Phoronix

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_read_xattr() kernel function...

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system...

Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as an upgrade-friendly and Linux-compatible 2-in-1 laptop. The Framework Laptop 12 was originally powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" low-end processor while now Framework is adding Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" as an upgrade or for new Laptop 12 orders...

Recently I looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 on the Intel Xeon 678X running within the HP Z4 G6i workstation. Linux performed admirably as one would expect. With this Intel Xeon Granite Rapids WS workstation from HP though commanding a retail price more than $46,000 USD, you likely want nothing but the utmost performance out of it. So for those looking to maximize the OS performance, here are some numbers from the HP Z4 G6i workstation when running not only Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but also Fedora Workstation 44, AlmaLinux, and the performance-optimized CachyOS.

In addition to the POWER/PowerPC code adding Rust kernel support, the main set of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have now been submitted. Most notable are early fixes toward eventually allowing the experimental Rust GCC back-end to be used as an alternative to the official rustc compiler with LLVM code generation...

It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames...

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 46...

When it comes to the watchdog driver changes for Linux 7.3, standing out is the new Lenovo driver for their upcoming ThinkEdge AI edge computing systems...

Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES...

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...

Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory management behavior...

The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed...

A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP...

Back in March were patches posted by ARCTIC Cooling for an ARCTIC fan controller driver for Linux. Typically we aren't used to seeing desktop/enthusiast focused vendors providing such Linux drivers for peripherals directly but the sad fact is most often it's left up to the open-source community to reverse engineer and create such drivers for Linux. Making it all the more surprising besides it coming from ARCTIC Cooling directly was that at the time they didn't even have a fan controller product with USB interface. Well, now it's launched and in turn is a great USB fan controller for Linux systems and retails for just $9 USD.

AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU...

Among the pull requests sent out today now that the Linux 7.3 merge window is open are the SMP improvements for this next kernel version. Standing out among the SMP code are some enhancements for helping reduce latency and ultimately enhancing real-time Linux performance...

Firefox 154 is now available as the newest monthly update bringing a few new features, enhancements, and other alterations to this open-source web browser...

In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3...

KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release...

Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work, out of the blue he announced a new -ck patch series today with updated MuQSS code...

The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures...

AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features...

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases...

The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases...

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel stable release expected to occur in the coming hours, a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request was submitted with one patch for adding the new tlbi= boot option...

Today marks thirty three years since the Debian Linux distribution was started by the late Ian Murdock...

Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available...

The Linux kernel's binfmt_misc functionality allows non-native/custom files to be run directly such as for Windows EXE files to be handled by Wine or JAR files to be handled by the Java runtime. For the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window, the miscellaneous binary formats support is being extended so a binary type can be matched programmatically and the interpreter determined on a per-exec basis. BPF programs can also then be attached to dynamically choosing an execution environment on a per-binary basis...

For those concerned about current imbalance or voltage changes with the 12VHPWR power connectors and having an ASUS ROG Astral graphics card, there is now an open-source driver for Linux available that integrates with the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem for 12VHPWR reporting on these ASUS graphics cards...

Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olak who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler...

The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set...

Last year Alyssa Rosenzweig joined Intel to work on their Linux graphics drivers after previously serving as a contractor for Valve on their graphics stack and also previously leading the Mesa driver work for the Asahi Linux Apple Silicon graphics support. Since joining Intel, she has been leading the development of Jay as a new SSA-based shader compiler for Intel graphics hardware to be used by the Mesa Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers...

RustConn has been in development for a while now as a modern GTK4 connection manager supporting a variety of protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, and more. RustConn 0.20 was released this week as the latest major step forward to this Rust-based connection manager leveraging the GTK4 toolkit and libadwaita...

Ahead of the presumed Linux 7.2 stable kernel release tomorrow, some last minute sound fixes/quirks have been merged for this next kernel version...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy this summer baking improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop release. This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue to outline all of these interesting enhancements...

Debian developers have been considering a general resolution over LLM usage within the project. After collecting a variety of proposals, voting has now commenced for Debian developers to decide how comfortable they are with AI / Large Language Model contributions in the project or not...

AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target...

D7VK as the open-source implementation of the Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5/ 3 APIs atop the Vulkan API for Linux/Wine usage is out with another feature update. D7VK continues to mature quite well for further enhancing these older Direct3D API versions that cover the span prior to DXVK's focus of Direct3D 8 to Direct3D 11 or VKD3D-Proton's Direct3D 12...

For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs...

Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro's biggest release to date...

With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains on AMD EPYC Turin. Today's kernel benchmarks are with the Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS currently in the lab as part of the HP Z4 G6i workstation testing.

With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday...

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there will be the fair scheduler becoming the default...

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight...

It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler...

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements...

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software...