Phoronix

Sent out today was a batch of platform-drivers-x86 fixes for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Notable among these fixes is introducing Intel Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support to the Intel VSEC driver...

A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016...

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is expected to merge two new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display drivers for supporting the Apple Touch Bar displays on older Intel x86 Macs and a newer "ADP" driver for handling the Apple Touch Bar displays on the newer Apple M1/M2-powered MacBooks...

For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default...

Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta's top services...

SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.

Wim Taymans of Red Hat today released PipeWire 1.4 as the newest major update for this leading open-source software to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other solutions on the modern Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams in a very excellent way...

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness...

The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts...

FEX 2503 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that enables the ability to run Linux x86_64 binaries on Linux ARM64 (AArch64) hosts...

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models...

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators...

The Xen Project announced the availability today of the Xen 4.20 virtualization hypervisor...

Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.

In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today's embargo lift, I've also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.

In addition to Vulkan-powered AI / machine learning talks at last month's Vulkanised 2025 conference, another interesting topic at this annual Vulkan developer conference was around improving the Vulkan API and making it easier for new developers and maximizing the potential with new GPU hardware...

The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration...

Linux already supports a number of XP-Pen drawing tablets while the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to include support for another one: the XP-Pen Artist Pro 19. This XP-Pen Artist Pro 19 is a big, 4K resolution display drawing tablet that retails for nearly $800 USD and features dual stylus, 16K pressure levels, and a nice display for this 19-inch drawing surface...

Sven Peter continues work on upstreaming more of the Apple SoC support to the mainline Linux kernel. On the DeviceTree side following the DT support for Apple T2 SoCs sent out last month, another set of updates were submitted this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window...

Released last year shortly after the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 for Zen 5 optimized CPU inferencing with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. ZenDNN 5.0 delivers up to a 400% performance uplift according to AMD engineers. Out today is ZenDNN 5.0.1 with further optimizations, particularly around recommendation engines and large language models (LLMs)...

LLVM 20.1 was just tagged in Git as the first stable version of the LLVM 20 compiler stack including sub-projects like the Clang 20 C/C++ Compiler...

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase...

Intel has been running an annual open-source developer survey and they recently wrapped up their survey for 2024 and today published the results to provide various insight into the health of open-source development...

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package...

Ahead of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics cards seeing retail availability tomorrow, today the review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics cards. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5070 under Linux and today have a number of GPU compute benchmarks to share.

Open-sourced back in January was the Yandex Perforator as a new software project for uncovering code inefficiencies and potentially "save billions of dollars" in expenses. Perforator has continued evolving since its open-source announcement and out today is Perforator 0.0.5 as the latest milestone...

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming...

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API...

While AMD hasn't released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU...

Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That's culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted...

The Redox OS open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language is continuing to enjoy nice progress in 2025 on its goals. The Redox OS project has published their February 2025 status update that highlights achievements made over the past month...

SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.

Godot 4.4 is out as stable today for serving as the newest feature release to this leading open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine...

Ahead of the GNOME 48 stable release due out later this month, tagged now is the Mutter "48.rc" release candidate milestone. While the feature freeze passed last month, there has been a lot of last minute improvements merged for Mutter to squeeze into this GNOME 48 release...

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times...

Back in December Linux kernel patches were posted by a Meta engineer for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found with Zen 3 and newer processors. The Linux kernel would use INVLPGB for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. After these patches went through 14 rounds of review since December, it looks like this AMD broadcast TLB invalidation support is now ready for the mainline Linux kernel!..

Raspberry Pi has been on a spree lately with many new product launches such as the Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi Monitor, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, and Compute Module 5 in the past few months. Today the company announced an expansion of their offerings in the Compute Module 4 line-up...

Rustup 1.28 is out today as the newest version of this official tool that is the Rust project's recommended means of installing the Rust programming language support...

Last September the USB Implementers Forum quietly published an update to the USB 2.0 specification... The Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" supplement to provide for better performance with significantly higher data rates to USB 2.0 while maintaining the low-voltage electrical interface...

Open-sourced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an open-source, soft processor core of Power ISA 3.0 and intended for use on FPGA boards and then there was seemingly short-lived work to fabricate a Microwatt chip and Microwatt also found its way for use within a BMC implementation. Linux 5.14 added support for this soft CPU core while the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle is set to introduce SMP support for Microwatt...

The newest upstream-focused work around AMD SEV for Secure Encrypted Virtualization with EPYC server processors is a set of patches to better optimize cache flushing...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc5 kernel as the Linux 6.14 stable kernel approaches toward release later in March...

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA...

Back in 2023 ONNX and AMD announced TurnkeyML as an "AI insights toolchain". There hasn't been too much news about TurnkeyML since then and they now describe the project itself as a "no-code AI toolchain" while this week brought the release of the big TurnkeyML 6.0 software...

Back during January Steam on Linux dropped by 0.23% to a 2.06% marketshare while overnight the numbers were published for February 2025.....

A pull request was sent out on Friday that could potentially land for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel to transition ARM's kernel entry code from some architecture-specific Assembly over to using the generic entry code path. It means more unification and transitioning some Assembly code over to C, but it also comes with some hits to performance...

Following the official SDL 3 release back in January, SDL 3.2.6 was released this weekend as the newest iteration of this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer that is commonly leveraged by cross-platform games...

Last month I wrote about new code slated to be added for Linux 6.15 that would provide a cross-driver/standardized means of reporting to user-space over hung GPUs. For the likes of the AMD and Intel graphics drivers initially, user-space will be notified via this new wedged event when a GPU is hung in case user-space wants to take additional actions to try to recover the GPU or at least properly note the troubled state of the GPU. There are now proposed patches under review for further extending this functionality...

Last week AMD sent out a big batch of new graphics driver code for Linux 6.15 including new GPU support, OEM i2c support for RGB lighting and other features, and other updates. Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code targeting the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window was sent out on Friday...