Phoronix

The Canonical Kernel Team confirmed their plans today that with the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are planning to employ the Linux 6.17 kernel...

Adding on to the Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" CPU family are today three new models focused on delivering enhanced GPU-accelerated AI performance...

Last week I began posting Linux benchmarks of the flagship "Strix Halo" SoC, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with powerful Radeon 8060S graphics using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. Both the CPU and GPU results for the data published thus far have been mighty impressive and done at the Ubuntu Linux defaults... But the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 within the ZBook Ultra G1a can be pushed even further by leveraging the ACPI Platform Profiles capabilities. In this article is showing how much further performance -- and the power costs -- can be achieved out of this AMD Strix Halo SoC when leveraging the HP Power Profiles as well as the power efficiency for those wanting to run the SoC instead in the "power saver" / "low power" configuration.

PoCL 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that originally was started for supporting CPU-based OpenCL execution but with time and in leveraging LLVM back-ends has added support for OpenCL atop AMDKFD / NVIDIA PTX / Intel Level Zero and other possible back-ends...

FFmpeg developers have been working on Vulkan-accelerated FFV1 video encode/decode for that two decade old lossless video coding format. Merged this week to FFmpeg Git were more enhancements to their Vulkan-based FFV1 encoder and yielding big performance improvements for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors...

Longtime AMDGPU driver engineer Alex Deucher has posted an interesting set of patches on Wednesday for enhancing the GPU reset experience under Linux with RDNA graphics cards...

A recently posted patch series for the MSI WMI platform driver is aiming this open-source driver to reach parity with MSI's official Windows application/driver for the MSI Claw gaming handheld systems...

A patch series is baking for likely upstreaming in the Linux v6.17 kernel cycle later in the year to optimize AMD CPU cache flushing when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) with KVM...

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 providing a RISC-V developer preview, CentOS is now in turn also providing initial RISC-V CPU ISA support...

Well, this is a pleasant surprise... Less than 24 hours after the AMD Computex 2025 keynote where better/more-timely ROCm support for client GPUs was brought up, AMD ROCm 6.4.1 is now officially released. With ROCm 6.4.1 there is formal support for RDNA4 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 9000 series consumer graphics cards...

The libinput input handling library that's used by both X11 and Wayland based environments on the Linux desktop is preparing to introduce a Lua-based plug-in system. Via Lua scripts it will be possible to modify evdev input events / input device behavior to deal with quirky/broken input devices and better workaround other problems that aren't currently easily addressable...

With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series having just been announced at Computex, it's a good time to revisit the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series performance ahead of those Zen 5 HEDT CPUs launching in July. In this article is a look at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X 32-core and 7980X 64-core HEDT processors have evolved on the same system with the software updates released since their late 2023 debut. Overall the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X and 7980X Linux performance is up by about 8% overall since launch day less than two years ago with the 64-core processor.

Fwupd 2.0.10 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware updating solution built around the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

At the AMD Computex keynote last night in addition to announcing the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series, Radeon RX 9060 XT, and Ryzen AI PRO R9700, they also brief talked about the ROCm compute stack and their plans for the second half of 2025...

Last year NVIDIA began publicly outlining known Wayland limitations for their driver and future support plans. This week NVIDIA put out updated information concerning known gaps in Wayland support as well as their ongoing future driver plans for enhancing the feature compatibility under this X11 successor...

The FreeBSD project today published their status report outlining their development happenings during Q1'2025. There's been a lot going on in the FreeBSD world, especially for improving laptop support and other modern hardware coverage for this BSD operating system...

Released yesterday was the newest monthly feature update to the Intel Compute Runtime as their open-source GPU compute stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on Intel integrated and discrete graphics processors...

Merged yesterday to the GNOME Display Manager "GDM" codebase is disabling of the X11/X.Org session by default as the first step toward deprecating GNOME's X11 session support...

Sent out last week was one final batch of drm-misc-next updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Besides a couple fixes, most notable was new async flipping code for the Intel DRM driver with the IN_FORMATS_ASYNC DRM property...

Ongoing Wayland release manager Simon Ser has proposed doing away with alpha and beta releases moving forward as a sign of Wayland's maturity and to ease the release management process...

Following the Mesa 25.1 stable release from earlier this month, Mesa 25.1.1 is now available as the first point release bringing an assortment of different OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes...

Along with announcing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and Radeon RX 9060 XT specifications, on the CPU side AMD used their Computex 2025 keynote for introducing the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series that will be launching in July...

In addition to announcing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and Threadripper 9000 series processors, AMD also introduced the Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card at Computex 2025...

From the AMD keynote at Computex today the Raeon AI PRO R9700 Graphics were announced in delivering RDNA4 graphics for professionals...

AMD this evening announced ROCm-DS as a new toolkit for their ROCm compute stack to accelerate data processing workloads on Instinct accelerators...

A set of Linux kernel scheduler patches posted today are trying to address some performance regressions observed since the Linux 6.11 kernel that was released back in September 2024. These performance-fixing patches are flying under a "request for comments" flag and some of the regressions are tricky and perhaps not completely resolved, but it looks to be a step in the right direction...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) today signed off on the planned change for Fedora 43 that the GNOME desktop will be Wayland-only: the GNOME X11 packages will be removed in this next Fedora Linux release...

In addition to AMD being involved with Red Hat on the new llm-d open-source project for Gen AI, AMD and Red Hat also announced today further collaboration around open-source GPU/accelerator support for AI workloads...

In addition to rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, Red Hat used their annual developer summit today for introducing llm-d as their newest open-source project...

Last week Intel released new CPU microcode for a number of processor generations due to the Training Solo vulnerability and Branch Privilege Injection. In this article today are some benchmarks looking at the performance difference from simply upgrading to the new CPU microcode on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" desktop system...

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 25.8 is now available for testing of this cross-platform, free software office suite...

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 GA images have been available for download since last week, Red Hat used the Red Hat Summit this week in Boston to formally announce the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 availability...

VKD3D 1.16 was released today by Wine/CodeWeavers developers as this upstream Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API implementation used by Wine for running D3D12 Windows games/applications on Linux...

Since last summer Intel open-source driver engineers have been working to make use of Lunar Lake's new adaptive sharpening capabilities under Linux. This is being done via a proposed DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences while the hardware capabilities within Lunar Lake equate to minimal power and performance costs when in use. The DRM sharpness property support still has yet to be mainlined but the newest iteration of the patches were posted on Monday...

Queued up within the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch is enabling support for the Intel Platform Temperature Control Interface...

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...