Phoronix

Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list this afternoon were a set of 19 patches in preparing for some new CPU features presumably to be found with AMD's next-generation EPYC "Venice" processors...

Back at CES earlier this month AMD talked up features of the ROCm 7.2 release. ROCm 7.2 though wasn't actually released then, at least not for Linux. That ROCm 7.2.0 release though was pushed out today as the latest improvement to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack and officially extending the support to more Radeon graphics cards...

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 26.0-rc1 with the code for this quarter's Mesa feature release now branched and under a feature freeze leading up to the stable release in February...

PyTorch 2.10 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used deep learning library. The new PyTorch release continues improving support for Intel GPUs as well as for the AMD ROCm compute stack along with still driving more enhancements for NVIDIA CUDA...

With the Dell Pro Max GB10 testing at Phoronix we have been focused on the AI performance with its Blackwell GPU as the GB10 superchip was designed for meeting the needs of AI. Many Phoronix readers have also been curious about the GB10's CPU performance in more traditional Linux workloads. So for those curious about the GB10 CPU performance, here are some Linux benchmarks focused today on the CPU performance and going up against the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" within the Framework Desktop.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21 is now available for testing with the latest features for this portal frontend service to Flatpak...

Ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 cycle kicking off next month, the Apple Silicon Device Tree updates have been sent out for queuing ahead of that next merge window. Notable this round are the Device Tree additions for rounding out the USB 2.0/3.x support with the USB-C ports...

A new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list aims to address the high wake-up latency experienced on modern Intel Xeon server platforms. With Sapphire Rapids and newer, "excessive" wakeup latencies with the Linux menu governor and NOHZ_FULL configuration can negatively impair Xeon CPUs for latency-sensitive workloads but a 16 line patch aims to better improve the situation. That is, changing one line of actual code and the rest being code comments...

Prominent Intel Linux engineer H. Peter Anvin has posted a new patch series working to clean-up the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel boot code. Besides cleaning up the code, the kernel configuration would drop options around EFI stub mode and relocatable kernels in making those features now always enabled...

For those using the powerful PHPStan tool for static analysis on PHP code, this week's PHPStan 2.1.34 is promoting optimized performance with projects seeing around 25% to 40% faster analysis times...

Mesa 26.0 was due to be branched last week and in turn start its feature freeze but ended up being pushed back to tomorrow (21 January) to allow some lingering features to land. It's been beneficial for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with several interesting merge requests having landed in time for Mesa 26.0...

Intel Linux engineers have been working on enhancing the NVMe storage performance with today's high core count processors. Due to situations where multiple CPUs could end up sharing the same NVMe IRQ(s), performance penalties can arise if the IRQ affinity and the CPU's cluster do not align. There is a pending patch to address this situation. A 15% performance improvement was reported with the pending patch...

It's typically rare these days for the ATA subsystem updates in the Linux kernel to contain anything really noteworthy. But today some important fixes were merged for the ATA code to deal with a reported power management regression affecting the past number of Linux kernel releases over the last year. ATAPI devices with dummy ports weren't hitting their low-power state and in turn preventing the CPU from reaching low-power C-states but thankfully that is now resolved with this code...

Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment...

Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically "just work" on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD's recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed Python wheel for making it easier to install vLLM without Docker and leveraging ROCm...

Following recent discussions over AI contributions to the LLVM open-source compiler project, they have come to an agreement on allowing AI/tool-assisted contributions but that there must be a human involved that is first looking over the code before opening any pull request and similar. Strictly AI-driven contributions without any human vetting will not be permitted...

A lot of HID subsystem updates have been queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window in February. There is a lot of new hardware support on the way along with quirks for some existing hardware support ranging from laptop keyboard issues to enabling support for more PS4/PS5 guitars under Linux...

Patches are now positioned to go into the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle for supporting Intel discrete GPU firmware updating on non-x86 systems...

A change proposal has been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" for providing a nice out-of-the-box experience for Windows on ARM laptops namely the recent Snapdragon X1 laptops and will also be important for the upcoming Snapdragon X2 laptops too...

Merged in time for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release is the merging of Vulkan driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics support that is notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs as well as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5...

DragonFlyBSD's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver continues to be a port of the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. Their latest porting effort for AMD graphics on DragonFlyBSD is now enabling optional support for the GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands (CIK) graphics processors on this modern alternative to the prior Radeon kernel driver...

A proposal has been laid out for a new X.Org Server "main" Git branch to house their development going forward and cleaning up the development lapses over the past few years. Ultimately the hope is for having a new cleaned-up X.Org Server and XWayland Git branch for shipping new releases in 2026...

Last year Valve contractor Timur Kristof managed to improve the AMDGPU driver enough for old GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs that with Linux 6.19 AMDGPU is now the default for those GPUs with better performance, RADV Vulkan out-of-the-box, and other benefits. He isn't done though improving the old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPU support on this modern AMDGPU kernel driver - a new patch series posted today brings some power management fixes...

A new feature expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is adding an OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE flag for the open_tree() system call. This OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE option can provide a nice performance win with added security benefits if you are dealing a lot with containerized workloads on Linux...

In late 2023 Mozilla began providing Debian packages of Firefox Nightly builds complete with an APT repository. Those on Debian/Ubuntu distributions have a much easier path for enjoying Firefox Nightly since then and now Mozilla engineers are providing similar RPM builds of Firefox nightly too...

Queued into the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window next month is cake_mq as a multi-queue aware variant of the sch_cake network scheduler. The intent with cake_mq is to better scale the network traffic rate shaper across multiple CPU cores...

Earlier this month we looked at the Dell Pro Max GB10 performance up against AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" with the superior performance for the green team for performance and power efficiency. For those wondering how the Dell Pro Max GB10 performance comes up for the much talked about NVIDIA GH200, here are some comparison benchmarks.

A new feature that appears ready for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle is revocable resource management...

Support for newer HDMI features in the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver have been limited due to being blocked by the HDMI Forum. There are though some new HDMI gaming features being enabled via new AMDGPU kernel driver patches that are coming outside of AMD and based on public knowledge and/or "trying things out until they work/break" for functionality like HDMI Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Auto Low Latency Mode...

There have been a number of nice RADV driver Vulkan ray-tracing performance optimizations for Mesa in recent times... Here is yet another merge request now merged for Mesa 26.0 and helping deliver some nice performance uplift for ray-traced games on Linux. And, yes, this is yet another Valve contribution to this open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver...

Following last week's updated Intel LLM-Scaler-vLLM release for helping advance vLLM usage on Intel Arc Graphics, LLM Scaler Omni is out with a new release today for that LLM-Scaler environment focused on image / voice / video generation using Omni Studio and Omni Serving modes...

Myrlyn 1.0 was released today as the package manager GUI developed by SUSE engineers and started out just over one year ago during a SUSE Hack Week event as a SUSE/Qt package manager program not dependent upon YaST or Ruby...

For those organizations on the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) bandwagon for increasing transparency around software components with license compliance, vulnerability management, and securing the software supply chain, proposed patches to the Linux kernel would introduce an SPDX SBOM Generation Tool...

Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel in working toward the stable Linux 6.19 kernel release likely on 8 February...

ReactOS as the long-in-development "open-source Windows" project has been on quite a roll recently. Beyond a big Windows NT 6 compatibility improvement and fixing a very annoying usability issue, for this third week of the year there is another big change landing: a significant improvement in networking performance on ReactOS...

Ahead of the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel release due out later today are two USB fixes for Apple M1 / M2 Macs running the mainline kernel. These Apple USB fixes are also marked for back-porting to the stable Linux kernel series...

With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle, the HP-WMI driver is slated to add manual fan control support for HP Victus S-Series gaming laptops as well as for some HP OMEN gaming laptops too...

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for allowing some control over Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) and managing of clock frequencies / performance behavior will finally allow limited non-root usage...

A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper...

With the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel release due out later today there will be a number of sound fixes/workarounds to note from the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld to several newer laptops seeing fixes for their audio support...

Synex is a Linux distribution that's been around for some months as a Debian-based, minimalistic Linux distribution out of Argentina focused on the needs of small and medium businesses. Making it a bit more intriguing for some now is that with their new release based on Debian 13 is a server edition and they have added native OpenZFS file-system support for new installations...

On Friday AMD sent out another set of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver patches for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle kicking off in February...

FreeBSD 15.0 had been aiming to offer a KDE desktop installation option as part of the FreeBSD OS installer. This initiative as part of the FreeBSD laptop support enhancements project didn't pan out in time for FreeBSD 15.0 but now they are working on getting the installer option ready for FreeBSD 15.1. Adding a NVIDIA GPU driver option to the FreeBSD installer was also recently carried out...

CVE-2026-0915 was published on Friday as a security issue with the GNU C Library "glibc" for code introduced 30 years ago. The latest Glibc Git code is now patched for this issue introduced in 1996...

KDE developers have been quite busy this week in preparing for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release in February while also beginning to land features for what will be the Plasma 6.7 desktop...

The Shotcut 26.1 beta was released overnight as the newest version of this Qt6-based, cross-platform video editing solution. Standing out the most with this new development release are some new GPU-accelerated hardware decode options for aiming to help speed-up this free software video editor...

As part of the GNOME Foundation funded Digital Wellbeing project, the GNOME Shell for GNOME 50 has merged options to prevent unlocking the desktop session past their bed time. The intent here is on rounding out GNOME's parental controls functionality...

A patch for the open-source exFAT file-system driver for Linux can boost the sequential read performance by about 10% in preliminary tests...

An open-source developer has worked through the last of the issues preventing the Adobe Creative Cloud installers for Windows from running on Linux via Wine. With pending patches, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 are expected to install and run on Linux...

Queued yesterday into the platform-drivers-x86.git's "for-next" branch are the patches for the Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver to begin reporting damaged device detection. This code being in the "for-next" branch makes it material for the next version of the Linux kernel and initially will be able to report to the user on damaged USB-C ports...