Phoronix

With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix...

While the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window is just getting formally started following yesterday's Linux 6.17 release, one thing is already quite clear: there is a a lot of new Rust programming language code set to head into Linux 6.18...

Control-Flow Enforcement Technology "CET" is coming to the virtualized world with support for running within KVM guest VMs on Linux 6.18+. This CET virtualization support works for both AMD and Intel processors...

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17 kernel on-schedule as the kernel version powering Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and other upcoming Linux distribution releases and rolling releases...

Ahead of the stable Linux 6.17 kernel release expected in the coming hours, Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet put out a blog post around the current multi-Linux distribution support for the out-of-tree DKMS packages for this copy-on-write file-system, some of their plans moving forward, and still aiming to graduate from the "experimental" phase at the end of the year...

GraalVM has been an interesting and performant Java JDK that over time added support for additional programming languages and execution models. Following their 2022 announcement that GraalVM CE Java code would be donated to OpenJDK, Oracle recently announced that moving forward GraalVM will focus on non-Java languages...

There is a lot coming for AMD processors with the Linux 6.18 kernel. Of the early pull requests submitted in advance of the planned Linux 6.17 kernel release later today, there are a number of changes already lined up with some exciting AMD CPU feature additions for the next kernel version. These AMD changes for Linux 6.18 are all the more important with that kernel expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

Adding to the list of pull requests submitted early in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening are several cryptography-related improvements. In particular, some nice performance optimizations once again for the Linux kernel...

Introduced two years ago was the Intel/Codeplay oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL support to new hardware. As part of that the oneAPI Construction Kit was brought to RISC-V and other platforms. Out this week is now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 and sadly it drops Vulkan API support...

Following the release earlier this year of the Fish 4.0 shell that was ported from C++ to Rust, Fish 4.1 was released this weekend as the next major feature release...

The Linux kernel's audit subsystem/framework for greater insight into system activity for security purposes will now be able to properly cope with multiple Linux Security Modules (LSMs)...

All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users...

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December...

When it comes to open-source games, Unvanquished remains one of the most promising and interesting open-source FPS games from a technical perspective. With its next release, Unvanquished has been ported to the SDL3 library and is working well natively on Wayland...

Thirteen years after the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs initially launched as the Radeon HD 7000 series, recently there has been an effort to improve the support for both GCN 1.0 and the GCN 1.1 graphics processors with their open-source Linux driver stack. This recent effort has been led by one of the developers on Valve's Linux graphics team...

Linux engineer at Microsoft Christian Brauner sent out his set of 12 pull requests touching the VFS portion of the Linux kernel. These changes for the Linux 6.18 kernel include one pull request that touches the writeback code to address a situation of lockups being reported by users when systemd units read lots of files...

Among the early pull requests submitted already to Linus Torvalds in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening soon is the Btrfs file-system updates. Btrfs for Linux 6.18 has a few items worth calling out but no major features this cycle...

The sched_ext scheduler framework that allows creating kernel thread schedulers via BPF programs is ready with some updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.5 beta release, the focus has shifted to bug fixing ahead of the October release of Plasma 6.5.0. There have been some minor features to still squeeze in, a lot of bug fixing has commenced, and also some early feature work around Plasma 6.6...

Following last week's GNOME 49 release, This Week in GNOME is out with their latest weekly summary of all interesting GNOME developments. Notable now for this post-49.0 time is libadwaita adding an adaptive sidebar widget...

Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target...

With Linux 6.17 expected for release this weekend, the Linux 6.18 merge window will in turn kick-off for its usual two week dance. Here is a look at some of the features on our radar that are expected to be merged for Linux 6.18, which is also likely to be the 2025 LTS kernel version...

Vulkan 1.4.328 is now available as the latest specification update to this high performance graphics and compute API from The Khronos Group...

The Linux 6.17 kernel is tracking well for its planned stable release on Sunday. Here is a look back at some of the most interesting changes to find with this next kernel version...

I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files... I quickly realized it's due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives...

After being on a hiatus for more than one year and going through several rounds of Habana Labs driver maintainers due to Intel layoffs, there finally is some updated "habanalabs" AI accelerator kernel driver code slated to go into the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle. There is some new feature work but still no Gaudi 3 support for the upstream Linux kernel...

The Linux 6.18 kernel is bringing a new patch to benefit those using the decade-old AMD Bulldozer processors and wanting to make use of Linux's X86_NATIVE_CPU build option for enhancing performance in some areas by optimizing the kernel build for your particular processor/ISA capabilities...

A new feature merged this week for the Intel Mesa compiler code for their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers is support for Stochastic Rounding...

Overnight the Linux PC vendor System76 released their long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Beta operating system along with the beta milestone of their COSMIC desktop environment...

Back in March AMD announced the open-source GAIA software for GenAI but as noted in that former article, at launch it was limited to Windows-only support. AMD recently released a new version of GAIA with Linux support albeit in a rather interesting twist is limited to Vulkan acceleration...

The Servo open-source browser engine project has published their monthly status update that covers all the improvements they made over the course of August. There's been a lot of progress on this Rust-based browser engine that has a lot of potential particularly for embedded/CEF-like use-cases...

Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window...

PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features...

Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions...

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors...

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild...

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode...

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel...

Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices...

Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.

SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms...

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency...

Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads...

Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.

Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders...

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about...

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete...

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding...

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller...

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system...