Phoronix

Microsoft announced today that Fedora Linux is now treated as an official distribution within their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) confines...

With the spring Linux distribution/OS updates upon us, in recent weeks I've looked at the Ubuntu 25.04 performance gains on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" and also the performance of Fedora Server 42. Following that I expanded the scope of the Linux operating systems (distributions) benchmarks on the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a look at how the performance of the new Ubuntu and Fedora Linux releases compare to AlmaLinux and Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution that tends to be at the forefront of open-source performance optimizations.

Ampere Computing last year talked up AmpereOne M for 12-channel DDR5 memory and up to 192 cores up from the 8-channel DDR5 memory found with the initial AmpereOne processors. They said at the time AmpereOne M would be shipping in Q4-2024. Now half way into 2025, it looks like they quietly announced the AmpereOne M processors...

As an alternative to the likes of the Pungi tool, Kurchu is a newer project within the CentOS/Fedora space for assembling content collections or ISO images of Linux distribution builds. Kurchu is already seeing use by the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for assembling their images while additional functionality continues to be worked on for those wanting to craft their own Fedora/CentOS install images...

With Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical is planning to make use of more Rust-written system components and so far most of that talk has been about transitioning to Rust Coreutils "uutils" in place of GNU Coreutils. It's also been firmed up today that Canonical is planning on using sudo-rs by default as a replacement to sudo...

PoCL 7.0 is on approach as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that began as a CPU-based OpenCL driver implementation but with time has added support for other back-ends from Intel Level Zero to NVIDIA PTX and AMD HSA...

The Btrfs file-system looks like its new "CLEAR_FREE" feature will be ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle...

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel was AMD INVLPGB support for broadcast TLB invalidation on recent Zen cores. AMD INVLPGB use by the Linux kernel can provide for some nice performance gains while now similar support for Intel processors is coming via a kernel patch series working on Intel RAR TLB invalidation support...

Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat was at the PremDay on-premise computing conference in Paris to talk up this open-source firmware updating solution and being what customers want. The presentation video and slides are now available for those needing additional material in helping sell your organization on the benefits of LVFS/Fwupd...

Last month IBM announced the z17 mainframe powered by Telum II processors and today they announced the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 servers...

FEX 2505 is out today as the newest version of this user-space software that enables running x86_64 binaries on ARM64/AArch64 Linux hosts with great speed that a number of games and applications are enjoying much success with this emulator...

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their April 2025 status report to outline interesting changes made over the past several weeks to this innovative project...

As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks. I ended up taking things a bit further after those reviews and have now extended it to a 21-way laptop comparison of AMD Ryzen and Intel Core SoCs from the past few generations in looking at their performance on Ubuntu 25.04 across more than 200 benchmarks.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar sent out a patch series this morning to enable additional kernel features by default for the Linux default configuration "defconfig" on x86-based kernels. The defconfig improvements aim to reflect modern Linux x86 kernel use with various features commonly being enabled by distribution vendor kernels and related improvements...

Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year...

Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers...

Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64)...

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support...

The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing...

For those that happen to have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA or are shopping for a higher-end Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake desktop motherboard for Linux use, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA is the latest motherboard seeing hardware sensor monitoring support under Linux with the next version of the kernel...

The EXT2 file-system's direct access "DAX" mode is being deprecated and expected for removal at the end of 2025, after this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

In addition to Bcachefs working on better self-healing / automatic repair capabilities, this modern copy-on-write file-system is also working on faster snapshot deletion performance. A patch series was posted this week to speed-up the deletion of snapshots though it comes with another bump to the on-disk format of the file-system...

As another alternative to the likes of the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V developer board, the Andes Voyager is in the process of seeing patches reviewed for mainline Linux kernel support...

The QEMU processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack has been seeing experimental support for the Rust programming language developing within its codebase. There continues to be good progress being made on this Rust support as more QEMU components get ported over to this programming language for memory safety and other security benefits...

Labwc 0.8.4 is out as the newest stable update to this wlroots-based, window-stacking Wayland compositor...

Blueprint is a currently-experimental markup language and compiler for crafting GTK4 user interfaces. Blueprint allows declaratively creating GTK UIs and aims to be a very easy and nice developer experience...

NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 is now available as the newest minor feature update to NVIDIA's GPU compute stack. CUDA 12.9 adds compiler targetr support for SM 10.3 and 12.1, compiler support for "family-specific architectures", new NVML counters being exposed, and other minor feature improvements. The NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 documentation is also now more verbose in encouraging anyone still relying on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta hardware to upgrade...

The first beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 was released on Friday night for testing. FreeBSD 14.3 will become the newest stable release this summer while later in 2025 we can look forward to the big FreeBSD 15.0 release...

The KDE Plasma developer sprint in Graz wrapped up just days ago but there's still been no shortage of new feature work landing into Plasma 6.4 this week. It was another exciting week of feature development as the soft feature freeze approaches for Plasma 6.4...

Wine 10.7 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Sent out a few minutes ago was the latest batch of AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel driver feature patches for DRM-Next in getting ready for the Linux 6.16 merge window opening in a few weeks. This pull request contains a big new feature: the initial albeit currently experimental support for AMDGPU user mode queues...

Going back to last year an AMD engineer has been pursuing "Attack Vecotr Controls" to rethink CPU security mitigation handling. Attack Vector Controls aims to make it easier to manage CPU security mitigation settings by focusing on the class/scope of vulnerabilities rather than managing the mitigations at an individual level. It's looking like the initial attack vectors control code will be ready for mainlining in the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle but stopping short of the complete implementation...

For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I've been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. The performance implications of using full disk encryption have went down over time and in most real-world workloads you'll see minimal to any difference out of it. As it's been a while since running any reference benchmarks looking at no disk encryption to full disk encryption, here are some results on the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 paired with the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point".

The Debian developer community is pursuing a General Resolution for voting on their policy around AI models...

In the event of your AMD Ryzen or EPYC system being randomly reset or unexpectedly rebooted under Linux, the Linux kernel with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is gaining the ability to report the reason for that reset. This is making use of a technical capability found going back to the AMD Zen 1 processors that the Linux kernel is now tapping into for reporting the cause of any previous system reset...

This week's batch of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc5 test kernel due out on Sunday...

The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers...

OpenZFS 2.3.2 is out today with a number of bug fixes for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.3.2 also comes official support for the Linux 6.14 stable series...

Like clockwork with the start of the new month comes the updated Steam Survey results from Valve to reflect the latest Linux gaming hardware and software trends...

KDE Plasma open-source developers were meeting the past week in Graz, Austria to plot out fundamental changes and improvements moving forward for this great desktop. Among the changes decided on were ending their practice of Plasma LTS releases, enhancing the telemetry capabilities to be more useful, and more...

Last year Redis made the much criticized move to Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL) licensing. The move was widely panned by the open-source community and led to the Linux Foundation forking it as Valkey and also other forks like Redict coming about. In the months since many Linux distributions have switched from Redis to Valkey. Now Redis Labs announced today that with the Redis 8.0 release, they are adding AGPLv3 to the licensing mix...

Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now formally open for development...

With the recently released GCC 15 (GCC 15.1) compiler besides adding new language features, enhancements to help developers in debugging build failures, and other refinements, there is the never-ending quest of compiler performance optimizations. Since the recent GCC 15.1 release candidate I've been testing this annual compiler feature release on more hardware, including several AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" servers to great success compared to the prior GCC 14 stable series.

Mediatek engineers have proposed Kcompressd as a new addition to the Linux kernel to improve the efficiency of memory reclamation. Mediatek engineers testing these patches on their handheld Linux devices have found huge benefit in alleviating memory pressure and enhancing system responsiveness...

As a follow-up to the Phoronix article a few days ago entitled A Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Hits Modern AMD CPUs, there continues to be activity to address this issue with the performance impact catching the upstream kernel developers off guard. I've tested a patch now that does address the issue while still carrying the KVM protections desired...

LibreOffice supports Zip compression for ODT and DOCX files, among other compression uses. There's now work beginning to be merged for supporting Zstandard (Zstd) compression moving forward...

During the past month on Phoronix were 249 original news articles and another 23 featured Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting topics in April from the launch of the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Strix Point, an interesting and cheap RISC-V board coming about, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 proving to be an interesting low-power Linux laptop, Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 releasing, and much more...

Sculpt OS 25.04 hasbeen released as the newest version of this general purpose OS built atop the Genode OS operating system framework...

For those that have spent any length of time in the open-source world have likely come across osuosl.org when downloading open-source projects that often are mirrored at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL). The OSU OSL over the past two decades has also provided VMs for various architectures from x86 and AArch64 to POWER for CI and testing purposes to open-source projects, among many other support roles. Unfortunately, the OSU OSL risks closure this year...

For fans of the DragonFlyBSD operating system, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 has been released after two and a half years to ship various bug fixes for this popular BSD...