Phoronix

GNOME 48 is officially out as the newest stable release for this open-source desktop that will be powering the likes of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04...

A few days ago there was a batch of 145 patches merged for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release to enhance the Rust "gccrs" front-end. That big set of patches merged the Polonius borrow checker and made other notable improvements. Today another 144 patches for enhancing gccrs were merged ahead of the GCC 15.1 stable release due out in the coming weeks...

Over the past year Intel has been working to prepare the Linux kernel for the end of the "Family 6" CPU era. There's been a big rework to the Intel CPU model handling within the Linux kernel given that "Family 6" has been in use since the 1990s and moving forward Intel CPUs will appear in Family 19 like Diamond Rapids along with Family 18 as part of the new CPU identification. Thus a lot of Linux kernel checks need to be reconfigured for the multi-family Intel handling. With Linux 6.15 it looks like most of that will be finally wrapped up...

AMD recently allowed me some time with their AMD Accelerator Cloud (AAC) leveraging multiple Instinct MI300X accelerators. During this brief opportunity to try out their latest software advancements with the Instinct MI300X and the ROCm compute stack, one of the most striking takeaways was their documentation improvements compared to previous forays into ROCm+Instinct compute. In addition, AMD is now offering more robust container options for easier Instinct compute deployments with more software options available and being more regularly updated.

Intel updated their AVX10 whitepaper and associated open-source compiler patches around this next Advanced Vector Extensions standard... While AVX10 had intended to allow either 256-bit or 512-bit modes depending upon processor capabilities, Intel has dropped the 256-bit-only approach and going for 512-bit everywhere. Thus it would seem to indicate that Intel E cores of the future will properly support AVX 512-bit operation!..

Patches queued up this month into net-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel merge window add support for the Airoha NPU... Not to be confused with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is all the rage these days for helping with AI, the Airoha NPU is a Network Processor Unit...

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been working on some optimizations to the DRM synchronization object "drm_syncobj" code for slightly more efficient use on the CPU side...

In addition to NVIDIA's GTC conference going on right now, they also released today an updated R570 Linux driver build...

Following Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project that he founded for bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, Asahi Lina announced today that she is pausing work on all of the Apple GPU driver development she had been pursuing for Asahi Linux with the open-source DRM kernel driver as well as Mesa contributions...

Ubuntu developers decided a few months back to switch from IRC to Matrix for real-time communication needs. The newest fundamental shift being discussed by Ubuntu developers is shifting from mailing list discussions to Ubuntu Discourse for mailing list like written communications...

BLAKE3 as the cryptographic hashing function that is much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA-1 while being more secure than SHA-1 and MD5 is out with a new feature update. BLAKE3 v1.7 is now available for the official C and Rust code as the reference implementations to this cryptographic hash function...

The full PCI Express 7.0 specification remains on track for publishing later this year while out today is version 0.9 of the specification as the planned final draft...

Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software...

Along with the GraalVM 24 update today, Oracle has formally released OpenJDK Java 24. JDK 24 is now out under general availability status with many new features and changes...

The beta of Fedora Linux 42 is out this morning with countless improvements over the prior release. There is the near-final GNOME 48 desktop packages and a whole host of other software updates for living on the leading-edge of open-source software as well as boasting a number of new innovations that were made by Red Hat engineers...

Hopefully leading to more timely updates to the Zstd compression code within the Linux kernel is a decision to add on a co-maintainer of the in-kernel Zstandard code...

Ahead of the OpenJDK Java 24 release expected in the coming hours today, Oracle already released "GraalVM for JDK 24 Community 24.0" edition...

If you happen to have a rare ARM64 platform with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support, with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel there is set to finally be run-time SMT controls similar to the functionality long available on x86/x86_64 processors...

Theora is Xiph.Org's first released video codec designed for use with Ogg. Theora started out based on the VP3 codec. It's been over 16 years since the release of the libtheora 1.0 reference software implementation and tagged this week was libtheora 1.2 beta...

The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run Llama 3, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models is out with its newest release. The ollama software makes it easy to leverage the llama.cpp back-end for running a variety of LLMs and enjoying convenient integration with other desktop software...

A pull request was opened last week for adding web browser dark mode support for Nginx error pages. Unfortunate for those who prefer browsing in dark mode and then shocked when hitting Nginx-served 404 error pages or similar, the change has been rejected...

Some 145 patches for the Rust "gccrs" front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release...

Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.

The Intel XeSS SDK 2.0.1 was published today to GitHub as their first XeSS 2.0 release being available there and their first released version since the XeSS SDK 1.3.1 update from last July. While on GitHub, the XeSS SDK remains closed-source and Windows-focused...

Raspberry Pi last year announced the RP2350 second-generation micro-controller that debuted within their $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 single board computer. Today they announced the RP2350 micro-controller is now available to purchase for your own micro-controller needs...

FFmpeg developer Lynne has landed a number of Vulkan Video improvements today into FFmpeg Git. In addition, there is now an FFV1 Vulkan-based decoder...

It's going to be a light week for development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, various other X.Org related components, and the dozens of other open-source projects that rely on the FreeDesktop.org GitLab for facilitating merge requests, CI testing, and related infrastructure. The FreeDesktop.org server/cloud migration has begun and may last until next weekend...

The upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 Linux OS release will be enabling NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support by default when using their packaged driver support on capable laptops...

After some 13 years of writing about GIMP 3.0 development, today is finally the day: GIMP 3.0 has been tagged and is in the process of being released...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc7 kernel with expectations of releasing Linux 6.14 stable next weekend...

Following the DXVK 2.6 release from a few days ago for Direct3D 8/9/10/11 atop Vulkan and ahead of the upcoming Proton 10.0 release for further enhancing Valve's Steam Play, out today is DXVK-NVAPI 0.9 as the NVIDIA NVAPI integration for use with DXVK...

For some newer Arm core designs, Arm is changing the Linux kernel to defaulting to enabling Kernel Page Table Isolation "KPTI" if not running on a new firmware version in order to properly mitigate a recently disclosed CPU security issue. This change has been queued up and is expected to change the default with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel...

For those that happen to have a Huawei Matebook E Go 2-in-1 laptop or have been considering these ARM laptops, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel will be better supporting these devices thanks to a new driver set to be merged...

Ahead of the Linux 6.14-rc7 kernel release later today, a set of input subsystem updates were merged overnight that add in support for a few more gaming controllers...

An SK engineer has posted a Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) driver optimization for Linux that one line of code changed is helping with performance especially for multi-threaded workloads involving small writes to SSD storage...

A set of patches were posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week that are working on initial Rust programming language abstractions for enabling HID device driver development...

Debian 12.10 is out today as the newest routine media refresh for the Debian 12 "Bookworm" Linux distribution release...

The much anticipated GNOME 48 is releasing this coming week as a big step forward for this popular Linux desktop environment. In addition there are a lot of other interesting projects continuing in tandem around GNOME. This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue to highlight some of these most recent GNOME-related changes...

It's been a while since having any news to share on ReactOS as the open-source operating system working to re-implement the Microsoft Windows APIs/ABIs for enjoying Windows apps/games and drivers on this platform. Today though they are celebrating a new milestone of being able to boot with the Windows audio stack...

The Linux 6.14 stable kernel is likely to be released in just over one week and thus leading to Bcachefs file-system developers racing to track down a new bug that's been reported by a user on upgrading to the new kernel...

OpenRazer 3.10 released last month with support for new Razer devices and a wealth of other enhancements for these open-source, community-developed Razer kernel drivers for Linux. Out today is OpenRazer 3.10.1 with some fixes as well as supporting a few more Razer products...

The KDE-aligned digiKam photo management software is out today with its version 8.6 release. With digiKam 8.6 the open-source photo manager has been working on better enhancing its artificial intelligence (AI) integration...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekend update to highlight all of the interesting Plasma desktop changes to have been merged over the past week...

Intel engineers today released Compute Runtime 25.09.32961.5 as their newest update to this open-source compute stack for Windows and Linux systems providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero GPU compute support. Most notable in this release is rolling out initial "pre-release" support for next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs with integrated Xe3 graphics...

Additional AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver updates were sent out today for collecting ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window. As we are late in the cycle, most of the new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver changes are fixes, but there are some minor feature changes particularly for the new RDNA4 GPUs...

Git 2.49 is out today as the latest feature update for this widely-used distributed version control system...

On top of the big features for the Intel graphics driver code and new AMD hardware support coming for Linux 6.15 along with the initial NOVA driver stub, the smaller Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have also been lining up their changes for this next kernel version. With the Mediatek DRM driver for Linux 6.15 it's set to add MT8365 SoC support, perhaps better known as the Genio 350...

In addition to the COBOL language front-end being merged this week for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release, another notable change also landed this week... Deprecating ESA/390 architecture support in preparation for its eventual removal...

Arm software engineer Peter Waller has shared some insightful benchmarks of the impact of PGO, Context Sensitive PGO (CSPGO), and BOLT optimizations across various classes of Neoverse processor designs...

The GNU C Library's tanh and other hyperbolic functions are now as much as 14~17% faster on modern Intel and AMD CPUs with the FMA instruction support for fused multiply-add operations...