Phoronix

There were a lot of interesting changes that landed in GNOME's Mutter compositor codebase to end out the weekend and ahead of next month's big GNOME 49 release...

Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting Plasma changes for the week. There continues to be a lot of feature work and polishing that is building up for the Plasma 6.5 desktop release...

Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel...

There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer...

We still don't know what's going to happen for Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 kernel even with the merge window set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release. Linus Torvalds commented over one month ago that they would be parting ways for Linux 6.17. At the start of the Linux 6.17 merge window a Bcachefs pull request was submitted but nearly two weeks later it's still not been pulled and Linus Torvalds hasn't commented on the matter...

A few new firmware files were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository for supporting a new GFX12.0.1 (RDNA4) "Kicker" graphics processor. There was also an AMDGPU kernel graphics driver patch that just landed as well in Linux 6.17 for the RDNA4 Kicker variant...

Last week the Threadripper 9000 series began shipping and as shown in our launch-day Linux testing there was stunning performance with the 32-core Threadripper 9970X and 64-core Threadripper 9980X processors. Beyond the improvements thanks to the Zen 5 microarchitecture enhancements, the new Threadrippers while working as a drop-in replacement to existing TRX50 workstation motherboards now can handle DDR5-6400 R-DIMMs up from DDR5-4800 R-DIMMs with the Threadripper 7000 series. For those wondering about the gain attributed to the faster memory modules, here are benchmarks looking at the DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6400 real-world performance impact for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X and 9980X CPUs.

While we eagerly await the release of ROCm 7.0, ROCm 6.4.3 is out today as the newest point release to the ROCm 6.4 open-source GPU compute stack...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a "fair use" quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers...

The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors...

The PCI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.17 merge window. There is new PCIe controller support and some other additions worth mentioning with the new PCI feature code...

Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions...

Following the release of GCC 15.1 at the end of April as the first stable version of the GCC 15 compiler, GCC 15.2 is now available with a variety of bug fixes back-ported...

LACT 0.8.1 is out with a few important changes for this open-source Linux GPU control application that is written in Rust and rendered using GTK...

MariaDB today announced the general availability "GA" release of the MariaDB Community Server 12.0 release. This first MariaDB 12 release brings many exciting enhancements over MariaDB 11 for this open-source database originally derived from MySQL...

Following the recent Linux kernel patch adding the AMD Zen 6 synthetic feature flag I suspected more AMD Zen 6 kernel patches would begin flowing... Sure enough, two new patches today noting some new model IDs in the Family 1Ah family as well as confirming rumors that next-gen EPYC Venice processors would support 16 channel memory...

With the input subsystem updates for Linux 6.17 in addition to now mapping ther F13 to F24 keys by default for PS/2 keyboards, the "performance boost" key beginning to be found on some laptops now has a standardized keycode. With standardizing that keycode, Linux desktop/user-space software will be able to more easily and uniformly set the intended behavior should your laptop/system have such a performance key...

The Rust-written open-source Redox OS operating system saw a roughly 500% to 700% performance improvement for basic file copy operations since the end of last year, among other ongoing performance optimizations. Plus various other Redox OS features continue to be addressed too as noted in their newest monthly status report...

In today's launch-day review of the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" were a number of benchmarks comparing the mini/SFF PC to Framework Laptops, the Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptops, and similar devices. With this being a desktop after all, for those wondering how the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 compares in a desktop form factor to the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X series processors, this article has all those benchmark numbers.

Today the review embargo lifts on the much anticipated Framework Desktop computer powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max 300 Series "Strix Halo" SoCs. Aside from offering an enclosure to allow old Framework motherboards to be re-tasked as a makeshift desktop computer, the Framework Desktop is the company's first dedicated desktop computer offering and it's very impressive in building around the Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" platform. Here is a look at the Framework Desktop with initial testing under Linux and a wide assortment of benchmarks.

Canonical just announced the release of Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS as the newest point release for this long-term support (LTS) operating system across desktop, server, and cloud...

It's just not Microsoft Windows and to a lesser extent Linux that can have challenges in dealing with heterogeneous CPU cores like Intel P/E hybrid cores but FreeBSD developers have begun working through those headaches too in trying to ensure a good experience of modern laptops running this BSD operating system...

Rust 1.89 is out today as the newest update to this popular programming language implementation prided by its memory safety features and more...

Similar to Clang-Tidy for tidying up C/C++ code using LLVM/Clang components, Flang-Tidy is in development as a tool for Fortran static analysis built upon LLVM's modern Flang compiler code. Flang-Tidy may be upstreamed in the future to LLVM while for now it's developed by TU Munich and Max Planck Computing...

It has taken until 2025 for the AT/PS2 keyboard driver to map F13 through F24 function keys by default. But that day has come and the support was merged today as part of the input driver changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel...

Intel is phasing out 16x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with modern upscaling tech like XeSS / FSR / DLSS being superior and more performant plus there being alternative anti-aliasing techniques. Upcoming Xe3 graphics are seeing 16x MSAA support retroactively disabled as the Intel graphics driver moves away from this highest-level MSAA sampling count...

The Linux 6.17 sound subsystem code last week introduced support for AMD ACP 7.2 as the next version of AMD's Audio Co-Processor IP. This appears to be for yet-to-be-released hardware and now over in the SoundWire subsystem is similar enablement work landing for AMD ACP 7.2...

PyTorch 2.8 released today as the newest feature update to this widely-used machine learning library that has become a crucial piece for deep learning and other AI usage. There are a few interesting changes worth highlighting with the new PyTorch 2.8 release...

The KVM feature changes were merged a few days ago with all of their enhancements for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. Some nice improvements made it this cycle for enhancing the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Microsoft today released an updated version of Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" that allows running Linux binaries atop Windows 11. There is only one change noted and it's for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability...

Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents...

Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop...

On top of all the Linux 6.17 kernel graphics driver feature changes that landed last week like promoting Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics to on-by-default, SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs, multi-GPU preparations, Wildcat Lake enablement work, and more, some additional Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for merging to Linux 6.17 in the coming days...

The AlmaLinux project announced today that there is now "native" NVIDIA graphics driver support for AlmaLinux 10 and AlmaLinux 9 using NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules that are now conveniently packaged in an AlmaLinux repository for easy usage complete with NVIDIA's closed-source user-space packages like CUDA...

Merged last week for Linux 6.17 were the FUTEX locking changes that include addressing an observed performance bottleneck...

On Linux 6.15.3+ there have been increased reports of log tree corruption being hit by users of the Btrfs file-system. Fortunately, a fix has now been submitted for Linux 6.17 Git and then for back-porting to the recent stable kernel versions...

Merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel to benefit the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D AMD drivers are improved scheduling heuristics for the ACO compiler back-end developed by Valve...

Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems...

All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3...

Released two weeks ago was systemd 258-rc1 with many changes throughout its massive codebase. Out today is a second release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 258...

The Rust project put out a status update concerning its 2025 project goals to summarize what has been accomplished during the first half of the year...

The PCI-SIG announced today the PCI Express 8.0 specification due out in 2028 will double the data of the PCI Express 7.0 specification, taking it to 256 GT/s...

If all goes according to plan Debian 13.0 will be released this weekend. Already in its effectively final state aside from any last minute fixes, I've begun running Debian 13 testing builds on various systems in the lab to great success. With two years since Debian 12, the new software packages of Debian 13 help in delivering better performance especially on modern systems. Here is a look at Debian 12 versus Debian 13 performance on an AMD EPYC server across 130 benchmarks. Coincidentally, Debian 13 is coming in at 13% faster than Debian 12.

Following yesterday's F2FS pull request, the exFAT file-system updates were sent out and since merged for the ongoing Linux 6.17 kernel merge window...

For several years now Intel has been working on SYCL support within LLVM and various related efforts like the LLVM SPIR-V back-end as part of their oneAPI ambitions and Data Parallel C++ across their spectrum of hardware. The latest hitting upstream LLVM is libsycl as a SYCL run-time library...

Oxmiq Labs exited stealth mode today as a new startup led by Raja Koduri of AMD / Apple / Intel fame to focus on GPU software and licenseable graphics IP. Oxmiq Labs is a new GPU software and IP startup that has been in development for two years already and built a team of talented GPU and AI architects...

For Linux gamers relying on the X.Org Server, the SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed support for precision/pixel scrolling...

FFmpeg developers are known for delivering some really wild performance gains from hand-optimized Assembly code especially around Intel/AMD AVX-512 optimizations for various features of this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Merged this week was enhancing the Bwdif deinterlacing video filter with a 23~28x speed-up over the basic C code path when using AVX-512...

Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values...

Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms...