Phoronix

In addition to the Nouveau driver set to see NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPU support with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle, the modern, Rust-based Nova driver for future open-source NVIDIA GPU support is set to become a bit more full with this next kernel release...

More Rust programming language abstractions are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle to allow for more areas where Rust-based drivers can be created for the kernel...

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet posted ap atch series today enabling use of the OverlayFS file-system in cojunction with an underlying file-system supporting case-folding for case insensitive files/folders/..

Following the release earlier this year of the big APT 3.0 package manager tool release, APT 3.1 was tagged today as another step forward to this key tool on Debian-based Linux distributions...

Intel's x86-simd-sort open-source project is a C++ template library for high performance sorting routines that can leverage AVX2 and AVX-512 for crazy fast sorting. The x86-simd-sort code in turn is used by Numpy, more recently adopted by PyTorch too, and has shown off the great performance potential of AVX-512 for very fast sorting algorithms. Out today is x86-simd-sort 7.0 and it's even faster due to now supporting OpenMP parallelization...

In early 2022 Samsung engineers began working on upstreaming support for the Tesla Full Self-Driving "FSD" SoC to the mainline Linux kernel. Those early patches were mainlined in Linux 5.18 and later in 2022 turned to working on the PCIe support for the Tesla FSD SoC with the mainline kernel, but then work seemingly ceased on this upstreaming effort. More than two years later, the work was restarted today with Samsung posting the latest patches for enabling PCI Express support for the Tesla FSD SoC in the Linux kernel...

Microsoft kicked off its Build 2025 developer conference today with some open-source announcements...

In addition to announcing the Arc Pro B-Series workstation graphics cards and "Project Battlematrix" Linux software improvements, Intel also used Computex 2025 for announcing that Gaudi 3 accelerators are now available in PCIe card form factors and rack scale systems...

Intel is using Computex 2025 to showcase their new Arc Pro B-Series graphics cards that will be available in Q3 for professional use-cases as well as focusing on AI inference workstations and edge computing workloads. Plus they are noting some significant improvements coming to their Linux software stack.

Coming somewhat as a surprise is the Nouveau driver patches for enabling NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPUs has now been queued to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window. So barring any surprises, this next version of the Linux kernel will feature preliminary open-source mainline kernel driver support for these newer NVIDIA GPUs...

Google engineers the past few years have been working on Device Memory TCP for the Linux kernel to allow zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions such as device memory attached directly to a GPU or AI accelerator or other device memory accessible with DMA-BUF. For Linux 6.12 that initial Device Memory TCP receive support was merged while slated for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is Device Memory TCP TX transfer support...

For going along with kernel DRM driver changes expected for the Linux 6.16 kernel, the Imagination PowerVR BXS-4-64 GPU firmware has now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for readying that open-source driver support for this PowerVR Rogue GPU...

Queued up via the FUSE "for-next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is a change to increase the read directory buffer size to in turn enhance the performance...

GIMP 3.0.4 released today with more bug fixes to this popular image editor as a free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...

Linus Torvalds released today the seventh weekly release candidate to Linux 6.15 with the stable kernel potentially debuting next Sunday...

On the networking front with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is supporting the new Realtek RTL8127A 10GbE Ethernet Controller...

The ByoWave Proteus Controller Kit is a modular gaming controller that allows snapping together different combinations of input toggles and to reposition the triggers and buttons depending upon your preferences. Support for the ByoWave Proteus Controllers is already supported by Valve's SteamOS while now the controllers will soon be supported by the mainline Linux kernel...

Debian 13.0 is now one step closer to release with Debian developers having moved Debian "Trixie" into a hard freeze state ahead of the official release this summer...

Linux 6.14.7 and other new point releases for stable and maintained Linux kernel series were released today. Among the fixes incorporated were a notable ARM64 security fix...

With the recently-launched Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 Linux distributions I've been seeing very healthy competition on Intel and AMD x86_64 hardware between these two leading Linux operating systems. But, surprisingly, after evaluating the AArch64 performance I was surprised to find Ubuntu 25.04 delivering a decisive advantage over Fedora 42 when testing on Ampere Altra using a System76 Thelio Astra workstation.

First on Phoronix earlier this week was highlighting AMD making their first step toward Zen 6 CPU feature development for the Linux kernel with introducing a "ZEN6" feature flag and filling out the Family 1Ah models that will be attributed to those next-gen CPUs. That patch has now been merged for Linux 6.15 and will be found in tomorrow's Linux 6.15-rc7 release...

While Debian 13 is coming soon, for the moment the Debian 12 series remains the latest stable series for this widely-used Linux distribution. Out today is Debian 12.11 that adds in dozens of bug fixes...

Niri 25.05 is out today as the newest major step forward for this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a devoted following...

Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to highlight all of the interesting Plasma happenings for the past week...

Released today is the RC1 version of Debian Installer for Debian 13 "Trixie"...

NVIDIA has supplied updated GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware derived from their R570 driver series to the upstream linux-firmware.git repository...

FreeBSD 14.3 Beta 3 is ready for testing as the newest test release on the road to the FreeBSD 14.3 point release due out in June...

Started just over one year ago was the effort to create an open-source Rockchip NPU driver. While not yet mainlined to the Linux kernel, progress on this kernel driver and associated user-space driver continues...

Intel's Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) is out with a new feature release in preparing for AVX10.2-enabled processors and bringing other enhancements to this C programming language variant focused on single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming...

Wine 10.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly test release for this open-source solution to enjoy Windows games and apps on Linux. Wine is what also forms the basis of Valve's Proton for Steam Play for a great gaming experience on Linux...

Smart device manufacturer HONOR has posted a patch series adding direct I/O support to DMA-BUF with the "DMA_BUF_IOCTL_RW_FILE" flag. In turn this direct I/O use can yield significant throughput improvements and lower latency to help with AI model loading, real-time data streaming, and other uses...

Now having shown the very strong AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 Linux performance for this "Strix Halo" SoC with Radeon 8060S iGPU for its integrated graphics, you may be wondering on the same hardware how this compares to Microsoft Windows 11. Today's article is looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance as shipped by HP on their ZBook Ultra 14 G1a laptop compared to Ubuntu 25.04 with a clean install.

With the Linux 6.15 kernel soon to debut as stable, the Asahi Linux project issued a new blog post outlining some of the new code they managed to get upstream for this next mainline kernel version as well as some of their other efforts for enabling Linux on modern Apple Silicon hardware...

A public Ubuntu 25.10 desktop road-map was published today to outline some of the plans that Canonical engineers are beginning to work on ahead of the next Ubuntu Linux release in October...

AMD is once again hiring more Linux engineer(s) to work on their Ryzen client efforts under Linux with next-gen hardware enablement, enhancing features/support for existing Ryzen systems, and related efforts...

Device Tree patches have been posted for enabling Linux support on the Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 QOY powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC...

Back in March Google unveiled the Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" as a new means of live kernel updates for running production systems with a particular emphasis on servers running cloud workloads. A second iteration of the Live Update Orchestrator patches were posted for review today...

Given the significant gains to the Intel Arrow Lake performance on Linux since launch that I showcased last month on Phoronix, I was also eager to see how the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since its debut last year. In this article is a look at those relatively weak launch-day Linux performance numbers for the Core Ultra 7 256V compared to where they are performing now on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how far the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since last September.

Rust 1.87 is now available as the newest version of this popular programming language. With the Rust 1.87 release it also marks ten years already of this system programming language focused on memory safety and modern features...

Adding to the excitement for this September's GNOME 49 release is introducing the Mutter SDK...

The beta release of the KDE Plasma 6.4 beta desktop is now available for testing ahead of its official release in June...

For those that may be upgrading to the new Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" SoCs and curious about hitting the best possible Linux performance, this article is for you. Here is a look at the performance of the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 across CachyOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora Workstation 42, Manjaro Linux 25.0, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu 25.04.

Posted last month were Linux patches for removing support for very old i486 and early i586 CPUs. While not yet mainlined to the Linux kernel contrary to some of the reporting elsewhere, this work for removing TSC-less and CX8-less x86 CPUs remains ongoing and out today is the second iteration of the patches...

Archinstall 3.0.5 is now available as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux OS installer...

Following recent discussions by Linux kernel developers around integrating swap cache and swap maps functionality with the swap allocator, Swap Table was born. With Swap Tables the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel...

Released last week was the Vulkan 1.4.315 spec update and with it comes the new VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory extension for allowing device memory allocations to be zero-initialized...

For those interested in making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding with Intel graphics hardware using the Vulkan Video API, some important fixes were merged to Mesa 25.2-devel and will presumably be backported soon to existing Mesa releases...

Llamafile continues pushing forward as the interesting Mozilla project to allow easily distributing and running AI large language models (LLMs) from a single file and in a cross-platform and cross-vendor hardware manner. Llamafile 0.9.3 is out today with more enhancements to this Mozilla Ocho project...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted for the Mediatek driver in advance of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...

After recently looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Linux performance has evolved since launch, many Phoronix readers were curious how a similar launch-day vs. now comparison would look on the AMD Zen 5 side. The article today is looking at how the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux performance has evolved since their launch last year. These numbers are put alongside the prior Intel Arrow Lake results for additional context.