this Rust-based OS now having the Rust-based Servo web engine running... Albeit in extremely crude form at the moment...

Queued up in a TIP branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window opening in about one month's time is optimizing the Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" code for its exit to user-space code path...

The first test release of the Git 2.52 distributed revision control system is now available. As has been a common trend, Git 2.52 is making further preparations in anticipation of the big Git 3.0 milestone...

Flatpak 1.17 is out today as the newest feature release for this Linux app sandboxing/distribution tech. Flatpak 1.17 brings a number of exciting new features...

Last week the AMD Radeon PRO R9700 officially began shipping for that new AI-minded workstation/professional graphics card built on RDNA4 and packing 32GB of RAM to accommodate large language models (LLMs) especially with multi-GPU configurations. While the focus of the product has been all about AI workloads, you may be wondering about the graphics capabilities of the Radeon AI PRO R9700 given the lack of any other "Radeon PRO 9000" series product at this point. In today's testing is a look at the workstation graphics capabilities for the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700.

With the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end for all Radeon GPUs rather than the conventional AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with Radeon 8060S Graphics for comparison...

A few weeks back I reported on Linux kernel patches surfacing for implementing Microsoft's ACPI Fan Extensions. This should help some HP devices and hardware from other OEMs for obtaining fan information reporting under Linux. The good news now is that the patches should be part of the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

H.J. Lu, a long-time compiler expert at Intel, merged today improved memmove() behavior for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of the upcoming GCC 16 release...

Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur" is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for "init freedom" lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system...

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel will add support for the Line 6 POD HD Pro X audio effects processor that has been in the market for several years now -- the past decade! -- but only now seeing the necessary additions for Linux support...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.18-rc4 as the latest weekly test release. Linux 6.18 is looking to be in good shape for potentially releasing on-time at the end of November otherwise the first week of December...

Slipping under my radar in October was the release of NASM 3.00 and the follow-up NASM 3.01 release shortly there after. This widely-used open-source assembler is now ready with support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10...

Merged this weekend ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc4 test kernel release due out later today is the "x86/fixes" for the week. There are a few notable changes on the x86 (x86_64) side of the kernel this week for Linux 6.18...

Open-sourced at the start of the calendar year was Perforator as a continuous profiling tool to find code inefficiencies. Yandex who open-sourced it claimed that it could lead businesses to saving "billions of dollars a year on server infrastructure." It's been a few months since the last feature release but out this weekend is Perforator 0.0.7...

Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it's above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet...

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut...

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset...

Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers...

Kicking off November for Arch Linux users happen to be the releases of Pacman 7.1 as well as Archinstall 3.0.12...

Restructuring to the Linux kernel's PCI Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support is set to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most...

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming...

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6...

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December...

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option...

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation...

Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers...

Last week there was a fix for a "serious performance regression" in the Linux kernel's power management code that affected some Intel-powered Chromebooks. This week the power management fixes ahead of Linux 6.18-rc4 is addressing another performance regression...

AerynOS 2025.10 ISOs were released today for closing out the month of October. AerynOS as a reminder is the Linux distribution that was started by Ikey Doherty and originally known as Serpent OS that has since evolved into an open-source team effort...

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting application is the latest creative app now supporting high dynamic range (HDR) on Linux when using Wayland...

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.330 brought five new extensions, Vulkan 1.4.331 is now available with another two new extensions for this high performance graphics and compute API...

The Genode operating system framework continues innovating over a decade and a half later on this original open-source OS creation and with that Sculpt OS as its general purpose OS. Out today is Sculpt OS 25.10 to incorporate the latest enhancements to the platform...

The Rust project announced today the release of Rust 1.91 as the latest update to this popular programming language priding itself on memory safety capabilities...

As expected after noting this morning that ROCm 7.1 release preparations were underway, ROCm 7.1 is now officially released as the newest step-forward for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware...

This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that goes hand-in-hand with the Fwupd open-source firmware updating utility celebrated the milestone on Wednesday of crossing 135 million firmware updates...

AMD Linux engineers continue to be quite busy working on enabling next-generation Zen 6 processors that will begin shipping next year. The newest patch working its way to the Linux kernel is expanding the range of Zen 6 CPU models detected by the kernel...

Qt Creator 18 is now available as the latest version of this Qt/C++-focused integrated development environment...

Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware...

AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1...

Following last week's initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.19, another round of new AMDGPU / Radeon / AMDKFD material was sent out today to DRM-Next. Notable with this pull is the Display Core "DC" work for analog video connectors as the initiative from one of Valve's contractors for improving the Radeon GCN 1.0 era GPU support with the AMDGPU driver...

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used on Linux systems for 3D support...

Following last month's Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS beta and COSMIC desktop beta, System76 has now shared their stable release plans for this long-awaited LInux distribution release with their Rust-written custom desktop...

Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olak just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads...

On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have since sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

In addition to talking up the openSFI firmware collaboration between AMD and Intel at the OCP Global Summit 2025, AMD engineer Raj Kapoor provided a status update on the company's much anticipated openSIL effort for working to ultimately replace AGESA with a new open-source CPU silicon initialization codebase...

Intel Compute Runtime 25.40.35563.4 is out today as the newest update to their open-source GPU compute stack for Level Zero and OpenCL on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware...

Yesterday the GitHub-hosted AMD XDNA driver code saw a new tagged release as version 202610.2.21.17. That itself wasn't too interesting but while diving into there is new yet-to-be-merged code for a new "NPU3A" revision to their NPU3 IP in Ryzen AI...