Phoronix

Last week the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instances reached general availability as powered by the custom EPYC 9V64H CPUs with HBM3 memory. These very interesting EPYC processors for memory bandwidth intensive workloads were announced last year while have finally reached GA with jaw-dropping results for software able to take advantage of the 6.7 TB/s memory bandwidth thanks to the HBM memory. The Azure HBv5 benchmarks last week showed how they compare to prior generation HBv4 instances while this article is taking things further and putting the performance into perspective against the older HBv2 and HBv3 instances.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week are seeking to remove SHA1 support for signing of kernel modules. This is part of the larger effort in the industry for moving away from SHA1 given its vulnerabilities to hash collisions and superior hashing algorithms being available...

CUDA 13.0 Update 2 is now available as the latest incremental improvement to NVIDIA's compute stack...

For next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It's been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it's in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver...

The Linux kernel's port to the DEC Alpha processors remains alive over 30 years after these processors first appeared...

Recently when Intel contributed Nova Lake support for LLVM/Clang and the GCC compiler support there was not any AVX10 or APX support contrary to rumors and expectations. Intel has now published a new programming reference manual where they now confirm Nova Lake will in fact support AVX10.2 and APX...

Canonical announced today the expansion of the legacy add-on for Ubuntu Pro to provide total coverage of Ubuntu LTS releases up to 15 years...

Miracle-WM 0.8 was released on Wednesday as another step forward for this tiling Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir software. Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek continues driving new features into Miracle-WM as it works toward its v1.0 milestone...

Back in April PostgreSQL added AVX-512 support for CRC32 computations. At the time the gains for CRC32 computations with this popular open-source database server were reported to be 50% to 3x faster for x86_64 CPUs able to leverage AVX-512. That AVX-512 support is found with PostgreSQL 18.0 that released in September and now Intel is praising this addition to PostgreSQL for which their developers also had a part in along with AWS and others...

Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.2.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release for this stable set of open-source (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library...

Valve just sent over the press release announcing three new Steam Hardware devices...

With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path...

Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware.

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristof of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has reached general availability with a number of enhancements to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. As with so many things in 2025, AI is a big focus for RHEL 10.1...

Back in August with the Vulkan 1.4.327 spec update was the introduction of VK_VALVE_video_encode_rgb_conversion as a Valve vendor extension. The open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has now merged support for this extension that is being used now by Steam Link VR...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso who developed the open-source and reverse-engineered "Rocket" accel driver for the Rockchip NPU and also worked on the Etnaviv/Vivante NPU support and other related code like Mesa's Teflon is teasing new NPU drivers coming in the new year...

Webmin continues serving as one of the best open-source, web-based server management control panels for Linux and other Unix-like platforms. Webmin 2.600 is out today with yet more features and a refined theme...

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS has published their October 2025 status report...

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel...

The Ubuntu 25.10 transition to using some Rust system utilities continues proving quite rocky. Beyond some early performance issues with Rust Coreutils, breakage for some executables, and broken unattended upgrades due to a Rust Coreutils bug, it's also sudo-rs now causing Ubuntu developers some headaches. There are two moderate security issues affecting sudo-rs, the Rust version of sudo being used by Ubuntu 25.10...

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it's bringing its flagship Kaspersky anti-virus software for home users over to Linux. Kaspersky software was previously available for Linux just for business/enterprise deployments...

Sent out today and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is the latest batch of 64-bit ARM "ARM64" architecture fixes. Most notable is a fix for addressing a "catastrophic performance issue" that was uncovered...

It's "Patch Tuesday" and Intel is out with new CPU microcode for Linux users in addition to making public 30 new security advisories that affect a range of Intel products...

The Linux kernel's Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem has an existing architectural limitation that there is just up to one battery per HID device. But with modern devices -- especially among various gaming peripherals -- there can be more than one battery when considering earbuds with a battery for each earbud, multi-device wireless receivers, etc. A proposal was raised today to address this limitation...

Lenovo recently sent over their new ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop for review under Linux. My Linux review on that ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 laptop will be coming up in the near future along with some other benchmarks from that premium mobile workstation. But with this being the first time I've had an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H "Arrow Lake H" device at Phoronix, here are some standalone benchmarks looking at the CPU performance of that 16-core mobile processor compared to various other Intel and AMD SoCs in different laptops while running Ubuntu Linux.

While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...

Intel on Monday released version 0.1 of their Low Power Mode Daemon, the open-source daemon in development for several years now for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core (Ultra) CPUs under Linux...

System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop...

New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU...

The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers' Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver...

The SDL3 library that is popular with cross-platform games for abstracting various software/hardware features has implemented render batching for its built-in rendering API. This render batching is successfully wired up now for Direct3D 11/12, Apple Metal, and Vulkan APIs for more efficient graphics rendering...

While there is already AMDXDNA as one of the few currently mainline drivers in the accelerator "accel" subsystem for supporting AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, another AMD accel driver is on the way: amd_vpci. The new amd_vpci driver patches were posted today for review as AMD continues to further expand their diverse offerings in the ecosystem...

EasyEffects is the open-source application formerly known as PulseEffects that transitioned to using native PipeWire filters for providing simple audio effects on the Linux desktop. EasyEffects makes it easy to apply different audio effects like bass enhancer, compressor, pitch shift, reverberation, and many more. With this week's release of EasyEffects 8.0, the user interface has been rewritten in Qt / QML / Kirigami rather than GTK4...

Following yesterday's release of Rust Coreutils 0.4, GNU Coreutils 9.9 is now available as the latest update to this set of core utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms...

Google Cloud today is rolling out their N4D compute instances that are optimized for cost/price-performance and geared for general purpose workloads. The N4D instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors and offer very nice performance and value over their prior-generation general purpose VMs.

Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution's select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it's been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.

Firefox 145 release binaries are now available. Most notable with this release is what's not there: the 32-bit Linux builds are no more...

Whenever seeing Linux kernel mailing list patches from Google engineer Eric Biggers it tends to be about performance optimizations to the Linux kernel's cryptography subsystem. That was once again the case on Sunday with the newest patch series providing some nice gains...

Tecent engineers have been working on addressing long-standing inefficiencies within the Linux kernel scheduler code around over-subscribed virtualized environments...

Fish 4.2 is now available as the latest version of this popular shell on Linux, macOS, and other systems...

While LoongArch 64-bit is already part of the GCC compiler for the past several years, LoongArch 32-bit is now being proposed for the GNU Compiler Collection...

For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristof of Valve's Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing "Radeon" driver. This can mean better performance, Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using that older Radeon driver...

Rust Coreutils continues moving fast on their goal "toward full GNU compatibility" with the GNU Coreutils. The uutils project announced Rust Coreutils 0.4 this evening with better compatibility, performance optimizations, and other improvements...

As we work toward the stable Linux 6.18 kernel release expected around the end of December, out today is the Linux 6.18-rc5 test kernel...

Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change...

Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the "Rapid Charge" USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver...

For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images...

AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window...