Phoronix

Along with getting the NVIDIA GSP fully booted and initialized for Ampere GPUs with the Nova driver code coming to Linux 6.19, this next kernel version is also beginning to make preparations for eyeing next-generation NVIDIA GPU support on this open-source driver...

Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025...

The latest feature enablement work happening by Intel for the Linux kernel with next-generation Diamond Rapids server processors are the adjustments to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for readying the new CPU ISA capabilities for a virtualized world...

A patch series sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list proposes "MEMINSPECT" as a new mechanism for helping with memory analysis...

Initially upstreamed into the Linux 6.18 kernel is Tyr as a Rust-based GPU kernel driver for Arm Mali hardware. This is in effect a Rust alternative to the Panthor DRM kernel driver for newer Arm Mali GPUs with the Command Stream Firmware (CSF). With the latest development code for Tyr, it's moved onto running the GNOME desktop and basic games like SuperTuxKart...

Xen 4.21 is out today as the newest feature release for this open-source hypervisor backed by AMD, Arm, AWS, and other organizations. Plus with Xen's use within automotive environments, Ford and Honda too...

This week marks two years since the debut of the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors. Given the occasion, I decided to revisit the Linux performance of the Threadripper 7980X compared to original benchmarks from November 2023 to see how the latest Linux software stack performs for these Zen 4 HEDT processors.

Beginning yesterday and continuing today are several patch series beginning to lay the foundation in the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver for enabling some next-generation graphics IP. Due to the AMD graphics driver block by block enablement strategy and IP-based discovery adopted by their driver over the past few years, it's not clear what this new hardware enablement is for whether it's RDNA5 / UDNA or some RDNA4 refresh. In any event, the Linux driver enablement has begun...

Intel engineers today posted Linux kernel patches for plumbing a brand new Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver for the next-generation memory controller design debuting with Xeon Diamond Rapids...

Back in September the Qualcomm X2 Elite SoCs were announced for next-gen Windows 11 on Arm laptops. Since then some initial X2 Elite enablement patches for the Linux kernel have arrived and for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel more of that work will reach mainline. Excitingly, Linux 6.19 is now bringing GPU and display support for the Adreno X2-85 found within the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC...

Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores...

When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn't seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say "the best is yet to come" in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts...

Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver continues taking shape albeit isn't yet ready for end-user usage...

Intel's ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilities and now the GCC compiler has received similar treatment...

Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard...

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance...

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer...

Intel's LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds...

It's the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package...

In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD's ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used.

In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future...

Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 "AIC100" firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators...

A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase...

SUSE developers working on their modern Agama operating system installer used by SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and openSUSE is out with a new release. With Agama 18 they have officially dropped support for 32-bit / i586 processors...

In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristof also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schurmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compiler back-end has turned out very well, and RADV is all-around a great example of an open-source Vulkan API driver...

MLPerf Client as MLCommons' machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS...

Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone...

Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today...

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December...

At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support...

Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager...

Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026...

SUSE engineer Lucas Mulling is leading an effort to work on implementing SSH within the Zig programming language, a popular language for robust, optimal, and reusable software...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve just announced VKD3D-Proton 3.0 as a major update to this Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...

Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the "-march=novalake" target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it's official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA additions...

The AMD ROCm blog just announced a new open-source AMD AI software project: the AMD Enterprise AI Suite as well as AMD Inference Microservices (AIMs)...

Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option...

Intel engineers continue working on the Nova Lake next-gen processor enablement for the Linux kernel. In addition to the Intel Xe3P graphics and other early Nova Lake enablement work already queued in "-next" Git branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window, the initial power management code is also ready for this next kernel cycle...

The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat...

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver's cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA's official driver stack...

Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month...

In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland...

The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU's RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy...

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware...

One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that's happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets...

Following the recent idea floated to consider C++20 as the default C++ language dialect by the GCC compiler rather than C++17, it was discovered that the GNU Compiler Collection itself has problems building in C++20 model...

As part of this week's sound subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware...

Released minutes ago was the Servo 0.0.2 web browser engine update. Along with this new Rust-based web engine release is also the "servoshell" in tow for the example implementation built around this open-source codebase...

GNOME's Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE's Dolphin and Xfce's Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files...