Phoronix

The IO_uring and block subsystem changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window with a few improvements worth highlighting this cycle...

Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices. But now it seems they are trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone...

Nearly four years have passed since AMD launched their EPYC Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache. When recently rearranging some servers in the lab and realizing the four year anniversary was coming up in March, curiosity got the best of me in wondering where the Linux performance and energy efficiency on Milan-X is now with the latest Linux software stack compared to the numbers when Milan-X launched back in March 2022.

Intel engineer Tim Chen has sent out a second version of the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling patches for the Linux kernel to enhance the CPU performance of modern processors sporting multiple cache domains...

Venus is the VirtIO-GPU driver that allows for Vulkan support within guest virtual machines permitting sufficient host driver support and other requirements in place with hypervisors like CrosVM and QEMU. The Venus driver now supports Vulkan's mesh shader capabilities and in turn advances the DXVK-Proton support for Linux gaming within VMs...

On top of enabling Xe3P graphics for Nova Lake and Crescent Island plus other changes like CASF adaptive sharpening for Lunar Lake and newer, another set of Intel kernel graphics driver updates were merged overnight as a big win for the open-source Intel graphics stack on Linux...

While NTFSPLUS continues to be developed as a new and modern NTFS open-source driver for Linux systems, at the moment NTFS3 from Paragon Software remains the most capable NTFS file-system driver within the mainline kernel. For the Linux 6.19 merge window a variety of fixes have landed for this driver...

The sound subsystem updates were merged on Thursday for enabling a variety of new audio hardware with the Linux 6.19. Among the hardware standing out is getting Intel Nova Lake audio support in order...

The big set of kernel graphics driver features were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel. As usual there is a lot of new feature work on the AMD Radeon, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics drivers plus the smaller Arm/embedded graphics like now having initial Qualcomm Gen8 GPU support. Plus the growing number of accelerator "accel" drivers for NPUs / AI accelerators...

Amazon AWS today announced Graviton5 as their newest-generation ARM64 server processor for their EC2 cloud. Graviton5 is being promoted as offering 25% higher performance over existing Graviton4 processors...

NVIDIA just released CUDA 13.1 for what they claim is "the largest and most comprehensive update to the CUDA platform since it was invented two decades ago." The most notable addition with the CUDA 13.1 release is CUDA Tile as a new tile-based programming model...

The many hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were merged today for Linux 6.19 that is predominantly around delivering new hardware support...

The out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system is ready with its reconcile feature, which previously was known as "rebalance_v2", and what lead developer Kent Overstreet calls the biggest feature to this copy-on-write file-system in the last two years...

This week brought the official release of FreeBSD 15.0 as the latest major update to this BSD operating system. In being eager to test out this new FreeBSD release, for this first round of FreeBSD 15.0 benchmarking is seeing how it compares to the former FreeBSD 14.3 release on a Supermicro + AMD EPYC Turin server.

Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit...

The open-source SVT-VP9 project started by Intel as a high performance VP9 video encoder has seen its first new release in five years...

The Linux kernel's printk code for logging kernel messages has some useful improvements with the Linux 6.19 kernel...

The "timers/core" pull requests for updating Linux kernel timer-related code doesn't tend to be too interesting each kernel cycle, but this time around for Linux 6.19 it is for addressing a problem HPE discovered on big NUMA servers...

The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as "a safer Zlib" for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng...

Linux's Integrity Policy Enforcement "IPE" module is gaining a useful addition with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel...

Mesa 25.3.1 was released overnight as the first point release of the Mesa 25.3 series. The Mesa point releases are typically bi-weekly but this one dragged out to nearly three weeks. In turn this also marks an end to the Mesa 25.2 series...

The merged EXT4 changes for Linux 6.19 bring some of the most prominent feature changes in recent times for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system...

ReactOS as the open-source operating system aiming to be an "open-source Windows" by striving for binary compatibility with Windows programs and device drivers is now slightly better with its USB support...

Last month I reported on Linux 6.19 looking to enable Microsoft C Extensions support throughout the Linux kernel with setting the -fms-extensions compiler option to allow Microsoft C Extensions when building the kernel. Linus Torvalds today merged that support without objections...

The Linux kernel's innovative sched_ext code for being able to easily write extensible task schedulers using eBPF programs has some nice enhancements merged for Linux 6.19...

Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses...

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...